by Debbie Burns
Ben was quick to react a second time, snatching up the puppy between his hands before it could get away. He tucked the writhing animal against his chest, and the puppy squirmed and growled a comically nonmenacing growl until it realized it was good and captured, then gave up and yawn-whined for several seconds before vigorously licking Ben’s sleeve, making Mia suspect it had been dozing.
“Oh my gosh! Nice work! Really nice work.”
Ben laughed. “I didn’t expect to find one like that.”
“What a cutie.” Mia lifted the pup’s exposed back leg and checked. “This one’s a boy.”
“What do you want to do now? Do you think there are more?”
Mia scanned the grass in hopes of a glimpse of another puppy. “Since there’s one, you’d think there’d be more. Except for the fact that in a strange environment like this, little guys his age should want stick together. What would you put him at, three, maybe four months max?”
Ben lifted the wriggly pup in appraisal. “That would be my guess.”
She brushed her fingers across the soft, downy fur atop the pup’s forehead. Seeing that the little guy didn’t object, she moved on to massage his silky ear. She laughed when, after a grunt, he leaned in to it. “Why don’t I call Ollie and Taye over, and we’ll make some noise and stomp down the grass around here? If there are any others, it should stir them up.”
When Ben agreed, Mia yelled to the boys to come see what they’d found.
After the boys cooed over the puppy, the group spent another twenty minutes stomping down patches of grass throughout the area but didn’t find evidence of any more puppies. When they finally gave up, they reunited the puppy with its mother, and judging by their similar markings and eager greeting, there was no doubt they were mother and pup.
Next, they crated the puppy and slipped the leash back onto the mom. Mia and Ben took turns attempting to lead her back into the prairie, but she seemed to want nothing more than to head back to the car where her pup was waiting. As a last resort, they brought the puppy out and allowed him to walk freely next to his mom, but it didn’t help their search. The mother had no interest in anything aside from expressing her annoyance at the leash.
Feeling as if they’d exhausted all possibilities, Mia suggested they call it quits. After all the extra searching, it seemed logical to assume he was the only pup here. And on top of it, a cold front was rolling in, the group was inundated with burrs, seeds, and scratches, and Ollie’s stamina had given out.
Maybe they’d try again later, but they’d given their best this afternoon. And thanks to their efforts, two dogs wouldn’t be sleeping out here in the cold tonight.
Chapter 8
As soon as he was past the front desk of the city-run animal control department and headed into the stark, astringent, foul-smelling kennels, Ben knew he was committed.
Even before laying eyes on the dog.
Yesterday afternoon, he and Taye had spent an hour or so at the shelter before heading out for dinner, then returning to Forest Park to skate. Including the mom and pup, the group of High Grove Animal Shelter staff and volunteers had managed to capture seven dogs. A second group from a different shelter had been working the park as well and had caught five others, and Bernie and his coworker had gone back to the pound with one lone animal, a young male dog. The animal had been caught after jumping into a young couple’s paddleboat in an attempt to get closer to a group of geese he’d been chasing around Post-Dispatch Lake by the Boathouse.
Bernie had texted Megan a picture of the dog, and she’d shown it to the group as they were getting the captured dogs set up in the available kennels. The image was a bit out of focus, but it was a black-and-white border collie straddling the back seat of the paddleboat, looking just a bit sullen and guilty at the same time.
“That’s him, Ben!” Taye had said excitedly. “That’s my dog!”
Ben had said it was hard to tell from a blurry photograph but had admitted that Taye might be right.
After spending a half hour walking around the High Grove kennels picking at the burrs on his sleeves and quietly studying all the dogs and shaking his head, Taye had pulled Ben to the side.
“That dog we almost hit is the one, man. My dog. The one I’ve been waiting for. You gotta help me convince my mom to keep him. You have to. She’ll listen to you. She always listens to you.”
In front of Taye, Ben hadn’t committed to anything. Instead, he’d commented that even if Taye’s mom was ready, which Ben wasn’t willing to bet she was, the shelter was full of great dogs that needed homes.
“This is different,” Taye had insisted. “I can’t explain it, but didn’t you ever just know something? Like really know it? This dog is my dog. We’re meant to be together. I just know it.”
Ben had had to work not to let his gaze stray to Mia. Yes, he knew what Taye was talking about. Knew what it meant to have someone or something touch your soul and not be able to explain it to a single person.
He’d taken Taye home soon afterward last night. This morning, when’d he’d woken up and not been able to get Taye or the dog out of his thoughts, Ben had driven here.
And even before laying eyes on the dog, he knew he was committed to whatever it took to get the animal out of here. This was no High Grove Animal Shelter. This was a city-run pound. The animals brought here were strays, confiscations, or simply lost, and the ones who weren’t claimed by their owners within seventy-two hours had dismal odds of adoption.
He followed the short, shuffle-footed worker down a long row of kennels. When they reached the third kennel from the back, and Ben spotted Taye’s dog lying at attention like a sphynx, watching their approach, Ben became doubly committed.
“This the guy you were describing?” the control officer asked.
Ben took in the long-legged, black-and-white dog watching from the middle of his kennel, not barking, his head cocked at attention. The dog’s eyes were bright, and he had an alert, energetic look. He suspected Taye would have his hands full with this one.
“Yeah, that’s him.”
Ben’s first dog had been an energetic border collie that his dad had brought home after taking it off the hands of a woman he’d dated for a month or two. Like Taye, dogs had topped Ben’s Christmas list for several years running. He’d been eleven and had done his best to train her but had his hands full. Too full, his dad had decided. Ben came home one day to find that his dad had given her to a colleague.
If Ben had had somewhere to go, he was so furious he’d have left too. Eventually, time had buffed the sharp edge of anger, and Ben had chalked it up to another way his father had failed him. When he was fifteen, he got a summer job busing tables, a year before he was hired at the climbing gym. As soon as he had enough saved, he biked to a facility a lot like this one and adopted a stocky-legged Lab mix that he named Winston. He showed up at home with the dog unannounced and somehow made it clear that this dog’s presence in the house was nonnegotiable. His dad never spent a cent on the dog, and Ben couldn’t remember him ever laying an affectionate hand on him either. But he’d allowed Winston to stay, and that had been enough.
He was the most loyal dog Ben ever had. And while Taye’s home life was starkly different from how Ben’s was back then, he wanted Taye to have the bond he’d had with Winston.
Spying an alertness in the border collie’s eyes, Ben suspected he’d likely need to lend a hand helping to train him. If he and Taye could convince his mom to take him. But none of that seemed to matter compared to Ben’s wish to give both Taye and this dog the chance he hadn’t had in late boyhood.
“He’s one of those border collies that was dumped in Forest Park yesterday,” the guy said. “Guess you heard about it on the news? Hundreds of dogs just like him move through here in a month, but a story like this airs and people get moved into action.”
“I didn’t hear about it on the
news,” Ben replied. He’d heard that Channel 3 and Channel 5 had aired stories about the bizarre dumping of so many border collies into Forest Park but hadn’t watched either. “I was at the park yesterday, helping to catch some of the others.”
“That right? Then I guess you heard that the police traced the plates and found the woman who dumped them. She ain’t coming for him. For any of them. She’s a total head case. Said she couldn’t afford to care for them anymore and asked the park to care for them for her. Heck, she told the cop that the park had agreed. Not a person; ‘the park.’” He made air quotes at the last two words. “One of her neighbors came forward to say the woman hardly ever left her house, and the dogs were only heard from behind a tall privacy fence in her backyard. The neighbors didn’t seem to realize how many she had inside.”
“Yeah, I heard as much yesterday.”
“So, what do you want with this guy?”
“I want to get him out of here.”
“Afraid that ain’t possible. We’ve got a seventy-two-hour quarantine for every animal who comes through the door. Since he ain’t gonna get claimed, when his quarantine is over, he’ll get an exam. Depending on how it goes, he could make adoption row. If you’re still interested, you can come back then and see.”
“I’d like to take him today.” Ben wasn’t sure of his next steps, but he knew he wanted to get that dog out of this cold and indifferent place. There was nothing in the barren kennel except for a bowl of water.
The dog’s head cocked nearly sideways as he studied the two people who’d approached his kennel.
“No can do.” The guy counted out the days on pudgy fingers, mumbling as he went. “He’ll be examined Wednesday morning per policy. If I broke policy for you, I’d get written up, maybe fired. This case has gotten media attention, which doesn’t help him not get noticed. But as long as he’s healthy and doesn’t show any signs of aggression, he’ll come back on the other side of the building Wednesday midmorning. We do our best to give them fourteen days after that.”
Ben frowned. If it were a private institution, he wouldn’t stop until he’d figured out a way to bring the dog home today, but it was city-run, and as unlikable as the guy seemed, Ben didn’t want someone’s reprimand on his conscience. “What time Wednesday?”
The man shrugged, and Ben noticed a crust of dried food in his unkempt beard. “Eight or nine. But there’s no guarantees the dog’ll pass.”
“I’ll be here Wednesday morning. Guarantees or not, see to it that he passes.”
Ben held the man’s shifty gaze long enough to make certain he’d been understood, then headed out of the unpleasant building.
Between now and Wednesday morning, he’d get a crate and some supplies ready to house Taye’s dog until he could convince Taye’s mom their struggling family needed another mouth to feed. Ben shook his head as it dawned on him that he hadn’t imagined any of this when he’d answered Mia’s call yesterday morning from the climbing gym.
It was different, letting her in. Ben still needed reminders it was okay to let the image of her remarkable face linger when it came to mind, when he was so used to pressing it down and repeating that she was another man’s wife. Or letting her smoky eyes stir his soul when she met his gaze or her sultry voice waken the long-slumbering heat in his belly.
For the last eight years—and truth be told, for years before that—the only uncertainty Ben had allowed in his life had been in his climbing. And even then, to stay alive at high altitudes and on near-vertical slopes, he’d been forced to operate with rigid control.
With Mia in his world, he was going down a path that would bring a dog into his home for who knew how long. He’d not had a dog for a few years now. He’d been climbing too often in recent years, away from his loft in downtown St. Louis too long to give in to any whims he’d had in recent years to adopt another.
The truth was, with Mia in his world, Ben figured he could be talked into anything.
Chapter 9
Mia drummed her fingers on the counter Monday morning as she attempted to Skype her mom for the third time in a few hours. It had become their routine to check in twice a week, Wednesdays and Sundays, but her mom hadn’t picked up yesterday’s call and had been MIA all week aside from a single short email.
All day yesterday, Mia’s thoughts had been spinning between the moving encounter with the mom and pup in Forest Park and the few hours after getting them settled in a kennel in quarantine. The few hours that were spent skating in Steinberg Rink and grabbing a quick dinner at Fitz’s where, even despite the cold, Ollie and Taye sucked down root beer floats in glasses as tall as their heads and giant burgers as well.
She kept telling herself that Ben was Ollie’s godfather, and she had no reason to feel guilty for spending a few fun hours with him. Though she knew perfectly well that the way her heart had been racing most of that time was causing the guilt more than anything else.
Ben had been a big part of Ollie’s life for years, and him taking Ollie out for a night of fun was nothing new. Until now, though, Mia and Ben’s relationship had been pretty much limited to the check-ins before and after outings like Saturday night.
As she’d adjusted to the ice, Ben had wrapped an arm around her waist and even locked his hands over her hips once or twice. But he was skilled on the ice from years of hockey in his youth, and he’d known her hands were sore from rope burn, so maybe that was expected.
It was innocent fun, Mia kept telling herself. There was no harm in it. Who cared that his steady and reassuring voice in her ear had made her insides turn to Jell-O? Or that his hands on her hips had heated her blood? And even if she was crushing on him, that didn’t make her a bad person. Her marriage had been all but over long before she’d walked away in August. Even if there had been honest-to-goodness flirting, which there hadn’t been, there would’ve been no cause for objection.
She was itching to talk to her mom about Saturday night, even if she dished out advice Mia didn’t want to hear. Lynn had a knack for getting to the heart of the matter, and she was a “take your medicine straight” kind of woman.
Mia also wanted to tell her mom about the rescue in Forest Park and the dogs they’d found. She hadn’t told Ollie yet, but she’d made the decision to foster the mom and pup full time at the house, and she wanted her mom’s okay to keep them here. The house had belonged to Lynn since Mia’s grandma passed away six months ago. Lynn had no intention of returning to live in America in the foreseeable future. While her mom had given her permission to stay indefinitely, Mia still felt as though she should get permission to bring dogs into the house full time. And even though she’d be taking the dogs on a foster basis, she had no reason to think she wouldn’t one day follow in the footsteps of dozens of other shelter volunteers and create a foster fail by adopting them.
Suspecting that her mom’s rural Kenyan school was having internet problems again, Mia typed out a quick email instead, comically begging for forgiveness about the dogs rather than permission since she had no idea when Lynn would get to read it.
As she looked around her grandparents’ small home and thought that starting tonight, two dogs would be pattering around these wooden floors, Mia’s stomach flipped in excitement and with a bit of nervous indecision as well. Brad’s life insurance policy had been paltry. Even once his car and the house were sold, she was quite possibly going to have an income shortage. But even knowing this, bringing the mom and pup home felt like the right thing to do.
It was Christmas, and Ollie still believed in Santa. He might not recover some parts of his years of easy laughter and make-believe and having both his parents at his disposal, but he could still enjoy the magic of the holiday season. And the happy noise and commotion the dogs would bring would make the quiet winter nights a lot more joyful.
Determining to keep the news a secret from him until the dogs were there, Mia’s next call was to the shelt
er, asking if she could foster the pair after the vet examined them this afternoon. Patrick answered and took a message for Megan. True to form, he took the news matter-of-factly, adding that the new mastiff who’d come in yesterday could use the larger quarantine kennel that had been allotted to both mom and pup late Saturday afternoon.
Mia was stepping out of the shower when Megan called back, bubbling over with excitement about Mia’s decision to foster the pair full time. She also offered to loan Mia some of the costlier supplies from her personal stash. At her house, Megan had two spare kennels and a stair gate, as well as a few ceramic bowls and leashes.
Megan lived in Webster Groves too, a mile and a half away, but on a considerably more fairy-tale street than the one where Mia had grown up. Mia arranged to meet Megan there when she went home for lunch.
When Mia pulled up to where newlywed Megan lived with her husband, Craig, she parked alongside the curb, admiring the stately brick two-story house and lush flower beds lining the home. Megan was in the front yard with Sledge, the gorgeous German shepherd she’d adopted over the summer.
As Mia got out of the car, Megan met her at the curb and pulled her in for a hug. Sledge had trotted along at her heels. The remarkably trained dog even waited to get Megan’s permission before stepping close to greet and smell their visitor.
“I have news,” Megan said. “Bernie called. You guys were right about there being only one puppy.”
“Really? Thank goodness. It seemed like that, but I’ll sleep better knowing no puppies were left out in the cold. I guess the woman’s talking?” Mia bent down to Sledge’s level and gave him a brisk rubdown on his neck. His back leg lifted off the ground and thrummed the air to the beat of Mia’s scratching.
“Yeah. She signed over custody of the dogs in lieu of charges being pressed against her. She had thirteen and described each one. Apparently, the conditions in the woman’s home weren’t altogether deplorable, but they weren’t good either. And she said some things that triggered doubt about her sanity, like how the park had promised to care for the dogs until she could afford their food again.”