Dog House Read Online Free Page B

out the door and gone, socks bunched around the ankles of his long skinny legs, and that was the end of that.
    But you know the rest. You’ve met Rusty. You’ve met my mother.
    Here’s the strange part, though. Barden’s a grown man now, and he says he doesn’t remember anything about Tippy. He doesn’t remember the surprise of that day, his joy; those fraught moments in the days to come when Tippy wouldn’t come to him or me to be walked—even though I’m standing two feet away with the leash in my hand, urging—in my most patient voice—“ Come, Tippy. Come on, good boy. We’ll go walkies.” (I learned that from those British books.) And he doesn’t remember this little bicolor streak tearing around the house and up and down the stairs, pursued by his patient mother in trying-not-to-swear mode. And he says he doesn’t remember me cornering Tippy at last, upstairs, in my newly carpeted bedroom, where he suddenly—intentionally?—made our walk unnecessary. Barden doesn’t remember that he forgot all about the taking-him-out-and-feeding-him thing. For that matter, Barden can’t recall a single one of those countless hot pursuits, or any of those walking, pooping, shredding, chewing phenomena.
    What he does remember is the day he came home from school about a month after we got the dog (I hope it was a month, although I’m afraid it was more like two weeks) and was told in the gentlest fashion that Tippy had run away.
    I didn’t tell him what had actually happened until he was in his twenties, because Barden has developed into a man with a marshmallow heart and I didn’t want to hurt him. Besides, he can really hold a grudge.

    Here’s how it was.
    Basically, I guess, I hadn’t had lessons in Dog, and Tippy hadn’t had lessons in Good Dog.
    He, cute, happy puppy that he was, was just being a dog; while at the same time, stubborn, tinkly puppy that he was, he was destroying and despoiling my longed-for first house. What I didn’t realize was that a solid ten sessions with a trainer would have changed both our lives, but I didn’t know about trainers or dog schools then. I didn’t grow up in a dog house.
    And that’s why, at last, in an act of desperation as impulsive as my original adoption of destructive, independent, shedding, unhousebreakable, busy-being-himself, darling, terrible Tippy, I’d called the ASPCA to come and pick him up.
    What stays clearly in Barden’s mind is that he and I drove around and around the neighborhood that first day with the car windows down while he called, in a voice growing fainter as the evening drew on: “Tippy! Tippy!” When I mention it now, he regards me with narrowed eyes and a reproachful smile, and I recognize, for the umpteenth time, that I did to him what my mother did to me.
    I was just like her.
    Minus the golf.

Chapter Three

    Underdog
    And yet ... and yet.
    I still found myself, somehow, stopping to pet every dog I saw. Perplexingly, it seemed necessary to my mental well-being. I found I couldn’t keep away, either, from those page-turners at the library like Raising Your Dog with the Monks of Skete. Or Dog Fancy magazine. Or even the most saccharine of the Pup-A-Day calendars. Occasionally, too, as time passed and the painful memory of the Tippy fiasco faded, I’d find myself hanging around the entrance to the neighborhood vet’s ... like some compulsive, smiley dog stalker.
    In the sequencing of the human genome, do you suppose they’ll ever find whatever it is about dog addicts that sends them back for more? Could there be something in our DNA, perhaps, that cries out for those muddy paw prints on the new white pants or a barefoot walk through drool? Could this be why, no matter how many times you wipe up the dog-sick or are slurped on the lips by some fetid tongue (“DO YOU KNOW WHERE THAT TONGUE HAS BEEN?!!”), you keep