The Dogs of Christmas (3 page)

Lucy licked her lips. She brushed past him, went into the living room, circled around on the rug, and lay down. A second later she was up again, pacing in front of the door.

“Do you need to go out?” Josh asked. He went to the door and pulled it open and Lucy dashed out into the yard. She stopped, squatting, and forcefully ejected a wet pile that was black in the moonlight.

“I guess the ground buffalo was a bad idea, huh?” Josh observed, relieved that’s all it was. “Probably not so smart to change your diet all at once, either. Did it make you sick to your stomach, Lucy?”

She seemed a lot better when she came back to the house. “Okay, good dog. I’m sorry about that.”

Lucy settled down on her bed next to his and eased back into sleep, but when the alarm woke him up at 7:30
A.M.
she wasn’t there. Josh found her in the back bedroom, of all places, lying in the small space between the bed and the wall. “What are you doing, Lucy?” he asked. She wagged and followed him into the kitchen, but when he set out a mix of her cardboard pellets and the good stuff, called Nature’s Variety, she didn’t do anything more than sniff at it and then gaze at him with a mournful expression.

“Tummy still upset? I’m so, so sorry,” Josh apologized. Less than forty-eight hours with a dog and he’d almost poisoned it with raw buffalo. “You go to the vet after my meeting, Lucy. They know how to take care of you there. I don’t. Trust me, your life’s going to be a lot easier.” He avoided her gaze as he said this, though, feeling guilty about it. It was true, though, right? Even if being taken to yet another place to stay might be disorienting, it would all be for the best once she went into labor.

His own breakfast was a microwave muffin and a cup of coffee. Josh showered and dove into his e-mail and then tinkered with the chart he planned to upload during his client conference, distracted and not paying attention to Lucy, who went back to her bed, or back down the hallway where the bedrooms were, anyway. It wasn’t until he was pouring himself another cup of coffee that Josh glanced at the thermometer and remembered, with a guilty start, that he had an unpleasant obligation to take care of. “Oh, Lucy,” he muttered to himself.

The news just keeps getting worse.

He let the dog out in case she needed to make another deposit in the yard, thinking that he didn’t want to be standing behind her with a thermometer when
that
happened. Lucy just trotted out into the yard and stood looking at him, so he waved at her and she came back in, giving him a
what was the point of that?
look.

Josh caught sight of his face in a mirror as he was lubricating the thermometer with margarine. His eyes were slits, his mouth hanging open in slack horror. He forced himself to look normal. “Here we go, Lucy,” he grated. “We got to do this.”

Taking her temperature was every bit as enjoyable as he thought it would be. What he saw, though, made his blood freeze.

Ninety-seven and a half. Her temperature was ninety-seven degrees! And below a hundred meant that within twenty-four hours …

Oh, come on. This could
not
be happening. Wasn’t it just Saturday that his life was completely normal, or at least as normal as it had been since losing Amanda? Now he was going to have puppies!

“Ryan,” Josh sternly lectured his neighbor’s voice mail, his heart pounding, “you need to call me back. Lucy’s temperature is below a hundred, which means she’s going to be in labor before we know it. I need you to get on this right now. I’ll remind you that animal abandonment is a crime.”
Probably not extraditable from France, though.
“I’ll take her to the vet, but whoever it is who is going to take care of the dog needs to get involved quickly, and needs to be ready for puppies by sometime tomorrow. Got that? Call me!”

Lucy went back to the bedroom, probably vowing never to speak to him again after the whole thermometer incident. His conference call was coming up; he had to get ready. He put on a clean shirt and conscientiously logged into the conference before anyone else. He adjusted his camera, cleared his throat, and then one by one people popped into the virtual room on the screen.

The project manager was Gordon Blascoe. He was a bald man with glasses who was known for terse e-mails that everyone called Blascoe’s Blurts.

“I’m seeing that the project timeline has gotten extended into the second quarter again,” Blascoe complained, launching right into discussion without greeting or preamble. “Since the deadline is February fifteenth I don’t get how this happened.”

“It’s the new tasks,” someone chimed in. “Because, you know, adding dependencies—things that have to be done before the tasks themselves can be considered done—extends the timeline.”

Blascoe never seemed to understand how his project management software worked, how adding tasks automatically rippled through the project, pushing everything out. They had conversations like this one about once every two weeks. Josh wore an alert expression like a mask while everyone patiently re-explained to Blascoe how the tool functioned, delicately avoiding pointing out that it was all Blascoe’s fault.

Lucy came back into the room and paced around underneath Josh’s desk, bumping into him with soft impacts. He steeled himself so he wouldn’t glance at her—Josh had noticed that the distracted team members who were always shifting around and looking away and sipping coffee during their meetings didn’t have their contracts renewed. Blascoe liked everyone staring straight ahead like news anchors.

Lucy whined.

This time Josh did look down. She was panting a little, drooling, even, and staring up at him with a beseeching expression.

Oh, surely,
surely
it wasn’t happening
now.
The meeting would last about an hour and a half. Surely she could wait that long. He reached his hand down and she licked it. Her tongue felt dry and rough.

“Let’s move on,” Blascoe snapped, which was what he always said when he understood he’d screwed up. “Josh?”

Lucy stood up from under the desk and walked over by the front door. Josh took a deep breath, nodding. “Okay, we got the first results back from user tests on the front end,” he stated neutrally. “We came in lower than expected in usability.”
Actually, they hated the design, because of the stuff you put in there, Blascoe.
“I think I can explain why, though.”

Lucy yipped in distress. Josh turned and stared at her. A fluid was puddled on the floor at her feet.

“How could that happen?” Blascoe demanded.

“I’m, uh, the problem … I have a chart … can you, can you hang on a second?”

“What?” Blascoe responded, sounding outraged. On the screen, everyone else shifted uneasily as Josh stood up and moved off camera. “Josh?” Blascoe called.

Lucy’s eyes were imploring and pained. “Okay. Okay, Lucy,” Josh soothed, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. Lucy moaned, her legs trembling. Josh dashed back to his computer. “I have an emergency, I have to go,” he said quickly, switching off the conference with a click of the mouse. Even in his panic, there was a momentary flicker of satisfaction at being able to put Blascoe out like a lightbulb.

Lucy was panting and pacing as Josh grabbed his keys and his wallet.
No.
This was
not
going to be a home delivery! “Let’s go, Lucy!” he urged.

She didn’t follow him. She lay down on the hardwood floor, her chest heaving.
Oh God
. “Everything is going to be all right,” Josh told her. He ran to his pickup truck and opened the passenger door, his hands shaking, then dashed back into the house. Gingerly, he eased Lucy up, staggering a little under her weight. Her tongue lolled in her mouth. “Lucy! You okay? Lucy!” he hissed. Please, Lucy.
Please.

He fumbled, trying to shut the front door of his house with his foot while still holding the dog, and then gave up and ran around and laid her as gently as he could across the front seat of his truck. The engine started right up. He glanced wildly at his open front door as he headed down the driveway, but decided it didn’t matter—nobody ever came around, burglars or otherwise. “Good dog, good dog, Lucy.” He stroked her head, and even in her obvious pain she managed to lick his hand. It pierced right through his alarm, that gesture, and he felt his heart heave in his chest. That she could feel affection for him under these circumstances gave him a fierce determination that nothing bad was going to happen. Not to Lucy. Not today.

Lucy panted and moaned while Josh bounced down the rutted road. It occurred to him that he should have called ahead to let them know he was coming, but it was too late now—he’d left his cell phone in the drawer where it lived most of the time. His hands squeezed the steering wheel until his forearms trembled. “Oh please, oh please,” Josh whispered over and over. He kept glancing anxiously at his companion, looking for what, puppies? And then what? He didn’t know what to
do.
He’d never felt so helpless in his life.

He left his truck door open when he got to the vet’s office, a small building just off North Turkey Creek Road. He picked up Lucy and ran with her in his arms, pounding and kicking at the front door of the vet’s like the sheriff serving an arrest warrant. A stocky woman in her fifties flung the door back, staring at him as if he were crazy.

“She’s in labor, but there’s something wrong! She’s crying and crying.”

“Hey now. Slow down,” the woman soothed.

“She was fine but then I took her temperature and it was under a hundred and her water broke, I mean, there was fluid. I was on a conference call and she went to the front door and there was a puddle.” Josh tried to sound less hysterical, puffing rapid breaths through his cheeks.

“Why are you panting like that?”

“What?”

“Are you doing Lamaze breathing?”

“Of course not,” Josh snapped, aware that he’d been doing exactly that. He deliberately slowed down, taking care with his words, though he pretty much wanted to scream at this woman. What did it matter what kind of breathing he was doing, she wasn’t looking at the dog! “I am just trying to say I think there’s something wrong. She seems in distress. I mean, look at her,” he enunciated carefully.

Lucy’s eyes were white-rimmed and her tongue hung from her mouth.

The woman finally stopped reacting to Josh’s reactions and focused on Lucy, and her expression changed. “Let’s get her back and let Dr. Becker have a look,” she decided.

Dr. Becker was such a nice, calm, affable guy that Josh wanted to punch him. In Josh’s opinion, everyone in the pet hospital should be wailing in terror. The vet’s hands were gentle as they examined Lucy, who lay shivering on the table. “Was there a discharge?” he asked, looking at the wet fur on her legs.

“Yes, sir. On the floor,” Josh replied.

“What color was it, did you notice?”

“Color?” Josh frowned, trying to remember, wishing everyone would stop talking and do … do
something
for poor Lucy. “I don’t know. Green?”

“Green?” Dr. Becker glanced at him sharply, his blue eyes narrow behind his glasses. “You sure?”

“I … I don’t know, I didn’t really…”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s fine. You seem pretty upset,” Dr. Becker observed.

“Hell yes, I’m upset! Who wouldn’t be upset?” Josh shouted.

“That’s okay, I understand. I’m just thinking that if I’m going to do what I’m going to do, maybe you should wait up front, would that be good with you? We may have a breech, here.” Dr. Becker snapped on a pair of rubber gloves, nodding at his receptionist, who had magically appeared the moment Josh raised his voice.

“Why don’t you come with me,” she suggested in quiet, this-is-how-we-calm-mental-patients tones.

Seeing the gloves made Josh want to vomit, for some reason. He stumbled willingly after the woman. She pointed to a waiting area, but Josh couldn’t imagine sitting there and reading
Bark
magazine, not just yet. He needed some air.

“Um, I left my truck door open,” Josh told her. He pointed outside. “Okay if I…?”

“Sure, of course.”

Josh pushed through the office door and walked on weak legs out to his truck. For the first time, he noticed that the air was much colder than it had been even just a few hours before—the clean taste of it on his tongue was sharp, his breath a gust of steam. He shut his door and then leaned against his vehicle, willing his heart rate to slow down. Dogs had puppies all the time. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any dogs. Lucy was fine now, she was going to be fine. They were at the vet. Everything was okay.

He just couldn’t shake the image of Lucy licking his hand in the front seat on their way in.

After half an hour of forcing himself to be calm, he returned to the office and the woman looked up with a sympathetic smile.

“Is it going to snow?” she asked.

“I don’t know. It’s weird. Really cold and humid.”

“The temperature has been dropping all morning,” she replied.

Yes, that’s just what he wanted to talk about, the
temperature.

“Dr. Becker’s the best there is,” she reassured, seeming to understand his mood. “Your dog will be fine.”

She’s not my dog,
Josh didn’t say.

FOUR

Over the next hour, Josh’s assessment of the woman behind the counter evolved from “sergeant major in the marines” to “kindly aunt.” Every time he glanced up at her she smiled at him in compassion. Almost anyone would be a little stern with a stranger trying to kick the door in, he reasoned, and Josh certainly hadn’t been friendly toward
her.

“When will we know something?” Josh asked her. She never got impatient with him asking his variations of this question.

“I’m sure Dr. Becker will be out as soon as he can,” she assured him.

A woman came in with a cat in a soft-sided carrier. She sat far away from Josh in the waiting room. “I’m sorry, Dr. Becker’s running late, we had an emergency this morning,” the woman behind the counter told the woman with the cat.

The cat woman turned and stared appraisingly at Josh.