by K. Kibbee
As if in reply, a faint noise materialized near the rear of the store and then grew steadily louder. It was a repetitious huff, huff, huff that mimicked a locomotive’s engine, and as it neared him, a flash of fur passed by an aisle in Sam’s peripherals. A few moments later, a second pass accompanied the phantom pants and Sam decided he’d “Seen a wee sasquatch,” while smiling at Theodore’s retreating backside.
It took a half-hour and ten full runs of the bookstore for Theodore to complete his investigation, during which time he clipped two displays, knocked over a potted plant, and face-planted into a cardboard cut-out of The Velveteen Rabbit. When he finally came to rest, he was panting vigorously and, thusly, “grinning from ear to ear,” as Sam put it. Theodore had never seen so vast a space—let alone one that he’d been granted free range to explore. Most of his life had been spent locked in disinteresting rooms or cages, and when outdoors, his mistress had rarely let him venture anywhere beyond her small, concrete patio. Now, as he panned this enormous, wondrous space and listened to Sam explain that it was to be his new home, Theodore could do little more than tilt his big, goofy head.
“See that—over there,” Sam directed as he raised his long finger towards a collection of bean-bags and pillows that dotted a large rug set near the shop’s main door. “That’s the Reading Nook. That’s where I— err—we—read to the kiddos.”
Theodore watched the spot for a moment and then sauntered over to one of the bean-bags—a bright blue one with a polka-dot patch—and lifted his leg on it. The “NOOOOOOOOOO!” that followed shook a couple of the more fragile books from their shelves, and as they fell with a succession of claps, Theodore hit the deck. His wide, erect ears flattened to his skull and his body quaked. When Sam rushed to his side, the dog squeezed his eyes tightly shut and trembled all the harder.
“Theodore—Theo—I’m sorry,” Sam sputtered as he lowered to a crouch at the Corgi’s side. He laid an outstretched hand on Theodore’s back. Despite the layers of plush fur between them, Sam could still feel the dog shaking. “It’s—it’s okay,” he went on. “Well—I mean . . . it’s not okay, okay—but it’s alright.”
The shuddering kept on, strong as ever, even as Theodore raised his head and set eyes on the kind man who caressed him. “I’m not going to hurt you,” Sam assured him from under his crumpled brow. “I promise.”
The little dog stared hard at his new master; felt the steady weight of the man’s hand upon his back, studied the laugh lines that dented his temples, and drank in his comforting perfume of musty pages and peppermint—and then Theodore stopped shaking. Never again did he fear Sam’s bellow and, in the days to come, he more often found his master exclaiming in delight than in alarm.
“Theodore—it’s time—it’s time—your Reading Dog debut!”
Sam was in rare form, rushing about the Reading Nook, fluffing the pillows and cushions in such a flurry that he all but blurred to a streak of flannel and beard hair. When he reached the bright blue bean-bag with the polka-dot patch, he stopped abruptly, upturned his nose, and shot eyes at Theodore. “No waterworks today, okay, buddy?” he playfully requested.
Theodore glanced at the big, blue blob, and clenched his bladder. Seconds thereafter, a chime from the shop’s front door announced the first of his reading buddies—a curly-haired girl with freckles and a big grin that showcased her missing front teeth. “Hi, Mister Moore,” she greeted.
“Hey there, Sally!” Sam beamed. “Lucky you, you’re the first one here for Theodore’s big debut!”
The girl panned the shop and her toothless grin vanished. “Theodore?” she puzzled.
“Oh, that’s right . . . you weren’t here last week. Nate found me a dog to adopt—a reading dog to join our storytime,” Sam explained. He then sidestepped until Theodore was at his heel and motioned towards the bashful dog with great gusto. “Here he is—here’s Theodore!” Sam declared as though he were announcing at a baseball game.
Sally’s eyes grew large and she lunged towards Theodore, who promptly darted behind Sam’s left leg. Were it not for his enormous ears, the dog might have hidden successfully, but the sizeable brown satellite dishes were his undoing. “You know I can see you back there, right?” Sally teased him as Theodore made an exploratory peek around Sam’s leg.
Another quick duck and Theodore, save his ears, was once again camouflaged behind Sam’s leg. By any dog’s account, he was invisible.
“Maybe we should give him some time,” Sam suggested, craning over his shoulder and looking Theodore over with a sympathetic eye. He added, “This is all pretty new to him,” and then he offered Sally a screwy smile and a bright, purple bean-bag in the Reading Nook. She obliged, as did the half-dozen children who filtered in behind her, and sooner than he’d expected, Theodore found himself seated beside Sam with a dozen eyes staring him down.
“Why are his ears so big?” a pale boy seated at the head of the group wondered aloud. “Can he hear extra good?”
Sam chuckled. “’Fraid not, Stuart. Or at least, if he can, he doesn’t let on. Fact is—I’d say he only listens to about half of what I tell him.”
A girl in a violet dress just behind Stuart wiggled on her cushion and her hand shot into the air.
“Yes, Nan—did you have a question?”
Nan peered at Theodore through the saucer-sized lenses of her glasses. “Wh-wh-what’s that bandage for?” she sputtered.
Sam looked away from the little girl and towards Theodore, who was attentively seated by his side. A fresh, tan Band-Aid clung to the dog’s right leg and, as Sam stared at it, he confessed, “Awe, he had a little accident—ran into an umbrella stand as he was dashing out the door. Got himself a little nick.”
Nan blinked, but behind her magnifying lenses, it was like the flutter of two gargantuan lighthouse bulbs. Her delicate little mouth turned down at the corners as she breathed, “Oh.”
Sam was quick to explain that Theodore was “just fine,” and “a bit of a klutz,” which seemed to pacify Nan, who promptly turned her attentions from the dog to the book waiting in the shopkeeper’s lap. Noting her attention on the mossy green cover trimmed in gold, Sam grinned and said, “So, are ya’ll done playing twenty-questions and ready to pick up where we left off with old Dan and little Ann?”
Nan nodded voraciously, as did Sally, Stuart, and the rest of the children. As they wagged their heads, squeaks rose from several of the bean-bags, and one little boy blushed when a particularly suspicious noise came from his. A wave of giggles cascaded through the group and Theodore cocked his head this way and that as he studied their cheery faces. His comically large ears swayed back and forth with each tick of his head, until the left one nearly slapped him in the eye, and he stopped. More giggles.
“Okay, okay . . . simmer down now,” Sam warned as he cracked the book. He cleared his throat and, with it, the commotion, after which he announced, “Where the Red Fern Grows, chapter four.”
Theodore quickly took note of Sam’s unusually loud and resolute tone, and gave his new master a curious look as the man began to read. Sam’s profile was animated as he scanned the pages spread across his palms. His glasses slipped down further and further on the bridge of his nose as he read, but just when they looked as though they might slip off altogether, Sam would lift his eyes to the head of a new page, and the glasses would correct themselves. This went on for some time—Sam tracing the words downward and then up again as his audience, and Theodore, sat utterly hypnotized. At the close of chapter four, Sam paused for a breather, and gave Theodore a sideways look.
“Don’t think I haven’t noticed you watching me read,” Sam quietly teased the dog. Theodore returned with a quizzical head-tilt, his honey-brown eyes fixed on Sam’s.
“I think he wants to read, too,” Nan offered from the foreground. She looked brightly upon the dog before adding, “After all, he’s a reading dog, isn’t he?”
“That he is,” Sam confessed. He held the book nearer to Theodore before asking, �
��Waddaya think, Theo, old boy . . . you wanna take a crack at chapter five?”
Stuart and one other boy chuckled and, meanwhile, Theodore examined the book as though it were a squirrel, baiting him from a high tree branch. A pensive few seconds followed before the dog’s mouth opened and he moved towards the book with jaws outstretched. Now Stuart graduated into hysterics that spread like wildfire through the troupe of children, one of whom shrieked, “He thinks it’s a steak! He’s gonna eat it!” between huffs of laughter.
Sam snapped the book back and, now wearing an expression of shock, chided, “No, no, Theodore. It’s not for that.”
The little Corgi immediately clapped his mouth shut and shrunk back. His ears bent to the sides and he was suddenly examining his paws, rather than the book. The laughter died along with his ambitions at making a meal out of Old Dan and Little Ann’s adventures.
“Oh Theo,” Sam crooned. “It’s not—I didn’t mean to—Oh, nuts—” he sputtered as his head sank alongside the Corgi’s. Several of the kids followed suite and, in an instant, the bookstore’s jovial atmosphere had darkened. At the same time, a low cloud that had been lingering just outside the picture window at Sam’s elbow moved to eclipse the sun. A swath of shadows in the shape of a creeping hand spread out over the children, stealing their sunny expressions away. As the mood darkened, Sam parted his lips to suggest that they wrap things up for the day, but stopped short when he felt a nudge at his hand and looked down to find Theodore nosing the edge of the book.
“See,” Nan called from the audience. “He does want to read.”
Several heads perked up at Nan’s observation, and in an instant the room grew light again. Still touching the tip of his long nose to the mossy green cover, Theodore’s eyes shone as the sun broke free of the clouds and cast its rays over both he and Sam. “Shall we try again?” Sam asked with a smile.
Theodore’s furry brows arched upwards and he glanced eagerly at the book.
“Well then,” Sam said in reply, “That’s a yes if ever I saw one,” and then he pulled the cover back again. The musty scent that Theodore had noticed when first he’d met Sam came spilling out from the pages, and the dog drank it in as he examined the mess of black blobs there. Sam’s thick finger fell on the opening paragraph just as Theodore’s eyes did, and as his master read aloud, Theodore tracked it as it trailed down the page. This went on for some time, until Nan, who’d been intently studying the man and his dog since they began the chapter, made an Eh-Hem sound, as though she were clearing her throat.
Sam stopped reading and looked up. “Nan? Did you have a question?”
The girl gaped back with her enormous eyes. “Not really,” she confessed, narrowing her focus in on Theodore. “I just—I just think . . .,” she trailed. “I don’t think he understands.”
Sam softly chuckled. “Well, no . . . I ‘spose not. After all, he’s a dog.”
“No, that’s not what I mean,” Nan returned. She rose on spindly legs, smoothed her skirt, and approached the two of them, keeping her eyes trained on the Corgi. The nearer she got, the more fevered Theodore became—glancing about the room, his ears dipping lower with every step the girl took. By the time Nan arrived in front of him, he was shivering. “I don’t think he can see—see the words,” she observed in a compassionate tone.
Sam blinked at the page, saying nothing, and then watched as Nan’s round little cherub face puzzled and crinkled and screwed into a knot as she stared a hole through his dog. Her eyes, previously the shape of silver dollars, narrowed to slivers as her face drew closer and closer to Theodore’s.
Under the weight of Nan’s scrutiny, Theodore wriggled and looked sideways. When he nervously turned his nose back to hers, they nearly touched, and an errant hair escaped his muzzle and landed on her cheek. She sneezed and stumbled back a step, nearly falling. When she recovered, she was bleary-eyed, but smiling. “He needs glasses!” she announced, blinking her tears away.
“Glasses?”
“Glasses!”
Nan stomped back towards the dog with her finger wagging. “That’s the look I had,” she explained, pointing directly at Theodore’s ever-widening eyes. “That’s the same look I had when Mum and Dad were trying to teach me to read and I couldn’t make the words out. That’s when they figured out I needed to see the poptometrist.”
The corners of Sam’s mouth turned upward. “Poptometrist?”
“Yeah, poptometrist,” Nan repeated in a slightly less assured tone. “The glasses doctor.”
Two rows back, a boy in a white button-up shirt and suspenders who was also sporting a pair of glasses sniffed loudly. “It’s OPtometrist, dummy.”
“Hey,” Sam barked, staring daggers at the boy, “There’s no need for name-calling, Noah.”
“Sorry.”
“Well, whatever,” Nan went on, rolling her eyes but not giving Noah a second, or even first glance. “That’s the same look anyway. He needs glasses. He can’t see the words.”
Sam gave the girl an incredulous bat of his eyelashes and tried to force the smile from his face. “I hardly think that—” made it only half-way from his lips before Nan interjected.
“Didn’t you say that he was always bumping into stuff?” she hammered. “And didn’t Nate say that he got in trouble with his other family ‘cuz he kept bringing them rocks n’ stuff, instead of tennis balls?”
Sam blinked. His smile slowly faded as his lips worked into a wavy line. Deep creases began to materialize across his forehead, and Theodore, who’d been panning back and forth between his master and the girl, got big-eyed as the fissures grew ever deeper. Both man and dog, locked in befuddlement, took little note as Nan marched up to Sam, plucked his glasses right off of his face, and then placed them on Theodore’s.
There was a brief pause of awe. Half of the children went slack-jawed while the other half bugged their eyes at the Corgi. One girl even gasped and, when she did, Theodore jerked. Only seconds later, the dog had launched from his seated position beside Sam and landed just beside Nan. He looked left, then right, as the glasses teetered precariously on his muzzle, and then he took off with a start. By hook or by crook, those glasses hung tight as the Corgi lapped the store, seamlessly dodging every cardboard cut-out, bookcase, and inconspicuously placed stuffed animal that had tripped him up before. He sailed past spindly cases, top-heavy with clutches of books that fanned out like the branches of trees, and wide-bottomed shelves—staunch and thick, with spines for feet. Faster and faster, he ran as his bright eyes washed over life-size unicorn statues, voluptuous clouds strung by twine from the ceiling, and figurines of trolls that peeked at him from their various hidey-holes amongst the stacks. The bookstore seemed to come alive through Theodore’s illuminated motion. Clay fairies, hobgoblins fashioned from stone, and comically large insects that he’d never noticed before watched the Corgi from atop their paperback perches as though they too looked on for the first time with clear eyes.
After several laps, Theodore came to rest in the center of the Reading Nook and skidded to a perfect stop at his master’s feet. He panned the room’s joyful faces, each suddenly brighter than it had ever been before, and as he did, a wave of applause washed through the crowd. Still bright-eyed from his dash around the bookstore, Theodore looked out over his audience with his head held high, and the once bashful little dog with the awkward gate swelled with pride.
Part Three
The Curious Courier in the Pea Coat
Sam plunked away at the keyboard, the tap, tap, tap of keys like breadcrumbs on his trail to discovery. Theodore had been intrigued by the sound at the start, especially when Sam had explained he was “searching out a treasure” for his new companion, but half an hour in, the dog’s enthusiasm was waning. His once-erect ears now wilted like sun-deprived daisies, and though he kept eyes trained on the glowing screen that backlit Sam’s typing fingers, Theodore’s eyelids were drooping along with his head. He gave a little jolt when Sam let out a cough and glanced towards h
im.
“Getting bored, are we?”
Theodore straightened up and fluttered his eyelids.
“Yeah, me too,” Sam confessed. He swiveled in his office chair until he was facing the little dog, and let out a sigh. “I don’t know, Theo,” he moaned, “I’m just not coming up with anything. I mean . . . there are plenty of places online that sell silly dog glasses and stuff, but none that have real dog glasses . . . glasses that actually work for a dog who can’t see well.”
Theodore cocked his head and his down-tilted ear flapped a little. Sam watched this, and grinned, but as his stare stuck there, his smile faded and his eyes glazed over until they grew empty. A couple of minutes passed in this way, with Theodore gazing inquisitively at his master’s blank stare, before Sam perked up and his eyes sparked. “But maybe they don’t have to be glasses meant just for dogs!” he excitedly realized before swinging back towards the computer. A few more clicks of the keyboard, these decidedly more feverish, and a moment of “Ah-hah!” followed.
“These are perfect!” Sam declared, now tapping at the face of his computer monitor. Clink, clink, clink. “Look, Theo—look!” he encouraged, continuing to tap. Just beneath his fingertips, a pair of delicate, wire-rimmed glasses with curled earpieces appeared as if by magic and Theodore gazed up at them, trying hard to figure out what all the fuss was about. Sam was beside himself with excitement, and so the little dog rose up off of his haunches and danced about, if for no other reason than to please his friend.
“We can do rush delivery—have them tomorrow!”
* * *
A long and sleepless night of anticipation followed. As he sometimes did, Sam suggested the pair sleep over at the bookstore, and with the aid of a motley collection of cushions from the pull-out couch in Sam’s office, and an expertly strung afghan, the two built themselves a fort to be proud of. Sam even produced a flashlight from his desk drawer and made a clever hand-puppet show for Theodore against the threadbare parts of the afghan. “This is the clumsy Corgi who can’t tell a rock from a tennis ball,” he narrated, fashioning his right hand into a shape that roughly resembled a dog’s head. He then lifted the opposite hand and curled his fingers so that they made a pair of small ovals before continuing, “And these are the glasses that are speeding towards him, even now, so that he’ll be able to tell the difference!”