Gone to the Dogs Read Online Free

a dog, too.”
    “You know,” Steve said, “considering the circumstances, you sound kind of flip about all this.”
    He was right, of course. “Do I?” I said. “Yeah, I guess I do.” Rita … Remember Rita? Let me make a Cambridge introduction. She’s a psychologist in private practice. Rita, my friend and tenant, claims that when I sound heartless, I’m actually defending against the “potentially ego-disintegrative affect that is the legacy of your childhood history of repeated unresolved loss.” As may or may not be obvious, she means that my parents raised golden retrievers. Loss? One day the pups were there, the next day they’d been sold to strangers. What’s more, the one flashy trick that the remaining goldens never mastered was the ultimate show-off stunt of living forever. So I don’t like to have anyone just disappear. But who does?
    “What circumstances?” I asked Steve.
    “For one thing, Geri’s pregnant,” Steve said.
    “I don’t even know who she is,” I said.
    “The woman Patterson lives with. Geri Driscoll.She’s pregnant. Lee’s wife, Jackie, told me. But don’t pass it along, huh?”
    “Of course not,” I said. “But isn’t Patterson a little old to, uh, have to get married? I mean, at his age? He must feel sort of ridiculous.”
    Steve smiled. “He’s all of forty. But it’s not like that. I gather he seemed real happy about it.”
    As Rita would say, may I share a fantasy with you? I imagined that Geri would need a Caesarean and that Oscar Patterson, scrubbed and gowned for surgery, would reach his latex-gloved hands into her uterus to deliver the infant himself.
    “So why did he take off?” I asked.
    “Don’t ask me. I don’t know that it was voluntary.”
    “You probably didn’t ask,” I said. “You should’ve asked Lee Miner. Speaking of him, when do I get to meet him?”
    Steve lifted Rowdy’s eighty-five pounds of what you’d swear is steel-laced concrete off the table and onto the floor. “Would you not do that?” I said.
    All he did was laugh. Sometimes I think that Steve sees all dogs as wet and bloody all-but-unborn puppies he’s just delivered.
    Anyway, when we got to the waiting room, Kimi and Rhonda weren’t there, but on one of the plastic-covered benches sat a young woman with short, wiry black hair exactly like the coat of a Scottish terrier. What’s more, and I am not making this up, her face was long, her head was large for her body, her legs were really quite short, she wore black tights, and—I swear it’s true—her dress was Royal Stewart tartan. Her terrier—you guessed?—promptly flashed a good scissors bite, then let out a prolonged menacing growl, and, head and tail up, black eyes snapping,staunchly hurled himself, all twenty pounds, to the end of his red leash. Yes, this little dog, no more than ten inches at the withers, was joyfully picking a fight with an Alaskan malamute. Totally crazy, right? The little guy was waiting there for a dose of veterinary psychiatry. Wrong. This animal madness is known to Scottie fanciers as “real terrier character.”
    Rowdy’s ears perked up, his hackles rose, and a gleam of delight sparkled in his eyes, but I could tell that he was more interested in enjoying the show than intent on getting into a real scrap. Even so, he jerked forward, but I spoiled the fun by calling him to heel. Probably because we weren’t in the obedience ring, he obeyed.
    Meanwhile, the woman was hauling in her dog and scolding him in the elated tones that terrier owners use when they chastise displays of what they privately consider the ideal temperament. Her voice was low and throaty: “Willie, that will do! Quiet!
Hush!”
She eventually succeeded in silencing Willie by dragging and shoving him around the corner of the reception desk and thus blocking his view of Rowdy. To Steve and me, she said brightly: “He really means it! He’s not kidding!”
    “Yes,” I said. “I believe you!”
    “He’ll take