The Dogs of Christmas (2 page)

“Not him, Ryan. It’s not him. It’s her. Lucy. The female dog,” Josh corrected sharply.

“Fine.” Ryan spread his hands in a
what’s the difference
gesture.

“Not fine. It’s not just that she’s female. She’s obviously pregnant, can’t you see? Lucy is a
pregnant
female dog.”

TWO

“Are you sure?” Ryan asked after a moment. His eyes slid away guiltily.

Josh glanced down at the dog, who sat, her ears erect and her brown eyes clear. “Am I sure?
Look
at her! Look at her teats. Did you think she was just fat?”

“Okay, well, but in my defense I knew that if I told you Loose was pregnant you wouldn’t take her. And you said yourself you’re not some kind of dog expert,” Ryan reasoned.

“That’s your
defense
?” Josh sputtered.

Ryan turned around and started walking away. The dog watched him uncertainly, coming to her feet but not moving from Josh’s side.

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t have time!” Ryan snapped, shutting his tailgate with a bang. “I have to go.”

“Yes, I know, you have to go to France. I’m sorry about your brother. But you’re going to have to make some other arrangements. I can’t have a pregnant dog.”

“Well, but first you said you couldn’t have a dog at all, and you changed your mind on that.”

Josh watched in disbelief as Ryan opened his car door. “Wait, what are you doing?” Josh demanded. “We’re not done. You can’t just leave. Hey!”

When Ryan shut his door, Josh realized that just leaving was exactly what Ryan intended. Josh strode briskly across his yard, prepared to knock on the driver’s side window and, if necessary, fling open the door. He could see himself doing it, maybe even grabbing Ryan and pulling the man to the ground. You don’t up and drive away in the middle of a conversation, especially when the conversation is
you can’t leave your dog here.

The dog followed on Josh’s heels, yawning anxiously. Ryan started the vehicle and, astoundingly, engaged his transmission, his four chunky tires spitting dirt back at Josh, who dashed after it. “Stop! You can’t do this!” he shouted.

Naturally the SUV pulled away, and Josh, defeated, slowed and then stopped. “Just great,” he muttered as the vehicle slid around the switchback and dropped down the hill out of sight. His own keys were on the kitchen table—he could dash in, grab the dog, and take off in hot pursuit. But then what? With that kind of head start, Josh stood little chance of even seeing Ryan on the road, so he’d have to drive all the way out to the airport. Denver International Airport was huge and Josh had no idea which airline Ryan was taking. And would the authorities really prevent the man from flying to France on the basis of an abandoned dog?

Josh warily regarded Lucy, who had stopped following when Josh elected to chase after the vehicle—maybe she’d tried it a few times before on other cars and had come to conclude there was no profit in it. She was sitting at the top of the driveway, watching him, perhaps waiting for an explanation. Probably sitting was her main activity, now—her belly was hugely swollen with the pups inside her, the teats pronounced, her body heavy. She looked nine-months’ pregnant—or however many months it took a dog. She watched him alertly as he crunched back up the driveway.

“So here’s what we’re going to do,” Josh decided. The dog raised her ears a little at this, apparently glad there was a plan. “We’ll call somebody. The vet, I mean. Okay? There’s no way I can take care of you; I don’t know the first thing about delivering puppies.”

Lucy regarded him with her warm dark eyes. The trust in them was almost unbearable to behold, given that Josh had just told her he was essentially going to dump her off on someone else. That seemed to have been happening to Lucy a lot lately. Where was the ex-girlfriend, anyway? What sort of person leaves a pregnant dog with someone like Ryan?

Josh sighed and looked around his property. When Josh’s father first built the house, the skinny lodgepole pines blanketing the hillside had been beaten back about two dozen yards, Josh’s mother optimistically planting city grass and flowers. Over time, though, the foreign foliage had gasped and died in the thin, dry air, and now coarse, native ground cover, brown except in June, lay matted at his feet. A stand of aspen trees had steadily advanced out of the woods like eighteenth-century soldiers, and they always went to color early: already some of the leaves were full gold, sunlight bouncing off them in flaring explosions of yellow. Painted against the dark evergreens, it was almost too bright to look at. It made him restless, all this beautiful scenery, as if he’d been wasting his day buried in a book when he should have been out on the trails, drinking in the afternoon. But he wouldn’t be going anywhere, now—Lucy didn’t look in any shape to be taking a hike.

“Are you okay?” Josh tentatively patted her head and she thumped her tail, her eyes closing a little. That was pretty much the sum total of his knowledge of dog behavior, right there—you petted them and they wagged their tails. “Do you need to lie down? Are you hungry? Let’s go inside. You’re housebroken, right? Does being pregnant affect that?”

This was insane. He couldn’t take care of a
dog.

When he walked in his front door, Lucy hesitated on the threshold until he slapped his thigh, and then she entered cautiously, nose down.

It was a hardwood floor—he couldn’t ask a pregnant animal to lie down on that. He dashed into his bedroom and, after only a moment’s hesitation, grabbed what he had always thought of as Amanda’s pillow. “Here,” he offered, setting it down on a rug. Lucy sniffed it. “Want a blanket?” In the closet there was a quilt. Josh pulled this down and sort of fluffed it under the pillow. “There.”

Lucy regarded him blankly. “Oh! Let me move it into the sunshine for you,” Josh exclaimed. He rearranged the bed in a square of sun cast from the front window. This time, when he patted it, Lucy waddled over to him and lay down on the soft assembly with a groan.

“Wow, you’re really big. I mean, not fat. Well, you’re a little fat. But mostly pregnant—you’re really, really pregnant. I guess you know that.”

Lucy gave him a disdainful glance and Josh realized he was babbling a little, and that he was pretty close to a flat-out panic. It wasn’t even two in the afternoon—less than half an hour ago he’d been curled up with a novel and now he had this poor pregnant dog to take care of and all he could think to do was insult her about her weight. What was he going to do?

“Could I speak to the vet?” Josh asked when the receptionist answered his call. “I just had a neighbor drop off his dog and leave for France, and the dog is pretty pregnant, and I need to make sure I’m doing the right thing and everything. Also, you know, to bring her in so she can have her puppies.”

“You want to bring her in? Is she in labor now?” the woman on the other side of the phone asked.

“I don’t know. I mean, how would I know, do they … what do they do? Do they bark?”

She laughed. “No, not normally. Is she pacing, panting, crying, or vomiting?”

“No.”
But I nearly am.

“Any discharge of fluids?”

“I don’t see any.”
Yuck.

She asked him to hold and after several minutes a man picked up the phone and introduced himself as Dr. Becker. Josh told him the story and explained what he needed.

“Actually, dog birth usually happens in the home. You’d pretty much only need to bring her in if there were complications,” Dr. Becker informed him.

“Sure, yeah, but I don’t, I mean, I’ve never even had a dog before. My dad was allergic to them growing up.”

“Are you allergic?”

“No.” Josh felt defensive. “It’s just that when you’ve never had a dog, you don’t think to get one.”

“Do you think you could take Lucy’s temperature?”

“I don’t know. I mean, how? Won’t she just bite it?”

Dr. Becker laughed. “Well, no, you need to be thinking of this from the other end,” he explained, saying Josh could use a little margarine to lubricate the thermometer. Josh swallowed and Lucy raised her head to look at him as if reading his mind. What kind of way was
that
to introduce yourself to a dog?
Hey, you’re fat. Turn around, I’ve got something for you.

“I’ll have to buy a thermometer,” Josh speculated. “I don’t have one in the house.”

“That’s fine. If the temperature drops below a hundred degrees, she should deliver within twenty-four hours.”

Deliver.
Josh shook his head. “I think maybe I should just bring her in, Dr. Becker. I’m sorry, but I just don’t think I’m going to be any good at this.”

“Let’s see. We’re closing up soon, and we’re not open Sundays. Why don’t you bring her in Monday morning for an examination?”

“Uh, sure. I have a teleconference in the morning, but I could be there by noon.”

“That’s fine. But Josh?”

“Yeah?”

“I want you to understand that we won’t be boarding your dog unless there are medical complications requiring it. We clear?”

“But…”

“I’ll examine Lucy and we can talk more about the birthing experience, but you need to take responsibility for your dog.”

“Okay,” Josh acquiesced weakly. After he hung up, he turned away from the phone. “But it’s not my dog,” he said aloud.

Lucy watched him as he carried the sack of dog food into the kitchen. He poured some of it into the metal bowl and she eased to her feet and padded over to it, putting her nose into her dinner. Josh watched as she picked out a mouthful of the little unappetizing pellets, dropped them on the floor, and then ate them one by one from there.

“Is that good, Lucy? Good dinner? Good dog dinner?” He doubted it—when he sniffed the open bag he didn’t smell anything suggestive of food.

She ate a little, then drank some water he set out for her, and then sat and looked at him.

“What? Do you need something? Are you okay? You’re not having contractions, are you?” Josh crouched down and peered into her eyes. “You’re going to be fine.”

Josh picked up Ryan’s phone number off his caller ID and dialed. It rolled straight to voice mail. “Hello, Ryan, this is Josh, here. You’re probably still in the air. When you land, please call me, okay? I’ve talked to the vet, and I’m taking Lucy there Monday. I’ll obviously expect that you’ll pay me back for the appointment. And let me know, please, when you’ve made permanent arrangements as we agreed. Okay, then. Have a safe flight.”

Josh was wincing as he hung up. Have a safe flight?
Look here,
he should have said,
you take care of this situation or I’ll beat the crap out of you.

Josh had never beaten the crap out of anybody, but there was no way Ryan would know that.

Monday afternoon seemed a long way off from the perspective of this Saturday afternoon. What was he going to do until then?

Even though Lucy was probably days, or even weeks, from delivering, Josh decided to move her bedding into his bedroom so he could monitor her condition during the night. He waited until she was up off the pillow and sniffing around in the kitchen so it wouldn’t inconvenience her. “You’ll be fine,” he kept repeating, hoping that was true. She looked so
sad.
Was she scared? Homesick? Josh would be feeling both. “Poor dog,” he soothed. “I’m sorry, Lucy.”

That night, whenever she moved he was instantly awake, rolling over to look at her. “You okay?”

Lucy got tired of wagging her tail each time he asked this and soon would just sigh in reply.

Sunday, Lucy didn’t really do much—she mostly just lay on her pillow in the living room. Josh thawed some ground bison in the microwave and gave it to her so she wouldn’t have a diet of nothing but the cheap pellets. He found a tennis ball and put it next to her, but she didn’t seem to want to play with it. He moved her water bowl next to her and covered her with a small blanket. He rubbed her back, recalling that he’d heard somewhere that this was something that women liked when they were pregnant.

He felt desperately inadequate. What else should he do? His Internet search turned up frustratingly little about how to make a pregnant dog feel better after she’s been dumped off by someone headed to France. It had more to say about making pregnant
women
feel better, but it didn’t seem transferable. Like, foot rubs? Can you do a foot rub on a dog’s paw?

He hated leaving her alone late Sunday afternoon, but he couldn’t see the sense in taking her to the grocery store with him. Lucy was watching him from the big window as he drove off in his pickup truck, and the wounded expression he imagined he saw nearly broke his heart.
I am not abandoning you. I am not Ryan. I am not Serena.
In town he bought a thermometer and some high-quality dog food and a rawhide bone and a pull toy with a squeaker in it. He also bought a Frisbee and chicken strips and a rope dog toy and a monkey dog toy and a tiger dog toy.

Lucy was there to greet him, wagging, when he opened the door, his packages crinkling. He sat on the floor with her and presented her with each toy in turn, and she wagged while sniffing each one and gave the rawhide bone a bit of a chewing, but Josh felt pretty sure she was just humoring him. Mostly she seemed to want to just concentrate on being pregnant.

He was already in bed when he remembered the thermometer, still in the package on the kitchen counter. “We’ll do it in the morning,” he told Lucy. “I don’t think you’ll mind waiting.” Josh sure wouldn’t, anyway.

Her bed was where he’d placed it the night before. At around four in the morning, Josh woke up with a frown, wondering what had disturbed his sleep. He rolled over on an elbow to check on the dog.

His eyes widened. Lucy was not in her bed. She was gone.

THREE

“Lucy?” Josh sat up, cocking his head. The floor was cool beneath his feet as he padded into the living room. Moonlight washed in through the windows, painting the colors out of the house with its stark white. Lucy was in the kitchen, standing in front of the oven, panting and trembling a little. “Hey, girl,” Josh whispered, alarmed. “You okay?”