09.5 A Last Goodbye by J A Jance

Author:J A Jance [Jance, J A]
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Author’s Note

Dogs have always been an important part of my real life and my fictional life as well. According to family legend and at least one photo, I learned to walk by clinging to the back of an immense farm dog named Nicky. As a first grader in Bisbee’s Greenway School, I found a stray puppy, an ugly little mixed-breed mutt, on the street after school. I took it home, telling my mother that the dog had “followed” me there. The truth is I carried it for much of the way. My mother looked at the dog and said, “No. Absolutely not! We are not keeping it.”

It happened that my mother’s parents, Grandpa and Grandma Anderson, were visiting at the time and staying in our downstairs apartment. The next morning, at breakfast, I noticed that Grandma was taking bits of bacon off her plate and holding them under her very loose green sweater. My mother may have said no, but Grandma Anderson overruled her. That’s how Daisy came into our lives and stayed for the next dozen years.

As newlyweds living in a barrio in Tucson and later out on the reservation, my first husband and I had several dogs. One was a border collie named Sunny who couldn’t be trusted not to steal the neighbors tamales when they were delivered on Friday afternoons. Another was a bluetick hound named Huck, who was a great dog but not particularly smart. He was always sticking his nose into places where it didn’t belong; as a consequence he was bitten by a rattlesnake once and came home with a nose full of porcupine quills twice. At the same time, we fostered Smokey, an Australian shepherd, for a year or two until his family got settled in their new home in Oregon and he could join them.

After Smokey, we ended up with a black and tan hound named Zeke. A year or so later, all three of the dogs—Huck, Sunny, and Zeke—died in a pickup truck rollover accident when the guy at the wheel, one of my husband’s students, suffered a seizure.

After that, we found a pair of reservation dogs. Scratch was a German shepherd mix of some kind, and Azalea was most likely part sheltie and part dachshund. Azalea was run over on the highway before we ever left the reservation. Scratch made the move from Arizona to Washington and from Washington back to Arizona in the cargo holds of airplanes. I was coming back to Arizona at the time, too, but my parents were the ones who actually picked Scratch up at the airport. He rode in the backseat of their car from Tucson to Bisbee without ever lifting his chin off my mother’s shoulder. He was glad to see me when I showed up, but he made it clear that from the moment my mother rescued him from that airplane, he was her dog, not mine.

Bootsy was a gangly puppy who came into our lives a few years later in Phoenix. Of all the dogs that have come through my life, she was by far the dimmest.

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