A Dog's Perfect Christmas Page 9

  Mitch’s pale skin served to accent his black hair so starkly that it almost looked fake, like a toupee, or Mr. Potato Head’s mustache. His eyebrows were absurdly thick and bushy. His coal-black eyes glowed as he wrapped an arm around her waist, preparing for a dance that was thankfully mostly Finnstep—an active, hopping routine the class had been working on. She wasn’t up for a waltz today, and neither was Mitch—his fingers were trembling. While Mrs. Steigler moved down the line of skaters, assessing their postures, Ello could see an internal struggle playing out on Mitch’s face as he worked up his courage.

  Oh no.

  “Hey, Ello,” he blurted. “Would you…”

  “My dad says I have to be outside for him to pick me up immediately after class,” Ello interrupted. Meaning, I can’t do whatever it is you’re about to ask me to do.

  Mitch nodded, but she could tell from his hooded gaze that he was never going to give up on this.

  * * *

  Winstead wagged in noncomprehension when Daddy lifted first one twin and then the other out of the car seats and handed them over to a smiling woman who smelled a little like raw chicken. Then Winstead was alone in the minivan with Daddy, curled up on the far back seat, content.

  He smelled the familiar scents of their street, and knew when they pulled into the driveway that they were home. Daddy steered the minivan into the garage and parked it next to his enshrouded automobile. Moments later, he opened the side door.

  “Come on,” Daddy urged. “Let’s go, buddy.”

  Winstead realized he didn’t really want to jump out. He could anticipate the pain in his joints when he landed on the cement floor of the garage. Also, as car rides went, this one had been a little disappointing; they’d never gotten out anywhere, and instead had depleted their supply of younger humans and returned home.

  Winstead wagged, trying to communicate his happy contentment with the ride process. Wouldn’t it be better if the two of them, dog and man, simply got back on the road?

  “Hey,” Daddy murmured softly. “You okay, buddy?”

  Winstead heard the question in the words. He wagged again.

  Grunting, Daddy climbed into the minivan and sat down next to his dog. He reached out and gathered Winstead into his arms, holding him as if the big dog were a puppy. “Do you want to take a minute?” he asked gently.

  Winstead closed his eyes. He reflected on all the things that he loved—dinner, walks, car rides—but this was the best: being held and loved by this man.

  “Are we near the end, buddy? Am I going to lose you, too?” Daddy whispered.

  Winstead pressed his head against his person’s chest.

  “Oh, Winstead. You’re a good, good dog. But if it’s time, I understand. I do, buddy. You don’t have to hold on for me. You’re my best friend in the world, and I’ll be seeing you soon … you and Mommy. You can go to her if you need to.”

  Winstead breathed in and out, held by Daddy, as happy as he’d ever been.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Ello would have been horrified to realize that she was talking to herself, Just Like Her Mother, practicing what she would tell her friends. “So after my lesson, all these people were coming in for free skate where they just go around and around in circles in the rink, and I was waiting for my dad and he was supposed to pick me up but he didn’t come. So then I texted him, but he didn’t respond. So then I texted my grandpa, but he didn’t answer either. And then my mom didn’t answer, but she’s still in the hospital, so maybe that’s against the rules or something. And I’m like, OMG, nobody is going to pick me up? So I, like, waited for twenty minutes and finally decided, okay, fine, I’ll walk All The Way Home. Which is more than two miles.”

  The air was cold enough that she needed to keep her hands in her jacket pockets, but the snow had been sparse thus far this winter and had been shoveled cleanly from the sidewalks. Her Sorel boots, a dark stone color with faux fur that frankly looked better on Brittne than on Ello, were more than adequate to keep her dry and warm. She walked with her back slightly bent, as if the weight of her skates in her backpack constituted a burden she almost could not bear. Every few minutes, she scanned her phone for a text, but found none—Brittne’s blockade still held.

  “The moment I turn eighteen I’m moving to California or New York or someplace. Anyplace not here.” Traverse City was just a bad fit for Eloise Goss. The summers were great, like how she imagined Hawaii might be, but the winters were pure North Pole.

  By then, Ello would have a Real Boyfriend.

  Somebody like Sean O’Brien.

  * * *

  The puppy had no name because she was not old enough to understand the words that had been spoken to her thus far in her ten weeks of life. She understood moods, though—the moods of the people who had been taking care of her since she’d been taken away from her mother dog. She knew there was a man whose emotions ran dark and angry. The little boy who gave the puppy the most affection was afraid of this man. So was the woman who lived in the house, holding a baby during most of her waking hours. And so was the puppy. The man often yelled loudly at the little dog, communicating clearly that the puppy was not pleasing to the angry man. This had taught the puppy to cower.

  Only a few moments ago, the puppy had been sitting in the boy’s lap in the back seat of a car, her paws on the window as she watched the bewildering world pass by outside the glass. The man was in front, and he said something sharp that caused the boy to flinch. The puppy hunkered down, feeling the man’s anger and the boy’s fear rising inside the car. And then with a lurch, the puppy nearly fell to the floor. The man stepped out and came around and yanked open the door next to the little boy. For a brief moment, the little boy’s hands encircled the puppy as if to protect her, but then the angry man took the puppy away and set her roughly on the ground. She heard banging sounds, and then the scent of the boy and the angry man abruptly left with the wind.

  The puppy was utterly alone and afraid. She sniffed the ground carefully, searching for clues about what was happening. She trotted across the cold ground and found a place to take cover under some high, dry shrubbery. As she shivered, the curled leaves of the foliage made a rattling sound.

  She was quivering from her fear as much as from the frigid air.

  A stranger, tall and big like the angry man from the car, strode by with his eyes on the ground. He did not glance at where the puppy was hiding in the bushes. The puppy did nothing but watch the man.

  She was trembling and sad and confused.

  And then she saw the girl.

  The girl’s head was down, looking at something in her hand, and she did not see the puppy, who emitted an involuntary whimper. When the girl was about to pass the hiding place, the puppy made a decision and exploded out from underneath the branches and galloped straight at the girl, who turned in surprise.

  “A puppy!” she cried. She crouched and the puppy leapt straight into her arms, wiggling and licking, no longer afraid, no longer cold, no longer anything but joyous.

  This was, the puppy now understood, why the man had pulled her off the boy’s lap and left her on the ground and driven away. This was why the puppy had hidden in the bushes. It was to wait for this girl, and now that they were together, nothing scary or bad would ever happen again.

  * * *

  Ello barely had time to gasp before the wriggling puppy was in her arms. She couldn’t help but laugh at all the squirming. “Where did you come from?”

  The puppy looked up at Ello with solemn brown eyes framed by a white and brown mottled face. Ello didn’t know anything about dog breeds, but even she could tell this puppy was a mix of short-haired breeds, with piebald fur and a face a bit like a golden’s.

  “Okay,” she decided. She strode up the walk to the nearest house, mounting the wooden steps to the front porch and ringing the doorbell. “Is this where you live?” Ello whispered to the puppy. “You are so cute!”

  The inner door was opened by a kindly older lady who g
rinned at the little dog and then raised her eyes at Ello in benign noncomprehension.

  “Is this your dog?” Ello asked. “She was in your yard.”

  The woman shook her head. “No, I’ve never seen that puppy before. What a cutie!”

  “Maybe one of your neighbors…?” Ello suggested, looking around the street.

  The woman shook her head again. “I’d probably know if someone got a new puppy. I think she’s got to be a stray. See? She doesn’t have a collar.”

  Ello was holding her face away from the puppy’s constant tongue assault. “She ran up to me from your bushes. I’m not sure what to do.”

  “You could call the pound,” the woman conjectured. “Or maybe take out an ad in the newspaper?”

  Ello tried to picture doing either one of those two things.

  “I’ll tell you what. I have a collar and a leash I bought for my cat a few years ago. She hates them. You can have them if you want. I’ll bet the collar would fit this little pup.”

  Ello thanked the woman and accepted the gift, but having the puppy secured with a pink leash and collar didn’t at all advance Ello’s thinking on what she was supposed to do next.

  The puppy didn’t seem to know either. The little girl (Girl? Ello checked. Yep, a girl.) darted out to the end of the restraint and then fell down and twisted and yanked. Ello tried to lessen the impact on the dog’s neck with some extra slack.

  “Hey! It’s okay!”

  Eventually Ello scooped the little dog off the ground and carried her like a football. The puppy accepted this as completely normal.

  * * *

  Winstead was deep into a dreamless nap. He didn’t register the sound of the front door shutting, nor of people moving in the house. Then his eyes snapped open as something deep and instinctive alerted him, his senses urgently warning that something was happening right now.

  And then there was a dog on his head. Winstead lurched to his feet, staring in astonishment at the little puppy, who was leaping and writhing in front of him. Winstead lowered his nose to the area under the puppy’s tail and the puppy promptly squirted urine on the floor, letting the older dog know that yes, she was a dog, and meant no harm. The puppy was licking Winstead in the mouth as Ello stepped into the room.

  Daddy grunted.

  “Oh, hi, Grandpa,” Ello greeted him. “I didn’t mean to wake you. The puppy just ran in here like she knew where she was going.”

  Winstead was still examining the scents of the new puppy, who was bursting with so much kinetic energy—rolling on her back and leaping up to kiss Winstead and bowing and twisting—that Winstead couldn’t help but wag.

  “You did not wake me up; I was reading,” Daddy corrected her gruffly. He frowned at the little puppy. “Where did that come from?”

  At the sound of Daddy’s voice, the puppy turned and scampered over and tried to scramble up his pant legs. A moment later the puppy abandoned those efforts and shoved her nose under the bed, snorting and sniffing, her little tail twitching.

  “She kind of followed me home from the ice rink,” Ello answered. The collar and leash in her left hand strayed farther behind her back as she related this edited version of events.

  “Well…” Daddy shrugged. “Obviously it can’t stay here.”

  * * *

  Hunter walked up behind his father, who seemed to react to the approach but didn’t turn away from the sliding doors to the backyard.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  Sander nodded and kept watching out the window. Hunter joined him. Ello and the twins were frolicking in the backyard with a small puppy and Winstead.

  “I honestly thought Winstead was on his last legs, but look at him go.” Sander chuckled. “The old boy’s been running nonstop for half an hour.”

  “Whose puppy?” Hunter asked curiously.

  Sander gave him a sidelong glance. “Yours.”

  “Sorry?”

  “I guess the little dog followed your daughter home from ice dancing. She named it Ruby.”

  Hunter winced. “Ice dancing! I was supposed to pick her up.”

  Sander nodded dryly. “Yes, you were, and now you have a puppy named Ruby. She said she texted you.”

  Hunter, frowning, patted his back pocket. His frown deepened.

  “Want me to try calling it?” Sander offered.

  Hunter shook his head in defeat. “It’s probably at work, on my desk.”

  “How’s Juliana?”

  “Same. Mostly just sleeping. Hey, I have to work tomorrow. If she’s not better, can I leave you in charge? And Monday, if it comes to that? I think all she needs is rest.”

  Sander regarded his son searchingly. “Tomorrow is Sunday,” he chided Hunter. “Your wife is in the hospital.”

  “I know. We’ve got a bunch of minor issues with some of the new furniture.”

  “You’ve been working practically twenty-four seven. Couldn’t you maybe take a break?”

  “We always knew we’d have some problems,” Hunter said, almost ready to reveal how the furniture boxes had spread like a virus from the software developers to the implementers and the support staff. People had brought in cardboard from home, like it was take-your-appliance-box-to-work day. But standing in the wash of light from the backyard, Hunter saw his father as an old, ailing man who could barely cope with the weak demands of his own life, and he decided not to burden him with his personal problems.

  “Well,” Hunter remarked instead, “we obviously can’t keep a puppy.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Monday morning, Ruby was savagely attacking a plastic superhero from the twins’ vast collection, tossing it up in the air and then cringing away from it when it fell back down toward her head—puppy dodgeball. The toy’s superpower was to be chewed to death without changing expression.

  Something magical had occurred, and now Ello put voice to it. “I love you, Ruby. I love you so much.”

  Ruby was too focused on inducing mayhem to look up. Ello wondered if the puppy even understood why everyone kept using the word “Ruby.” She leaned down and the puppy grabbed a mouthful of hair and began yanking. “Dad says we need to find your owners,” she whispered.

  Ruby paused and gazed at Ello with such an open willingness to love that Ello scooped the little dog up and kissed her on the snout. “Oh, Ruby … can’t I have this one thing?”

  * * *

  At school, her usual clutch of friends was not in its usual position. There was no sign of Brittne in the hallways. Ello’s ears, attuned to the social buzz of the hallway the way sparrows stay alert for mating calls, perked up when she heard a chorus of boys call out, “Hey, Sean!”

  “How’s it going, Sean?”

  “Sean. Hi.”

  Ello turned and tracked Sean O’Brien as he headed toward her, grinning. Of course: grinning. He was wearing a Batman T-shirt. Nobody she knew had worn a Batman T-shirt since sixth grade, but here he was, strolling down the hallway unselfconsciously, nodding at the guys calling his name.

  “Hello, Ello,” he hailed cheerfully, smiling knowingly at the rhyme.

  She blinked. “How come all the guys seem to know who you are, all of a sudden?” It made her feel weird, almost hostile, for some reason.

  Sean shrugged. “Oh, I guess because this weekend I went to the rink and tried out for the club team.”

  “The rink? You mean the skating complex? I was there this weekend.”

  “You were?” Sean beamed. “I was on the hockey side; were you doing free skating?”

  “No, I was … I do ice dancing. I’m going to quit, though.”

  So that’s how easy it was for guys? Sean went to one hockey practice and now he was like the Most Popular? Without any effort at all? Then he walked around in a grade-school T-shirt and the boys still thought he was cool?

  Boys had it so easy. It was Completely Unfair.

  “We should skate sometime,” Sean suggested breezily.

  Ello’s heart jumped—wait, had he just asked her to
hang out?

  “So, you know that assignment?” Sean continued. “For English, where we each have to pick someone and write a biography about them? I was wondering, could we maybe write about each other?”

  Like she could say no to anything he asked.

  In English class, they sat face-to-face, leaning forward and speaking in low tones over the buzz of all the other students doing their own interviews.

  “My dad travels, like, all the time,” Sean advised. “I was living with him, and then I had someone who would come over and stay with me when he was out of town, even though I’m fourteen. And then my mom is the head of her company. She works all the time. So, it’s the same deal, only now she comes home at night and asks how my day went, like she’s all of a sudden concerned about me.” Something flickered in Sean’s expression.

  Ello wondered what to do—ask him about his parents’ divorce? Tell him her own father and mother seemed to be headed down the same road? No, none of that felt right. She nodded, taking a different route. “I know. My dad works all the time too. Like, you know how long it’s been since we had a vacation?” While she spoke, Ello was conscious of Sean’s seemingly accidental examination of how she looked in her sweater. She felt her face warming under the scrutiny. Sean clearly liked this outfit better than her father did.

  “My dad’s really into football,” Sean resumed. “My mom hates it, though. And then there’s hockey. That’s my favorite. Mom doesn’t like that either.” Sean dropped his gaze to the list of suggested questions on the paper in front of him. “Okay, most prized possession?”

  Ello thought about that. “Well, when I was little, my hero was this famous ice dancer, Meryl Davis.”