Joy School by Elizabeth Berg

Author:Elizabeth Berg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-08-24T10:00:00+00:00

Ginger lives in a little house on a narrow street. It’s a white house with window boxes, empty now, but waiting. There is a small porch in front with a wicker rocker on it, a mailbox hanging a little crooked at the side of her door. A deep yellow light is on to say welcome.

We pull up to the curb, and a dog starts barking. I didn’t know Ginger had a dog. He’s a big one, too; I see his head at the window.

We get out of the car and ring the doorbell and now the dog really goes berserk, barking hoarsely and hurling himself at the door like he thinks he’s the star of a cop show.

“Bones!” Ginger yells. “Stop that!”

Bones! Well, now that is one dog’s name I have never heard before.

She opens the door, yanks at Bones’s collar. “Come on in,” she says. “I’ll be ready in a minute. Don’t worry about him—he’s all talk.”

The dog is a skinny one, who looks like he has a lot of Great Dane in him. I see where he got his name. His ribs look like he is wearing them as a vest.

“I just got him a couple of weeks ago,” Ginger says. “Poor thing, you should have seen him.”

I don’t want to hurt her feelings, but he is nothing to write home about now.

“I’ll get his leash,” she says, “and then we can go.”

Oh, of course. She has to bring the dog, she won’t be back for a few days. Well, I’m going to be sitting in the front seat on the way home, that’s for sure. Bones does not seem exactly pleased to make my acquaintance. He is sniffing me, but he has planted himself far enough away that he has to stretch out his neck to do so. This is a dog’s way of saying, “Don’t get any ideas.”

“Hey,” I say to him, friendly. “I got a dog.”

He is sniffing one place in particular on my hand. Probably it’s Bridgette he smells, and probably he’s saying to me, “No kidding.”

I take a look at Ginger’s living room, off to the side of the hall. She is not a wealthy woman, I can tell. But she has fixed up what she has so comfortably it makes you want to stay there awhile. There is a jewel-colored afghan draped over the back of an old sofa, books neatly lined up in the cases along the walls, plants along the top shelf. She has a lot of books. I can see from here that they’re nearly all paperbacks so they don’t look quite as pretty as what you see in magazine pictures, but they do their job just fine, which is to make you feel satisfied. It’s a cozy thing to know you have so many books, that you can at any moment walk over and browse in your own house.

There are some pictures on the wall, mostly flowers, it looks like, and the white curtains at the window are clean and ruffled.

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