Dedication
For our dearest Buddy
Contents
Dedication
How to Tell Time
Work
Meeting Penny
How to Be Understood
Person Matching
How to Communicate
Mysterious Boy
Freezing Like Statues
Windows and Movies
How to Not Scare Someone
A New Idea
How to Build a Nest
Something to Love
Expectations
How to Get a Sparkly Pen
How Not to Help
How to Get Ready
School
How to Tell a Joke
How to Worry
Non-Breakthroughs
Ms. Palmer
Mama
Fright Fest
How to Say Yes
Spooky Walk
How to Find a Dog
Quiet Mouth
A Surprise
My Job
Spider Watches
Principal McGregor
How to Say Goodbye
My Person
Never Run Away Again
How to Worry More
Home Again
My Bed
How to Not Talk
Great Family Pet
A Mystery
How to Tell On Someone
Dark Night
Funny Sounds
Martha Speaks
Eleanor
How to Sit
An Idea
It Does Get Worse
How to Say Yes, Part Two
How to Make a Plan
Penny’s House
Tower Puzzles
Penny’s Mom
How to Speak
How to Go Home
A Real Surprise
Author’s Note
Excerpt from Just My Luck
Back Ad
About the Author
Books by Cammie McGovern
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
How to Tell Time
I’VE LIVED IN MY NEW HOME for three days but I still haven’t met the boy I’m supposed to be best friends with.
He’s nervous, I think.
So am I.
I don’t know very many boys. I played with one once in the park where Penny brought me so I could get used to little children pulling on my fur and grabbing my tail. The boy in the park threw a ball and then a stick for me to fetch. When he got tired of that game, he said he was going to show me something called a slide that would be the most fun thing I’d ever done in my whole life. He picked me up and carried me to the top of it.
It was not fun. It was the opposite of fun. It was the most scared I’ve ever been except for the first time Penny practiced the “Dog Left Alone” test and tied me to a post for two minutes while she walked away. Afterward, she told me I wasn’t supposed to whine or bark or show any signs of anxiety, which I didn’t know at the time because I whined and barked like crazy. I couldn’t help it. I was so anxious. This is what happens when you’re a puppy. Your brain is so busy, you lose track of someone for a second and you think, I haven’t seen her for hours. She’s probably dead. You don’t even know what dead is and you think it.
It’s embarrassing now when I look back on it. I got nervous over lots of things back in those days.
When Penny came back, I dribbled pee I was so relieved to see her again! She knelt down and said, “It’s okay, Chester. I was only gone two minutes,” and I thought, Really? Was it only two minutes? It felt more like two hours.
I’ve never had a great sense of time and back then I wasn’t completely sure what those words meant. Now I know. Two minutes is about the same as in a sec, and an hour means dinner’s not for a long, long time, possibly days.
I loved our time at the park until that day the big boy carried me to the top of a slide and pushed me down. After that, I didn’t love our trips to the park anymore.
Work
I KNOW I SHOULDN’T COMPLAIN ABOUT MY new home or this boy I haven’t seen yet. It’s my fault that I’m here, living with people who don’t know their son very well if they got him a dog that he doesn’t want to meet.
I was meant to be a service dog like my mother. She was a guide dog for a blind man until she got hit by a car, and then she retired to be a mother. “Being a mother is an important job, too,” she told us, but she didn’t really mean it. Having puppies made her tired and not very happy. Thinking about her old job made her happy.
“There’s no better feeling than knowing there’s one person in the world who depends entirely on you,” she told us once. We were still small then and lying in a heap on top of each other. I had my brother Hershey’s ear in my mouth. We all stopped what we were doing and listened.
“You meet your person and you connect. You learn what that person needs and you do it for them. It’s the most satisfying feeling in the world.”
After that we tried harder to pay attention during our puppy trainings. My sister Cocoa asked every person who gave us kibble or a drink of water, “Are you my person? Are you?”
Cocoa wasn’t the smartest puppy in our litter. She was always eating things she wasn’t supposed to.
One morning after breakfast, I looked up and saw a big group of people walking up the driveway of our farm. A few of them rolled in wheelchairs. One wore dark glasses.
Our people! I thought. There they are!
I ran to Cocoa and told her to come quick and look, but she was trying to eat a pinecone and didn’t want to. My brother Hershey walked with me to the edge of our play yard and watched the group for a while.
Finally he said, “I want the big man in the rolling chair with pictures on his arms. You can have any of the others.”
My heart started to beat faster. I didn’t know how this worked—if we got to pick them or if they picked us. “Do we know enough yet to be paired with our person?” I asked.
“Yes,” Hershey said. He was the biggest in our litter and acted like he knew everything. “This is how it goes. Tomorrow we’ll start our jobs. Remember, the man with pictures on his arms is mine.”
For the rest of the morning, I worried. I thought about our mother’s stories of her life with the blind man. I did everything for Donald. I opened doors, I pressed elevator buttons, I guided him through traffic. Yes, I got hit by a car, but the important thing is: He didn’t.
There was so much I didn’t understand. What was an elevator? What was traffic?
In the afternoon, we watched the people come outside with a group of dogs who were all wearing blue vests on their backs. Our mother came over to watch with us. When we pestered her with questions—What are they wearing? What are they doing?—she told us to be quiet.
“Just watch,” she said. “This is the most important afternoon of their lives. They’re being chosen by their person.”
For the next hour, we watched them do tricks.
“Beautiful,” our mother whispered under her breath. “Just beautiful.”
“Sheesh,” my brother Milton said softly. “That doesn’t look like much fun.”
“Fun isn’t the point,” Hershey snapped. “The point is getting someone to choose us.”
I looked over at Hershey—his ears set forward, his nose working, taking it all in. I knew what he was thinking: I want to wear a blue vest. I want to be chosen.
I felt it too. We all did.
After the group went inside, we asked our mother more questions. “Learning all that will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. You’ll live with a trainer for almost a year and work constantly. That’s all I can tell you. Even after all that work, some of you won’t make it. That
’s just how it is.”
She turned around and went back to her bed. That was that.
None of us knew what to think. Cocoa couldn’t stop crying. “I don’t want to work hard. I don’t want to leave our play yard.”
Milton was nervous, too. “What if we can’t learn all those things?” By the end of the demonstration, the dogs were doing amazing things—finding and picking up tiny objects in the grass, holding a cane steady for someone who’d dropped it. “What if we can only learn about half those tricks?”
Hershey quieted him. “This is what we were born to do. It’s our calling.”
Cocoa whined some more.
“Don’t be a crybaby,” Hershey snapped.
In the middle of the night, I woke up and realized Cocoa was missing from our pile. I got the others up to help me look. We found her at the far end of our yard, lying on her side and moaning in pain, too sick to stand up. After Wendy, from the farmhouse, wrapped her up in a blanket and took her to the vet, our mother explained, “She ate three rocks last night. I have no idea why.”
For a week we didn’t see Cocoa, but we learned what the word “surgery” meant when Wendy told one of the workers: “Two hours of surgery. She had to have her stomach cut open and the rocks taken out.”
When she finally came back, Cocoa seemed like a different dog—not really a puppy anymore.
A week later, she was given away.
“It’s okay,” our mother said, after she was gone. “Some dogs aren’t cut out for the working life.” She sounded as if we should all just forget about Cocoa for now.
I didn’t of course. How could I?
Meeting Penny
HERSHEY WAS THE FIRST ONE TO be picked by a trainer and leave the farm. He didn’t even look back as he got into the man’s car. It was like he’d already forgotten his dog family, he was so ready to move on to the working part of his life.
After that, each of my brothers and sisters left one by one. I asked my mother if I should be worried that no trainer had picked me yet. “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably.”
She wasn’t a big one for reassuring her puppies. She didn’t see the point. “Some of you won’t make it as working dogs. That’s all there is to it.”
She didn’t say Cocoa’s name, but I thought of her of course.
After the last of my littermates was taken away and it was just the two of us, my mother said, “They might think you’re too much of a worrier.” She snapped at a fly and went over for some water. “Try not to act so nervous the next time a trainer comes.”
A few days later, I had my chance. Penny walked into our yard and right over to me. She wore a funny green hat and shoes with plastic flowers attached to them. “Look at you!” she said, reaching out to pick me up. “They must have saved the best for last!”
I wriggled and squealed and acted like a puppy again. I was so happy to be chosen I almost left without saying goodbye to my mother. At the last minute, I went over to the bed where she slept by herself now. “I have my trainer!” I said. “I’ll see you in eight months! I’ll work hard, you’ll see! I’ll try not to be too nervous, I promise!”
She confused me then, waking up from her nap, blinking at the light. “All right,” she said. “I suppose it’s too late now for anything else.”
In the car, Penny told me all about herself. “Dogs are my true love, Chester. That’s the first thing you should know about me. I’ve got no husband and no kids. Just a lot of wonderful dogs who I love and train and then I take them back to the farm to be matched with their person.”
At her house, she showed me pictures of the dogs from her past in frames around her living room. Some of them looked like me in other colors, like yellow and black. “I’ve never had a chocolate lab like you. I think that’s going to make you a little different from the rest.”
She smiled as she said it and pulled me into her lap. I’d known her only a few hours and already she was nicer than my mother had ever been.
How to Be Understood
“EVERY DOG HAS A WEAKNESS,” PENNY told me a few weeks into my training. “They’re perfect in many ways and then suddenly, they see a rabbit in the woods and all their training goes out the window. Poof, off they go. If it’s not a rabbit, it’ll be something else. The trick is to figure out your challenge as early as possible, then work on it a lot. I’ve got a shelf full of windup squirrels if we need them.”
I loved the way Penny talked to me all the time. I always answered, hoping she would understand me. No thanks, I tried to tell her that time. I don’t think squirrels will be my problem. I’ve seen lots of squirrels. I know not to chase them.
I thought of what my mother had said and I wanted to be honest with Penny. I looked her in the eyes. I’m a little anxious sometimes. It might be a problem.
She looked back at me and smiled reassuringly. “It’s okay,” she said, and for a second, I thought: She understands! She knows what I’m saying! Then she stood up. “I’m going to get one of those squirrels right now and try it on you.”
A few days later, we discovered my weakness. After the boy carried me to the top of the slide. Penny worried that I might get scared of children, so she brought me to a school one morning and we sat outside the front door, saying hello to all the students as they walked in.
I was fine! Children were sweet! One girl lifted my ear and whispered, “You’re the cutest dog in the whole world.” Another girl lifted my other ear and said, “I love you!”
I love you too! I tried to say, but she didn’t understand.
“No yipping, Chester,” Penny said firmly, with a flat hand on my nose. It didn’t hurt but still, I felt embarrassed. I had to remember that I understood what people said, but they couldn’t understand me. I went back to the girls and licked their hands.
That’s when it happened.
A terrible sound ripped through the air. My legs went jittery and frantic. I scrambled to get under a bench. The sky is falling! The earth is blowing up! I screamed to Penny, but she didn’t hear me. How could she with all that noise?
When the noise finally stopped, I peeked out from the bench I was hiding under. I couldn’t believe it. The children weren’t scared at all! They even moved toward the door where the sound had come from.
After they were gone, Penny walked over to my hiding spot and crouched down. “That was just a school bell, silly dog. It looks like maybe loud sounds might be a problem, doesn’t it?”
She talked softly to me the whole drive home. She told me it would be okay, that noises might hurt my ears but they couldn’t hurt my body. She let me ride in the front seat next to her again, where she could keep a hand on my back. I was still having trouble catching my breath.
Her hand felt nice. So did her voice.
“We’ll practice, that’s all. When you don’t expect it, I’ll bang a few pots and pans and you’ll get used to it. Caramel had this problem, too—you remember I told you about her? She got over it eventually.”
That night while I ate my dinner, Penny dropped a cookie sheet on the floor. I thought it was a bolt of lightning hitting the house. I flew out of the room and under the sofa.
“Oh dear,” Penny said from the kitchen. “Looks like we’ve got some work to do, Chester.”
After that, we worked on it all the time. Along with heeling and fetching and opening doors, Penny and I practiced loud sounds. She whistled. She set off timers. Once, she deliberately set off her smoke alarm. She even warned me ahead of time as she held the match under the alarm. “This is going to be loud, sweetheart.”
It was and I panicked. I knew I wasn’t supposed to. Penny had told me many times: “When a loud sound comes, sit down and wait. Don’t hide. Breathe in and out until it passes. Your person will need you. They have to be able to find you when it’s over.”
I knew all this and I still panicked. I couldn’t help it. I ran as fast as I could and got under the closest bed or table I could find.
Except for this problem, my
training went well. Almost every day, Penny told me how smart I was. One time, I knew what to do for a trick before she’d even taught me. The trick was opening a drawer and getting out a pot holder. It wasn’t hard. I’d watched a dog do it on a DVD, but Penny must have forgotten, because after I brought it to her she said, “You might just be the smartest dog I’ve ever had.”
After that, she did experiments to test my “vocabulary.” She put different objects around the room and asked me to fetch one without pointing at what she wanted.
“Please bring me my car keys, Chester,” she’d say, and I could. That was easy because Penny misplaced them so much. Whenever she found them, she said, “I hate you, car keys! You always walk away!” I learned the word for “shoes” the same way and also “cell phone.” Once she started those tests, I worked harder to remember the names of things because it made her so happy when I did.
It didn’t seem like that much of an accomplishment to me until I heard Penny on the telephone with Wendy from the farm. “I’ve never seen such a young dog with such a big vocabulary. There are about fifty words that he’s picked up entirely on his own. And it’s not just that. He’s six months old and he’s already got so many commands down—heel, sit-stay, crate, go now, and don’t touch.”
Listening to Penny made me feel good.
“I’ve never seen a dog like this,” she said. “He’s remarkable, really. There’s only one weak spot, I’d say. He seems to have a bit of sound sensitivity.”
Those two words weren’t in my vocabulary back then, but now they are.
Person Matching
THE FIRST TIME I SAW MILTON and Hershey again, they’d gotten so big I almost didn’t recognize them. When I realized who they were, I was so happy, I ran right over. “We’re getting matched with our people! It’s finally going to happen!” I think they were excited too, but were trying not to show it. We were back on the farm and we’d just visited our mother, who gave us a sniff and turned around. Maybe that was her way of saying, You’re older now. Don’t act like puppies.
I felt excited and nervous and also a little sad. On the drive that morning, Penny had said, “Chess, I have to tell you that if someone picks you this weekend, you’ll stay here for the next two weeks and train with them. You won’t come home with me.”
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