Mister Max: The Book of Lost Things by The Book of Lost Things (Mister Max #1)

Author:The Book of Lost Things (Mister Max #1)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-97681-9
Publisher: Random House Children's
Published: 2013-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

13

In which Max and Joachim

discuss thorny topics and Grammie has a strange encounter

Max was troubled by what he’d learned. He doubted that Clarissa cared about the dog at all. That was a problem for him. Also, he didn’t want to return the dog to a life of being tied to a fence, day after day, as if it were a prisoner in a jail, as if being a pet was committing a crime. On the other hand, the dog did belong to Clarissa. Legally, he had to return Sunny. Didn’t he? It would be dishonest not to, and it would also count as a failure for Mister Max.

But what about the dog herself? How could it be a success for Mister Max to do that to the dog?

Max was not unhappy to have this thorny question needing his attention, and as he rode his bike back toward home he was so concentrated on the Hilliard pet problem, which was the Sunny problem, that he barely noticed when it began to rain. But the bad weather and the difficult thinking added together convinced him to pay a visit to Joachim and the dog, to see how they were getting on. He leaned his bicycle against the garden wall and let himself in. If Joachim was working, he wouldn’t want to put down his brush to answer the door. If Joachim was eating lunch, he wouldn’t want to put down his spoon, or sandwich, and get up from the table to answer the door.

The truth was that whatever Joachim was doing, he wouldn’t want to answer the door.

Max found Joachim in the studio, in front of an easel that held one of the paintings Sunny had ruined. He ran a dry brush along the streaked lines her tail had made on wet paint, imitating the strokes. Then he dipped his brush onto his palette and, using the same long, stroking gestures, painted over a canvas on another easel, a fresh painting of the flowering branch of an apple tree. He put his glasses on to see the effect more clearly; he took his glasses off to perceive the effect more feelingly. He mumbled to himself and called to the dog. “Sunny? Come here, girl.”

The dog rose from where she lay on the stone floor and padded over to Joachim, her tail wagging gently. “Good dog, good dog,” the painter said, studying the movement of her tail. He turned back to his easels, the dog returned to her original place and position, and Max cleared his throat.

The dog raised her head and wagged a welcoming tail, but Joachim ignored him, so Max went out to the kitchen, where he deduced from the lack of dishes that Joachim hadn’t yet eaten lunch. Neither had he, so he heated a vegetable soup he found in the icebox, set a loaf of bread and two spoons out on the kitchen table, filled two bowls with the hot soup, and not until then did he go back to the studio door to announce, “There’s lunch ready.

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