Art of Racing in the Rain, The by Garth Stein

Author:Garth Stein [Stein, Garth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2008-05-13T04:00:00+00:00

27

Six months came and six months left and Eve was still alive. Then seven months. Then eight. On the first of May, Denny and I were invited to the Twins’ for dinner, which was unusual because it was a Monday night, and I never went with Denny on a weeknight visit. We stood awkwardly in the living room with the empty hospital bed while Trish and Maxwell prepared dinner. Eve was absent.

I wandered down the hallway to investigate, and I found Zoë playing quietly by herself in her room. Her room in Maxwell and Trish’s house was much larger than her room at home, and it was filled with all the things a little girl could want: dolls and toys and frilly bed skirts and clouds painted on the ceiling. She was immersed in her dollhouse and didn’t notice me enter.

I spotted a sock ball on the floor, which must have fallen when the clean clothes were being loaded into her dresser, and I pounced on it. I playfully dropped it at Zoë’s feet, nudged it with my nose, and then dropped down to my elbows, leaving my haunches tall and my tail upright: universal sign language for “Let’s play!” But she ignored me.

So I tried again. I snatched up the socks, flung them in the air, batted them with my snout, retrieved them for myself, and dropped them again at Zoë’s feet, and downwardly I faced. I was all prepared for a fun game of Enno-Fetch. She wasn’t. She pushed the socks aside with her foot.

I barked expectantly, one last attempt. She turned and looked at me seriously.

“That’s a baby game,” she said. “I have to be a grown-up now.”

My little Zoë, a grown-up at her tender age. A sad thought.

Disappointed, I walked slowly to the door and looked back at her over my shoulder.

“Sometimes bad things happen,” she said to herself. “Sometimes things change, and we have to change, too.”

She was speaking someone else’s words, and I’m not sure she believed them or even understood them. Perhaps she was committing them to memory because she hoped they would hold the key to her uncertain future.

I returned to the living room and waited with Denny until, finally, Eve emerged from the hallway where the bedroom and bathrooms were. The nurse who spent her breaks obsessively knitting with metal needles that drove me mad with their scraping and scratching was helping Eve walk. And Eve was brilliant. She was wearing a gorgeous dress, long and navy blue and cut just so. She wore the lovely string of small freshwater pearls from Japan that Denny had given her for their fifth anniversary, and her makeup and her hair, which had grown enough so she could arrange it into some kind of a hairdo, was done that way, and she was beaming. Even though she needed help for her runway walk, she was walking the runway, and Denny gave her a standing ovation.

“Today is the first day I am not dead,” Eve said to us.

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