“You don’t need another dog,” she said.
“I just want to check it out,” I replied. “Will you go with me?”
“Fine.”
By the time we got there, the animal control officer was about to lock up for the day. He led us back to a shed behind the police station. Inside were two wire pens. Each pen held a dog, although it was so dark inside that I couldn’t see anything. One of the dogs inside the pen was barking, high-pitched and panicked. I went inside that pen and scooped up the dog inside.
“Oh, you don’t want to do that,” the animal control officer said. “He’s pretty dirty. He’s been in here for a while.”
“It’s okay,” I said, wishing I’d brought a nose plug. “I’ll take him.”
“You haven’t even seen him.”
“I don’t care. I want him.”
I didn’t get a good look at him until after we’d filled out the paperwork and were back in the car headed home. “He’s filthy,” I said.
“He’s tiny,” my mother said.
“He’s shaking,” I said.
He was shaking. And panting. The moment we got home and his feet touched the carpet, he ran to my bedroom and hid under the bed. Nothing and no one could make him come out. My two other dogs, a Boston terrier named Lola and bulldog mix named Louis, didn’t quite know what to make of this new dog.
Truthfully, neither did I. He’d been an impulse rescue. I’d scooped him up, paid the ten-dollar adoption fee, and taken him home. He was in pretty pitiful shape. His coat was dull and patchy. There were several long scars running the length of his back legs. His eyes were cloudy, his ears were tattered, and his belly was full of sores. The vet said most of his teeth were rotten and that he wasn’t healthy enough to be neutered. The vet sent me home with antibiotics, medicated shampoo, and eye drops, and told me to wait it out. The dog might live if the infections cleared up and he started to eat.
And so I waited it out from underneath my covers while Tru waited it out underneath the bed.
Little by little, Tru got better, and the story of what his life must have been like before he came to live with me became more and more clear. His eyes were milky from ulcers that had never been treated, the sores on his belly were from staph infection, he had ear mites and fleas and ticks, and the scars on his legs, the vet said, were probably from being tied up and chewed on by other dogs.
He jerked away and barked violently when anyone tried to touch him during those rare occasions that he came out from under the bed. My other two dogs hadn’t come to me this way. I’d read about abused dogs, but until now, I’d never had one. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that Tru had probably been abused for a very long time before he was picked up by animal control. His wounds went much deeper than the physical, and although his body got stronger and stronger every day, his spirit remained broken.
By the end of the summer I’d managed to find a job teaching high school English, and I came home every day exhausted, ready to fall back into my routine of watching television in my room in my underwear. Sometimes I’d come home to find Tru at the water bowl, but most days he’d scurry back to his hiding spot before I saw him. I didn’t blame him. I wanted to do the same thing.
One day I was cleaning my room when I leaned down and saw Tru staring back at me from underneath the bed. I lay down and slid under the bed next to him. He let out a yelp and army-crawled to the other end, where he watched me from a distance. I opened my mouth to tell him that it was okay, that I wasn’t going to hurt him, but instead what came out was a sob. I was just so lost. I felt like I was suffocating. Everything was wrong, just so damn wrong. I couldn’t believe that I had finished an M.A. in creative writing only to come back to my hometown and teach high school. I couldn’t believe that I’d let some stupid guy destroy my self-esteem, couldn’t believe how much it hurt every single day just to breathe and get through it.
I was lying there, face-first on top of dust bunnies and dog hair and God knows what else, wondering if it really and truly might be better just to die, when I felt something wet and rough slide across my cheek. When I looked up, Tru was right in front of me. He cocked his head to the side, his tongue hanging ever so slightly out of his mouth. We stayed that way for a long time until I collected myself enough to resume cleaning.
Neither one of us was magically healed after that moment. Tru stayed under the bed most days, and I still felt like my world was all wrong for a long time. But I think it’s like many of those of us working in rescue say—the animals rescue us more often than we rescue them. My dog comforted me when I was feeling my lowest in the only way he knew how. He reminded me that even when you’re sobbing in the middle of the afternoon in your underwear after crawling underneath your bed and you’re feeling your absolute worst, there’s a reason to keep going.
Almost a decade later, Tru’s face is completely gray, and he’s missing most of his teeth. He still has those scars on his back legs, but he doesn’t run away when I or anyone else bends down to pet him. He sleeps on top of the bed instead of underneath it, and if you’re not careful, he’ll lick your face before you’ve even had a chance to say hello.
I think about him every time I get a phone call or an e-mail from someone about an abused dog—a dog that is considered unadoptable, unlovable, too sick or too old to be of any use. I think about how I found him in the dark in that dirty pen and about how the animal control officer said I didn’t want him. I wonder what might have happened to the both of us if I’d listened to him. More than anything, I think about that brokenness—Tru’s and mine—the brokenness that we shared that summer and still carry around inside of us when things get tough, and I tell every single unlovable, unadoptable dog I meet that there is always a reason to keep going.
You Might Be from the Ozarks If . . .
1.You’ve ever ridden a tractor to a gas station for a snack in the summertime.
2.Your punishment as a kid was picking up rocks.
3.You can’t throw one of those rocks you just picked up without hitting somebody you’re related to.
4.You wave at everyone you meet on the road.
5.You are “fixin’” to do something.
6.“Hell” and “hail” and “think” and “thank” sound the same coming out of your mouth.
7.“A ways” is a fairly accurate measure of distance.
8.Your school lets out at least one day for deer season.
9.Your childhood swimming pool was a round stock tank.
10.You measure large weights in sacks of feed.
11.You can name the location of at least one permanent yard sale.
12.“He don’t” and “I seen” are not improper grammar, but local vernacular.
13.You know how to get “ahold” of moonshine (and you talk about “getting ahold” of things and people).
14.You know how to get from one town to another without your tires ever touching a paved road.
15.You’ve ever been to a revival or a pie auction in your high school gym.
ALSO BY ANNIE ENGLAND NOBLIN
Sit! Stay! Speak!
CREDITS
Cover design by Emin Mancheril
Cover photographs: © Getty Images; © Shutterstock
COPYRIGHT
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.
JUST FINE WITH CAROLINE. Copyright © 2011 by Annie England Noblin. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage
and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
FIRST EDITION
Chapter opener illustration by dien/Shutterstock, Inc.
EPub Edition October 2016 ISBN 9780062465634
ISBN 978-0-06-246562-7
16 17 18 19 20 RRD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Just Fine with Caroline Page 30