Bad to the Bone Boxer

by T. T. Sutherland

“Did he fit in?” I asked. “Was he shy? Did he miss us? Did he mesh well with the established dynamics of the other dogs?”

  “He was terrific,” she said. “Lots of energy and lots of love. He wanted to be with us all day long; you just have to look at him and he comes running over to say hi and lick your hands. He did chew up a few of our toys during naptime, but we’re used to that. Tomorrow we’ll make sure he gets the more indestructible ones instead.”

  Tomorrow! I thought, overwhelmed with relief. He can come back!

  Alicia sent one of the other employees to get Chihiro and Tombo for us, while we watched through the big window in her office. We could see Chihiro lying on a big stretchy dog bed in a corner, licking her paws. Tombo was racing around with a tiny golden Pomeranian.

  The little dog had a stuffed football in its mouth, which Tombo kept trying to grab. But every time he lunged for it, the Pomeranian nimbly dodged or spun around and ran between Tombo’s legs, so the boxer would end up standing there with a goofy expression, peering down at his paws, all Where’d she go? Where’d she go? Then the Pomeranian came running back and pretty much waved the football in Tombo’s face as if she was taunting him, before she turned around to run off again with him right behind her.

  I laughed. “Look at that!” I said to Midori. “I knew he could play well with little dogs. He would have loved Buttons, and I bet she’d have loved him too, if Rosie had just given them a chance.”

  Midori and Satoshi exchanged glances. “Is that what you guys are fighting about?” Satoshi asked.

  I looked around to make sure my mom wasn’t listening, but she was over by a rack of pamphlets, reading about obedience classes. I wasn’t ready to have a full therapy session with my mom about my failing friendship with Rosie and how I’d handled it all wrong.

  “Sort of,” I said. “That and a bunch of other stuff. Whatever, it’s all her fault, anyway. I’m waiting for her to apologize.”

  “Do you guys fight very often?” Satoshi asked casually.

  Midori made a face at him. “Don’t be nosy,” she said.

  “Oh, yeah, all the time,” I said, trying to sound like I wasn’t bothered by it. “It’s no big deal.”

  Alicia’s assistant led Tombo through the door, and the dog’s whole body lit up when he saw us. His eyes went bright and his mouth dropped open into a huge smile and he flung himself to the end of his leash, straining to get to me. I ran over and hugged him and he slurped his tongue up my cheek.

  “Good boy, Tombo!” I said. “You were so good! Good boy!”

  Chihiro wriggled and bounced up and down behind him, waiting for her turn to get some attention. I leaned over and patted her head as Satoshi took her leash and Midori rubbed her sides.

  “Did you show Tombo around?” Midori asked Chihiro. “Were you welcoming and friendly?”

  “She was,” Alicia assured us. “She stayed close to him all day. Even when he played with other dogs, he kept coming back to her. Although he’s pretty fond of our Newfoundland, Yeti, too.”

  “That’s Heidi Tyler’s dog,” Satoshi told me. He pointed through the window. “Look, you can see him in there.”

  I realized that Yeti was the huge black-and-white shaggy dog I’d seen in the park the other day. He was romping around the big playroom trying to get a small silky cocker spaniel puppy to play with him.

  “Thank you so much,” Mom said, shaking Alicia’s hand.

  “Yes, thank you!” I said. “And thank you, Midori, for telling us about this place.”

  “See you tomorrow, Tombo!” Alicia said, and he wagged his stumpy tail at her.

  We all crammed into my mom’s car with the dogs piled on top of the twins in the back. They didn’t seem to mind — Midori burst out giggling every time Tombo climbed on her, which happened at least seven times on the way home.

  Of course Mom had to bombard them with all kinds of embarrassing questions. “So you play the cello?” she said to Midori. “How long have you been doing that? How often do you practice? Do you enjoy it? That’s very impressive. We tried to get Michelle to learn the flute a few years ago, but she couldn’t stand all the practicing. What about you, Satoshi? What are you interested in? And tell me about your parents. What do they do?”

  “Mom,” I said. “Leave them alone for one second, can you?”

  “I’m just curious,” she said.

  “It’s OK,” Satoshi said, but I was relieved when we finally got back to my house and could run out to the yard. I thought Tombo might leap right out of his fur, he was jumping around so much with excitement.

  “This is great!” Midori said, unclipping Chihiro’s leash. She stared around at our wide grassy lawn. “Look at all the space you have!”

  “Race you to the other end!” Satoshi said to the dogs. He took off running and they both sprinted after him. Chihiro won by a mile, but mostly that was because Tombo got distracted halfway there and stopped to attack some falling leaves.

  “I wish we could throw a tennis ball for him,” I said to Midori. “But he eats them, like, faster than I can eat a bowl of peach sorbet. Which is my favorite, if you’re wondering.”

  “You could try a Frisbee,” she suggested. “And Furry Tails has some really tough toys and balls you could throw for him.”

  I was about to say that if we went back there, we’d have to leave Tombo at home after his behavior last time — but then I was struck by a terrible thought.

  “Uh-oh,” I said slowly. “Hey, Midori, the day care isn’t open at night, too, is it?”

  She shook her head. “Just seven a.m. to seven p.m., Monday through Friday.”

  “What are we going to do the rest of the time?” I said. “Like if we want to go out for dinner? Or over to my grandparents’ house? Or even to the store on the weekend? How can we ever leave him alone, even for a little while?” I shook my head. “I’ll always be worried that he’s destroying something or hurting himself.”

  I’d been so excited about the day care — but really it could only solve half our problems with Tombo. The rest of the time, we were still on our own.

  “Actually,” Midori said. “I have an idea.”

  I wasn’t sure whether to say anything,” Midori said. “Some people don’t like it when you give them advice about their dogs.”

  Yeah. Like Rosie, I thought. The week before, I had told her about a video I saw on YouTube where a puppy learned to spin in circles, and she got all huffy and said she wasn’t about to teach Buttons any tricks that made her dizzy.

  “You can tell me anything,” I said to Midori. “We’ll take all the advice we can get!”

  She went and got her messenger bag from the kitchen, where we’d left our stuff. She sat down on the back steps and I sat beside her. Chihiro and Tombo were wrestling playfully in the grass, pouncing on each other’s shoulders and trying to be the dog on top. It was funny to see Tombo act like a boxer, getting up on his back paws and trying to bat at Chihiro with his front paws.

  Satoshi came jogging back toward us when he saw us sitting down.

  “You’re going to give it to her?” he asked his sister as he flopped down on the grass next to us.

  Midori nodded. She pulled a big, funny-looking bone out of her bag. It wasn’t a real bone, but it was shaped like the ones you see in cartoons, long with a big knot on each end. It was a pale sand-white all over. She handed it to me. It felt dry and solid and a little crackly like really thick paper under my fingers.

  “This is rawhide,” Midori said. “You can get it in lots of different shapes and sizes; this is one of the big ones. Most dogs love it — they’ll chew on it for hours, and it’s really good for their teeth.”

  I turned it over and squeezed it. It felt pretty hard; I didn’t think my teeth would make much of a dent in it! But of course Tombo’s were much bigger than mine.

  “So if we give this to Tombo, he’ll chew on this instead of ripping up other things?” I asked.

  “Hopefully!” said Midori. “It’ll hel
p if he’s tired and well-exercised, too, but we leave one of these in Chihiro’s crate with her and it keeps her busy for hours. She barely even notices we’re gone.”

  “Wow!” I said.

  “Want to test it out?” Satoshi suggested. “We’ll put him in his crate with this and then leave for a few minutes and see what happens.”

  “We can watch him through the back window!” I said. “Let’s try it!”

  Of course, convincing Tombo to abandon his game with Chihiro took a while. When I called him, he looked over at me like, Um, hello, can’t you see I’m in the middle of a very important wrestling move right here? The big gray dog had him pinned under her front paws and was chomping playfully on his head. This was apparently everything Tombo had ever wanted out of life, judging by the dopey expression of glee on his face.

  Midori called Chihiro, and immediately the Weimaraner ran over and sat politely in front of her. Satoshi saw my face and hid a smile. “I’m sure Tombo will be good at that soon,” he reassured me.

  “Hmmm,” I said. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Abandoned by his playmate, Tombo was rolling on his back in the grass with all his paws flapping in the air.

  “Come on, Tombo,” I called. He wriggled upright and galloped over to us. I held the rawhide bone out so he could sniff it. Immediately he tried to grab it in his jaws. I pulled it back out of reach and beckoned him into the house.

  Mom was in the kitchen reading a book and stirring a pot of soup at the same time. She squinted at me as Tombo and I came in.

  “Are they done playing already?”

  “No,” I said, “but we’re going to test out a way to leave him in his crate. You know, in case we want to go out at night. Check this out!” I held out the bone to her.

  “Oh, rawhide bones,” she said. “That’s a good idea.”

  “Midori thought of it,” I said. “OK, Tombo, go to your room!” I pointed at the crate. Tombo wrinkled his forehead skeptically. I waved the bone in front of the open door. “Go to your room and you get this!”

  Tombo kind of snort-sighed and leaned forward, as if he was hoping he could just take the bone, but I held it farther into the cage. Hesitantly, he stepped inside, and I let him take the bone in his mouth. Then I shut the door behind him and stood back.

  Tombo circled for a minute on the newspapers my mom had left at the bottom of the crate. The bone stuck out of his mouth goofily, like one of my grandpa’s cigars. Finally he lay down, propped the bone up between his front paws, and started going to town on one end of it. His eyes half-closed and his teeth went chomp chomp chew chew chomp chomp chomp.

  “He loves it!” I said. “Come on outside and let’s see if he notices he’s alone.”

  Mom put down her book and followed me out the back door. Midori and Satoshi were already standing at the back window peering in through the glass.

  “He didn’t look up when you closed the door,” Midori whispered.

  “He’s still chewing,” Satoshi added.

  Chihiro wagged her tail at us like, This is a weird game, huh? Where’s my friend gone?

  I cupped my hands around my eyes and peeked in. Mom did the same thing beside me.

  Sure enough, Tombo was slurping away in the same position we’d left him in. He kept tilting his head one way and then the other, gnawing on the bone with his back teeth.

  “Yay!” I whispered. “Look at that! Totally better than chewing shoes!”

  “Or eating towels,” Mom agreed.

  We watched for a few more minutes, but he just kept chewing happily. “I think this might work!” I said to Midori. “I can’t believe it. I guess he’s not really ‘bad to the bone,’ right, Mom?”

  “I never thought he was,” she said.

  “Except that he’s bad to the bone,” I said, pointing at the rawhide. “Ha-ha! Get it? Because he’s chewing up the bone?”

  Satoshi groaned and Midori pretended to slap her forehead. “I cannot believe you just said that,” she said. “That was such a Charlie kind of joke.” But she was giggling, and Mom hid a smile too.

  “Well, I’m just glad there’s something that’ll make him be good,” I said.

  “And if he gets bored with rawhide,” Midori said, “there are all these other things you can give him to chew. Like, there are toys you stuff with treats or peanut butter — Chihiro will spend forever trying to get the treats out. Or there are real chunks of cow bones and stuff you can get at the pet store.”

  “Gross!” I said.

  “But if it makes him happy …” Mom said with a shrug.

  “OK, I think that’s enough of a test,” I said. “Let’s bring him back out so he can play with Chihiro some more.”

  When I opened the back door, Tombo glanced sideways at me and blinked a little like, Oh, hey, it’s you. Did you go somewhere? I opened his crate and he stayed where he was, yarm yarm yarming on his bone. I had to get another treat to distract him and lure him out, and then we hid the bone so we could use it only when we had to go out.

  Luckily Tombo didn’t seem to have a very long memory. By the time the bone was hidden, he was all ready to go outside and run around again.

  “Dogs are funny,” I said to Mom as I opened the back door for him. We watched him sprint across the grass with Chihiro leaping on his back and the Takashi twins chasing them. “The ways to solve their problems are so logical and simple, once you figure them out.”

  “If only people were like that,” Mom said, shaking her head.

  No kidding, I thought. Wouldn’t everything be great if I could just give Rosie a bone to make her stop bossing people around? Or if I could distract her from Pippa with a treat as easily as I distracted Tombo from his rawhide?

  Unfortunately, I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy … and the truth was, I had no idea if Rosie and I would ever be able to be friends again.

  I took Midori upstairs to show her my room before they went home. Unlike Rosie, she thought it was really cool, and she didn’t say anything about how messy or mismatched it was. She loved the photos of Africa and she went crazy for my rainbow waterfall of scarves on the coatrack.

  “They’re all so beautiful!” she said. “How do you decide which one to wear each day? I never see you wear the same one twice in a row.”

  “I have a system for that,” I said. “Once I wear it, I move it to the bottom hooks of the coatrack. Then I gradually move the scarves up as I go through them, so by the time it gets to the top again, I know it’s been a while since I wore it.”

  Midori looked impressed. “That’s very organized of you.”

  “That might be the only way I’m organized!” I said with a laugh.

  She gently touched the scarves on the top hooks. “So you’ll wear one of these tomorrow?”

  “Yeah, this one, I think,” I said, lifting off a midnight-blue scarf with flecks of silver thread like stars in a night sky and silver braided tassels on the ends.

  “That is gorgeous,” said Midori, feeling the smooth satin. “I’ve always loved the scarves you wear.”

  “I get new ones from my Kenyan side of the family every Christmas,” I said. “I think they first chose them because they’re lighter to mail than other presents. And then other people started getting them for me, too, and it kind of became my thing.”

  “How many do you have?” she asked.

  “Eighty-four,” I said proudly. “I bet I can get to a hundred by the end of elementary school.” It was nice to have a friend who thought that was as cool as I did.

  After the twins left, I went onto my dad’s computer and tried to figure out the goat charity research I’d promised Ms. Applebaum I would do. Tombo flopped down on the floor underneath me and started snoring about five seconds later. Day care and playing with Chihiro had really worn him out. I rested my bare feet on his solid brown torso and he just made a snortling noise in his sleep.

  I went to Google and typed in “goat,” but that only got me lots of information about raising goats and t
ypes of goats. So then I typed in “goat Africa” instead, and got about three million results: give a goat for Christmas, buy a goat for Africa, donate a goat, something about goat meat that I definitely did not want to click on …

  There was too much information! How was I supposed to choose which charity was best? How could I even tell which ones were real charities? What if I clicked on the wrong link and accidentally put a virus on my dad’s computer? Mom and Dad are always warning me about going to strange websites. They are super-careful about everything to do with the Internet.

  I sighed and Tombo woke up. He pushed himself into a sitting position and looked at me. His forehead was all wrinkled in that cute worried way again. It was as if he knew how stressed out I was and he was wishing he could help.

  “It’s too confusing, Tombo,” I said.

  He tilted his head. He looked like he was listening as hard as he could.

  “Any advice?” I asked him. “How would you send a goat to Africa?”

  He thought about that for a long moment, then tilted his head the other way. It made his ears flop over adorably, but it wasn’t very helpful.

  “Oh, well,” I said. “I’ll deal with it later.”

  Tombo liked that plan. He rested his chin on my knee while I closed the Internet window and turned off the computer. His big brown eyes looked up at me reassuringly.

  “I can tell you one person I’m not going to ask for advice,” I said to him. “And that’s Rosie. She’d probably send you to Africa if she could.”

  Tombo’s butt wiggled a little, so I guess he wasn’t listening all that carefully.

  After dinner, Dad and Deandre and I took Tombo for a long walk to make sure he was really, really tired, so he wouldn’t eat or chew anything overnight. It worked on me, too — I was so tired by the time I got into bed that I didn’t even have time to worry about Rosie or goats before I fell fast asleep.

  It wasn’t until I woke up on Wednesday morning that I remembered to worry about what I would do after school that day. Mom and Dad wouldn’t be home until five, and I couldn’t go to Rosie’s mom’s store with her and Pippa the way I usually did. But it was a bit late to tell Mom and Dad that. They didn’t even know that Rosie and I were fighting.