Love Is the Best Medicine Read Online Free Page A

his smile.
    She sat back in her seat, the dog virtually asleep in her lap.
    “She really does possess some interesting qualities,” said Eileen.
    “Aside from a talent for clearing confined spaces.”
    She laughed.
    “If she wanders the streets begging for food she has to be a fighter, right? A survivor, a go-getter, feisty and determined. I mean, don’t you see it, something familiar about that close-cut fringe of hair over her eyes? Remind you of anyone?”
    Ben checked the mirror, and the lights from a passing car let him see his wife passing her hand over the sleeping dog’s body. He shook his head, pretending not to know, rewarded with a moment of delight before she disappeared into darkness and said, “I think we should name her Helen.”

T HERE are many reasons why so many of us choose to share our lives with a pet—it’s the perfect antidote for loneliness, providing an endless supply of smiles and the certainty of unwavering companionship, and many of us have seen the way a pet can make a family feel whole. Whatever the reason, something clicks, and evolves into a side effect called love. More often than not the time frame for this connection is brief, perhaps instantaneous. Maybe this was what made the relationship between Sandi Davies and a singular miniature pinscher named Cleo all the more special. For here was a love affair over forty years in the making.
    Sandi grew up as a baby boomer in rural Ontario, Canada, a freckle-faced little girl with rust-colored hair, frequently branded by her mother as “the greatest disappointment of my life.”
    “You were meant to be a boy,” her mother would say, almost affronted, as though she were the victim of some grievous miscommunication. “Not a girl. I never wanted a girl, let alone imagined a name for a girl. All I had was Michael Ashley. You were meant to be Michael Ashley. Michael Ashley was supposed to be my son.”
    Like so many woman of the June Cleaver era, Sandi’s mom was determined to appear permanently elated by the joys of living aperfect life. Why perfection necessitated an offspring of the opposite sex, Sandi never knew. But perhaps this was why, in a misguided effort to appease her mother’s preference for this hypothetical Michael Ashley, Sandi developed into a tomboy. If worms and dirt and an indelibly grass-stained pair of Levi’s were all it took, her mother’s wish had come true.
    “What’s wrong with you?” her mother would scream, trying to brush the snarls from her daughter’s short hair, hair that defied barrettes and bows. “You’re wearing that dress and I won’t hear another word about it.”
    Such mixed signals only compounded Sandi’s confusion. She was supposed to be a boy, yet her mother also wanted a doll, something malleable, preferably silent and amenable to dress-up and the application of makeup and jewelry. Fortunately for Sandi the nearest small town was more than a forty-five-minute drive away, and it was at least a two-hour drive to a respectable department store, which meant that her mother’s efforts to mold a protégé took place in the home, where she dreamed of meeting a better class of people and agonized over the latest innovations at the Joneses’. Sandi grew used to being subjected to fantasies about new appliances and haute couture from magazine and newspaper advertising.
    “Look at this, just look at this,” Sandi’s mother might say as she accosted the child clomping through the house and demanded an opinion on Dior or Maytag as a long pink nail lovingly pointed out a wool jacket or pearly white washer. And though Sandi tried to please, she failed to appreciate and crave these finer things in life, her indifference to material prizes counterbalanced by a longing for her mother’s attention and affection, simple gifts that were always somehow unattainable.
    Consequently, shunned as a misfit, even an embarrassment, Sandi learned how to be alone. Their home was surrounded by woodlands and