Year of the Dog Read Online Free Page A

the idea of sending me off to a state which had just that spring declared civil unions legal. Whatever racism he’d inherited from his daddy had been rubbed away after thirty years of working at the hardware store, where, he liked to say, you could see who was doing the hard work and who wasn’t, and who built straight and who built crooked. But he still had a blind eye in the direction of people loving their own kind. “You watch out,” he’d said when I was packed and the car loaded for the drive, “up there anybody can marry anybody.”
    â€œI went to see Aunt May,” I told them. “She served hot tea, and gave me a book on trees.”
    â€œThat’s her being a librarian,” Mom explained.
    â€œWhat? Her heating up the tea?” Daddy interrupted.
    I said, “I’m not sure she remembered that I was supposed to be up here—she seemed surprised to see me.”
    â€œNow don’t you go casting a stone about the treatment you got, hear? So many different apples fell off our family tree we could change our name to Newton. She’ll look after you.”
    â€œShe didn’t like the idea of me bringing the puppy inside.”
    â€œWell, of course,” Mom nearly shouted, “she doesn’t want to have a dog in her house. Didn’t you listen to what I told you? Didn’t you read Bert Greenwood’s books which I sent you up there with two of? Those mysteries, every single one, has some kind of bad-dog event in the past of somebody, somebody deceased or maybe the suspect, and this judge always has to retire to his chambers to get over hearing about it, before solving the case. He sometimes has to have a glass of bourbon, and your daddy, who is on the other line listening in, says to ask you, Do they drink bourbon up there in Vermont, he thinks it’s only in the South.”
    I hadn’t read the books, which probably were still in the unpacked box in the trunk of the car. I remembered they were all set in a little town in Vermont, spelled like CHARlotte, the town in North Carolina, but pronounced CharLOTTE. They all had titles which sounded like something you’d heard before, which I guess was the point: Charlotte’s Web, Charlotte Ruse, The Prisoner of Charlotte. But if Bert Greenwood or anybody was living with Aunt May, I didn’t have an inkling of it.
    I had to admit to Mom that I hadn’t got around to reading the mysteries yet, but promised her I would soon. “I’ve been spending all my time with Beulah,” I explained, and patted my trusty puppy who, hearing her name, had padded over to stand beside me. Good girl.
    â€œBeulah?” Daddy’s voice broke in.
    â€œThe dog, Talbot,” she said. “The dog.” Then, just when she’d shooed him off the line and I thought the call was over, Mom added in a whisper: “Hon, there’s some news you might not want to be hearing, so stop me if you’re going to get upset.”

5
    I’D KNOWN MILLIE Dawson longer than I’d known Curtis. She had been a thorn in my side from grammar school through high school. At least that was my side of the story. She’d sat behind me in homeroom, and always had to ask the teacher if she could move in front of me so she could see the board or if I’d just remove my head. She was one of those girls that the rest of us had a jealousy just looking at: a waist about the diameter of my ankle bone, boobs like cup cakes, hair that bounced even when she sat still. Bitsy and limber and energetic, she could do the split and jumping jacks, and made me—a pretty good athlete actually—feel large and lumbering.
    She’d been wild in love with Curtis Prentice forever, and when, our senior year, he’d asked me to the senior all-night party instead, I didn’t have a guilty minute. I figured she could’ve had anybody in the state of South Carolina she wanted. I never spent an instant