The Lost - J. D. Robb [55]
What a mensch. At the end, Ronnie’s voice wavered a tiny bit, and that put a lump in my throat, too. Sam dropped down in the desk chair and put his head in his hand. I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t need to. Whatever had happened today at Hope Springs, which couldn’t have been good, this just made it worse. Sam’s beautiful cabin, going to some rich guy who wanted to use it as a base for shooting our deer, our birds.
I put my head on his knee. Sam. I nudged his elbow so he had to uncover his face and look at me. Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry. He gave me a twisted smile of affection, absent-minded at first but gradually focusing. “You,” he said—and my heart stopped. Did he see me? Did he know me? Sam. He leaned closer, stared harder. “How the hell did you get out?”
They say you don’t know what you have until you lose it. I found out in that moment that that includes the ability to cry.
Sam gave my head a pat and stood up slowly, his shoulders slumped. “Hungry?” he said, and headed for the kitchen to start dinner.
I followed a few minutes later. Not quite as hungry as I had been.
“Daddy, what does ‘spayed’ mean?”
We were in my favorite place, at my favorite time of day: on the couch after dinner, when Sam read the paper and Benny got to watch TV for half an hour if anything suitable was on. Tonight was Sunday, so it was The Simpsons. Which may or may not have been suitable, but since I didn’t have a vote anymore, I tried not to make judgments. I just enjoyed.
Funny, when I was myself, I usually grabbed this interval between dinner and Benny’s bedtime to get some work done, phone clients, schedule appointments, do a little paperwork. I’d thought of it as Sam’s time with Benny. Which didn’t make much sense, I saw now, since Sam had Benny all day while I went to work.
I wasn’t technically allowed on the couch, but I had perfected the art of the stealthy creep, the discreet, painfully slow advance whose key element is patience. It almost always worked, and sometimes, when he noticed it in progress, it even made Sam laugh. Tonight I’d been especially successful by ending up between him and Benny, not curled in the smallest ball I could make on Benny’s far side, for invisibility. Ahh. This was the life. Everybody touching. Fidgety Benny on one side, warm, steady Sam on the other.
Sam let a lot of time go by without answering Benny’s question. Something in the newspaper seemed to have him enthralled. Did he think Benny would forget? What a dreamer.
“Daddy, what does ‘spayed’ mean?”
Sam put the paper down. “Spay. It’s an operation they perform on a girl dog so she can’t have any babies. Any puppies.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why can’t she have any puppies?”
“Because they fix her so she can’t. They tie things up in her stomach. No puppies can come out. Say, how many more days till your birthday?”
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“But Sonoma would make good puppies. She’d make great puppies. How did she get out?” Benny veered, dropping the puppy question. “How’d she get out of the house?”
“I guess she got out while we were leaving this morning. That’s all I can figure—she slipped out the door and we didn’t notice. We’ll have to be more careful from now on.”
Sam had checked every window and door in the house—I went with him. He found the open casement window over the oil tank and closed it, but not once did it cross his mind that it might’ve been my escape route. No dog could be that clever or that dexterous, he was thinking. I felt so proud.
Back to puppies. “What if Sonoma got so many puppies inside her stomach and they couldn’t come out and she exploded! She could blow up. She could—pwow!”
“No, that wouldn’t happen. Are you getting