Dog Driven by Terry Lynn Johnson

Author:Terry Lynn Johnson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

Chapter 19

Once the dogs are settled, I head back to the center to find my family. But when I step inside, I hear their angry voices and it makes me pause by the door. They’re at the first table and I can feel the tension from here. I want to turn around and leave.

“I’m very sure, Beth,” Dad is saying when I join them.

“Sure about what?” I ask, wishing we weren’t in the middle of a community center with all these people around. “What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” both my parents say at the same time.

“Some of us are being so pigheaded they don’t see what’s right in front of them,” Mom says.

I look at Em, but with the lighting in here, I can’t see her face clearly. Nonchalantly, I get up and move to the chair next to her.

“Everyone is doing fine where they are,” Dad says.

And then I know what they’re talking about. A glance at Em confirms it. She knows too, even though they think they’re being so stealthy.

“Remember, you’ve got to let them fail,” Dad continues. Seriously, does he think we’re so stupid that we don’t know what they’re discussing?

“Well, that’s not an option,” Mom snaps. “I’m just saying, this week proves my point.”

Her point is that she wants to pull Emma from school so she can homeschool her. We heard them discussing it a few months ago. I’d been in Emma’s room when their whispers reached us from the kitchen.

After Emma had fallen down the stairs two years ago, everyone moved bedrooms. Despite Dad insisting, “You can see this stair, right, Emma?” she couldn’t see the contrast between the last two steps and the floor. It’s not as though she got hurt, but from then on, she was confined to the main floor unless she was with someone. I even dragged my mattress off my bed and down the carpeted stairs—thump, thump, thump—and wedged it next to the bottom stair. I thought I had solved the problem. I was twelve.

So Em’s room is in my parents’ old room on the main floor down the hall from the kitchen. Even if you’ve got the door partially closed, if your parents start to whisper, it’s amazing how your hearing instantly becomes supersonic.

“She wouldn’t have to worry about getting around the school anymore,” we’d overheard Mom say. “Or about getting the right books or organizing her homework. Those teachers don’t have time to help her, and they don’t understand her needs. I could join the homeschooling association and learn—”

“No way!” Dad sounded like his jaw was clenched. “She’s going to school like a normal kid.”

“Dan, she’s not . . .”

If she says Emma isn’t normal I’m going to slam the door, I thought.

“It was because of your stubbornness and your refusal to accept that there was something wrong that we waited so long to take her to the doctor,” Mom hissed.

“My stubbornness? Who’s the one who packs her backpack for her every morning and reads things to her even though

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