The Mountaintop School for Dogs and Other Second Chances by Ellen Cooney

Author:Ellen Cooney
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Twenty-Three

THE MOUNTAINTOP WAS full of wind, icy and blustery. No one in her right mind would have ventured out in this, but Shadow needed a walk. He was with me on a leash. I’d felt he needed after-lunch exercise to work off his acute depression, which he was feeling for a very good reason. Also he needed some confidence. He had flunked the pop quiz Giant George gave him to see if it was time to send out his SAR applications.

If the five basic commands are fingers of a hand, Shadow was okay with three: sit, come, stay. He really had those, all aces. He’d stay put in perfect position, even if you walked away from him to another room. He’d come in a flash; it made no difference if he felt he was doing something more interesting than rushing to your side. For a sit, you didn’t have to speak. A tiny pointing downward would do it. Sometimes he’d have his bum on the floor with just a lean of your chin toward your chest, unlike Tasha and Josie, who’d be standing there, unless the instructor was Louise, saying things like I’m not in the mood, or I can’t hear you, or I don’t want to lie down because that’s what Alfie does and I don’t want to turn into Alfie.

Lying down for Shadow was a finger that was on the hand, but he didn’t have a clue what to do with it. Maybe he’d learned from the girls that it was uncool to act like Alfie. Maybe he had reasons of his own from all that old infinity of his, tied to his chain on the same ground he peed and pooped on. Sometimes when he lay on that ground, it was hot against his belly and penis. Sometimes it was muddy, cold, crawling with bugs—didn’t anyone care what he used to lie down on? Giant George gave him three tries only. All Shadow would do with that command was say no. He was polite about it. He was completely: I would prefer not to. So that was an F on the quiz, for which I blamed myself. I thought I’d done a good job of getting him to wipe out all those memories.

The command for dropping was worse. It was F-. It was a finger of the hand that hadn’t grown in. The fault was mine. All along, I was supposed to throw him tennis balls he’d find and bring back, dropping them at my feet right away, not after half an hour of keeping a ball to himself, poor boy, cherishing it, his possession, his prize, when he never had anything before but the chain he was on and the collar that held it, the choke one, digging in, a necklace beneath it of worn-away fur and infection.

Giant George should have given me a heads-up about the pop quiz. I could have made Shadow do some cramming.

The only reason he ended up having the ball in his mouth no longer was that Tasha sneaked over to him and stole it away with her teeth.

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