Good Boy by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Author:Jennifer Finney Boylan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Celadon Books

* * *

My mother called me on the phone. There were some issues with Brown.

“Well,” Mom said. “It’s her paws. She kind of chews them, you see.”

“She chews her own paws?”

“My dog book says it’s called a ‘lick granuloma.’ ”

I’d seen dogs who had this problem before, of course, dogs who start in on their paws and wind up obsessed and deranged, as if their paws are the dog equivalent of right-wing talk radio.

“She just chews them and chews them,” my mother said, “creates these giant sores, and you know, well, they just bleed all the time, and then she chews them some more. It’s like the dog wants to disappear. By swallowing herself, starting with her paws.”

“Mom, you need to take the dog to the vet.”

The vet, interestingly, was now a young man named St. George Hunt. He was one of the Hunt boys who had grown up in our house. (His older brother Al Hunt became a beloved journalist as well and was someone I would eventually cross paths with in Washington, D.C., while he was working for Bloomberg News.) As a child St. George had lived, for a while, in the room across the hall from the one I would live in in the 1970s, and—as he later explained it—one night some wandering spirit had encouraged him to jump out the window. He’d got one leg out the window when his father, hearing the commotion, hauled him back inside. Years later, I asked him if he would spend a night alone in the haunted house now. “Not for any reason,” he said kindly. “Not for any price.”

“Well,” my mother asked, “could you come down from New York and help me get the dog to St. George? I can’t take care of everything. I just can’t anymore!”

“Is everything okay, Mom?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away. Instead, she started breathing funny, inhaling in little gasps. It took me a moment to realize that this was the sound of my mother crying.

I hadn’t heard this sound very often, over the course of my young life. I had the strong suspicion that, whatever she was crying about, it wasn’t the dog.

“Mom?”

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