Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings (9 page)

Darian and Michael had a special kind of closeness, too. When they were young and the heat of summer made the tar in the streets of New York melt underfoot, we’d get in the car and go to the Clarks. Darian and Michael would sit in a wading pool together, pouring water over each other’s head, and eat Popsicles, their faces covered with the frozen treat’s bright colors. It was such a simple pleasure, but an indelible marker in Michael’s childhood. They’d dig in the garden looking for worms, they’d chase each other around the yard, and then they’d get back in the pool.

When they got too big for the wading pool, they’d trade turns swinging on a tire Dave hung from a tree in the yard. They’d stay outside until it was dark enough to chase fireflies. On more than one occasion, Michael ran to me and said: “Mommy, I’m having so much fun. Can we come back tomorrow?” His skin moist with perspiration, his face tanned from the sun, his dimples popping, his blue eyes sparkling, he smelled of the outdoors. I’d draw him close, hoping to still the passage of time, but in a matter of seconds he was off again.

As the kids got older, baseball and a devotion to the Yankees took over. There were treks to nearby Finch Park to practice throwing a baseball and catching it in a glove, and sliding in the dirt. Back at the house, they’d play Wiffleball in the yard, giving both Rich and Dave a chance to reawaken their own ball-playing muscles.

That night, as we stood in the kitchen and I unpacked Huck’s belongings, I told the Clarks about Huck’s habits. “He goes out three times a day, but he is also paper-trained, so if you can’t take him for a walk, just put down some paper.”

“We don’t need the papers, we’ll just let him out in the yard,” Dave said. “You worry too much.”

I told him about the cream cheese. “It’s his favorite treat. Whenever you want to reward him, or even if you just want to call him, just say ‘cream cheese,’ and he’ll come running.”

Dave and Rich chatted about baseball and the games we were going to see in Florida. I paced around nervously. Barbara teased, “Would you relax? I think we know how to take care of dogs,” she said, pointing to the multiple beds of their multiple dogs. “He’ll be fine.”

I admired my sister. I had felt very protective toward her all through our years of growing up. By virtue of being the youngest, not to mention the third girl, she had gotten the brunt of all the problems of our childhood. But Barbara really didn’t need protecting; she was scrappy as could be.

Barbara had been a high school cheerleader with a penchant for drama, two characteristics that draw people to her even as an adult. She was always the energy in the room.

As an adult, she has a powerful sense of family, loyalty, and order. She is also a “clean freak,” like me, something I am sure came out of the tumult of our youth. It conveys a sense of order even when none exists.

Dave is a quiet man who is often hard to read. He’s given to small acts of kindness and always deflects attention from himself. Other than Barbara’s commute into New York for work, the Clarks rarely venture into the city.

Barbara and Dave are a perfect match. His reticence complements her high wattage. Dave has a runner’s build and a narrow range of expression. His own parents died young. Every summer he packs up his family and takes them to the races at Saratoga, something he did as a child. Dave loves to garden, play baseball, and run. He prides himself on knowing his way around a kitchen, a skill he picked up at Cornell’s School of Hotel Management. He and Barbara were married at Cornell, and they return every year to hike the rugged hills of Ithaca and to eat the meatball sandwiches sold off the back of a truck dubbed “The Hot Truck,” something Dave relished when he was in college there.

Dave and Barbara are passionate about Ramsey, the town where they have raised their children. They have each coached various Ramsey girls’ softball teams. Dave went so far as to volunteer his time to serve as commissioner of the league, which included nine towns. After about a decade of service, Barbara and Dave retired their bats and gloves. The town thanked them with plaques and invited them to throw out the first pitch on Opening Day.

Throughout the fall, on Saturday mornings, Barbara goes to the high school to help sell hot dogs and sodas at the game, engaging her fellow Ramseyites in conversations about their lives.

Barbara is the kind of person people want as a neighbor. She can be counted on to notice if you went away and forgot to close the garage door, or to pick up your kids if you were running late, or to make a pan of lasagna if you had a family member in the hospital. I knew she would take good care of Huck.

I left Dave, Barbara, and Rich chatting in the kitchen and started up the stairs to see what Huck and Michael and Darian were doing. As I got closer to the top, I heard barking and laughing. Standing in the doorway of Darian’s room, I watched Huck doing what he does best. With one paw planted on one of Darian’s cheeks, he was licking her face, her eyes, her nose, and her ears. It was as though he were holding her face with hands. “If he likes you,” Michael said laughingly, “he could lick your face for hours.”

It was getting late. “We have to leave in about five minutes,” I said to Michael.

Michael responded the way he always did when I tried to pry him out of Camp Clark, the house where all the fun was. “Can’t we stay?”

I responded the way I always did, “No, we have to get going. Five minutes.”

Truth was, I wasn’t ready to leave either. I wasn’t ready to leave Huck. I wouldn’t be any more ready in five minutes or five hours.

I went back downstairs, through the living room, pausing by the piano to look at the latest addition to the family pictures, this one of Michael and Darian at a dance recital of Darian’s. The family resemblance strong, they could easily be brother and sister. I carefully put the picture back down on the piano and went into the kitchen.

I said to no one in particular, “We’d better get going.”

Barbara put her arm around me. “Now you guys have to have some fun. You deserve this vacation. Have a fantastic time,” she said. “And please, do not worry about Huck. He’ll be fine!”

We all walked back into the living room. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and called to Michael. He and Darian came down. Looking at Darian holding Huck in her arms, I thought about how even though Huck had nearly doubled in size since the day we got him—he now weighed nine pounds—he was still a very small dog. He was just the perfect size to hold; he seemed so vulnerable. I wondered if he would miss us as much as we would miss him.

It was time to go. I braced myself. “Bye, Huckie,” I said. I gave him a pat on his head.

Michael took Huck from Darian and looked him straight in the eyes. “You be a good boy, Huck,” Michael said. “I love you.”

Rich, too, was having a hard time. “Okay, Huckie boy. We’ll see you soon,” he said.

Rich gave Huck a hug. Michael handed Huck back to Darian. Barbara walked with us out to the car. “Seriously, Jan, don’t worry. Just have a good time,” she said.

Rich, Michael, and I got into the car. Rich immediately tried to save the moment, saying ebulliently, “Is this family ready for a great vacation?” He pulled the car out of the driveway. We drove back through Ramsey’s dark streets and back to the highway. Rich started filling Michael in on the latest Yankees trivia he had picked up from Dave.

I had a terrible sense of foreboding. I thought it could be many things or it could be nothing at all. But it was there, a dull ache, something I decided to ignore, hoping it would just go away.

When we got home that night, our apartment felt empty, as though someone was missing, which of course, someone was. Huck had been living with us for only four months, but it was already hard to imagine life without him.

The next morning, as we were about to board the plane, my cell phone rang. “I just wanted to let you know Huck is fine. He’s sound asleep in my lap,” Barbara said. “We love having him here, especially Darian.”

It was reassuring. We got on the plane. Michael and I took out a deck of cards and spent the next few hours playing crazy eights and laughing at the reruns of
Everybody Loves Raymond
they were showing on the plane.

C
HAPTER 5

I
LOVE THAT MOMENT
on vacations when the plane touches down and you realize the bonds of your everyday responsibilities have fallen away. Whatever adventure you have embarked on is yet to unfold, whether across an ocean or across state lines. That is exactly how it was when the plane touched down in Tampa. It was a moment of possibility and excitement.

After being confined in an airplane seat for three hours, with its scant leg and elbow room, I stood up, pulled together the books and magazines I had toted onboard, the giant bottle of water, my needlepoint project—all barely touched. Freedom. It is hard to know whether I felt freed from the captivity of the plane or freed from the demands of daily life or freed from the nightmare that I had been living in for so long, but it didn’t matter.

“Welcome to Tampa,” the pilot said. “The temperature here is 75 degrees.”

As I walked off the plane, I thanked the pilot, the copilot, the flight attendants, just about anybody I could find. Never, ever had I been so happy to be in Florida. I was practically giddy. By the time we got there, I didn’t even miss Huck all that much. I was glad to have left the responsibility of walking him three times a day and worrying about him to someone else for a while.

I had been to Florida before—mostly while covering presidential campaigns. I also had been there to visit Rich’s mother a few times, and once to visit a family friend, but never on a true vacation. Florida always felt too hot, a state in need of shade trees. Not this time. It was forty degrees warmer that day than it had been in New York. We peeled off our jackets and sweaters and headed for the car rental counter. It was only about 10:30 in the morning, the day was still fresh, and we were ready to take on Tampa.

In its heyday, Tampa was a city of laborers who culled the surrounding waters for phosphates and shrimp. They also once produced a fair amount of the world’s hand-rolled cigars.

That was then. Now Tampa’s waterfront is full of gleaming steel office buildings and banks and fancy restaurants, with boats tied up outside. It is not nearly as interesting as it must have been in the cigar days. Still, no matter what time of year you might visit, you’re bound to find a professional sports team in midseason. They have a baseball team, a hockey team, and a football team. They have a minor-league baseball team. They even have a women’s football team called the Tampa Bay Terminators.

There must be something strategic about Tampa’s location in the middle of the water with Tampa Bay on one side and the Hillsborough River on the other, both emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. MacDill Air Force Base and Central Command take up about six thousand acres of the city’s real estate. Part of that acreage is used to protect endangered species, including the bald eagle. The Persian Gulf War and the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq were run from that base. Some of the generals liked it so much, they stayed. Generals Norman Schwarzkopf, who ran the first Gulf War, and Tommy Franks, who ran the second one, both now private citizens, are said to live in the same gated community in Tampa. I’ll bet their neighbors feel safe.

We picked up our rental car and headed for the hotel. We were staying at the Hilton Westshore, close to the airport and to the Yankees’ winter home, Legends Field. For more than thirty years, the Yankees had played their winter games in the eastern part of the state, in Fort Lauderdale, in a stadium named for the city. But George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees, was from Tampa and spent most of his winters there, so he decided to move the team to Tampa.

George Steinbrenner owns the Radisson Hotel in Tampa and decreed it the team’s official hotel. But the million-dollar ballplayers don’t stay there. If I had done some decent reporting beforehand, I might have been able to figure out the team’s habits—where they ate breakfast, or where they bought gas—and we could have planned to accidentally run into Derek Jeter or Jason Giambi.

Our hotel wasn’t downtown near the water, or even out near the wetlands and the bald eagles; it was near the Yankees, near their practice fields, their stadium, their souvenir shops. We stayed out that way for Michael. He wanted to breathe the same air as the team.

There isn’t much else for tourists in that part of Tampa, except for several shopping malls, the flashiest of which is the International Plaza. Full of upscale stores, like Nieman Marcus, Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, and Burberry, it is the Madison Avenue of Tampa. Shopping malls are now ubiquitous in just about every corner of the country except Manhattan. For Manhattanites, when all else fails, malls are a tourist attraction.

I had remembered to pack everything for a sun and sand vacation except the most essential item—my sunglasses. I reminded Michael and Rich to pack theirs, but didn’t remember my own. Rich suggested a visit to Neiman Marcus. I suggested we find a drugstore. Rich won.

We walked into the store past the Fendi handbags, and the Jimmy Choo handbags, and the Chanel handbags, all displayed like museum pieces under glass, to the sunglass counter. I actually found a pair I could more or less afford, or maybe I was still intoxicated by the warm air and just talked myself into thinking I could afford them. But I now owned a new pair of Kate Spade sunglasses.

As the saleswoman handed Rich back his credit card, he asked, “Do any of the Yankees shop here?”

“Oh, yes, Derek Jeter buys his jeans here.”

The day was only getting better. Maybe Derek Jeter would walk by the sunglass counter on his way to buy jeans. Anything was possible. We decided to get lunch. The saleswoman pointed to the escalator. “You’ll find a lot to eat upstairs. There are all kinds of good restaurants up there, anything you want.”

As the escalator climbed we found ourselves underneath hundreds of white butterflies made out of some kind of sparkling fabric that were suspended from the ceiling. For a moment, it felt oddly otherworldly. We walked outside, past the Häagen-Dazs shop, and the Nestlé Toll House counter, to the open-air rows of restaurants.

The pathways near the restaurants were designed with Europe in mind. Strolling the painted brick walkways, an active imagination might be reminded of Sienna, Italy. I said the painted stucco walls of some of the eateries reminded me of a kind of faded burnt-orange color we had seen a lot on our trip to Italy. Michael said the color looked more like nacho cheese. It was all about imagination.

We found a small Italian restaurant, Pizza Roma, and sat at an outside table. Michael and Rich ordered a three-cheese pizza. I ordered a salad. I could sense how content Rich was in that moment. “It was so balmy. I was so at ease, so relaxed,” he would later say. “I thought it was just delightful. I was with my family. Our vacation was all in front of us.”

We discussed how excited we all were to see the first of several baseball games that night. For any Yankees fan, it was a matchup to savor—the Yankees versus the Red Sox. They would not meet again until May. Johnny Damon, a former Red Sox player, now a Yankee, would be facing his old team for the first time. Best of all, we were going to the game with our close friends Mimi and John Kepner, whom we had met on a Nantucket beach years ago.

John and Mimi, college sweethearts, married young. When I first saw them playing Wiffleball in the sand, it was hard to discern that they were the parents. They looked so youthful I thought they and their sons were part of the same group of teenagers. John, in his early fifties, was so agile, a hitter and runner, and every bit as strong as his teenaged boys, Tim and Dave. Mimi, with her baseball cap and dead-on pitches, seemed no different from Tim’s and Dave’s teenaged girlfriends, who were also playing. If anything, Mimi seemed more game. Before I knew her name, I thought she had set an impossible standard for motherhood.

Our affinity with the Kepners was instantaneous and strong. No sooner had we met than we found ourselves spending every day of our vacation together, lolling on favorite beaches, and trading barbecuing nights. Every summer afterward, we and the Kepners tried to schedule our Nantucket vacations for the same weeks.

The friendship quickly moved beyond Nantucket. We’d visit the Kepners at their house in Pennsylvania over Christmas and they’d come to see us in the city in the spring.

Our families shared many passions—baseball, Nantucket, biographies of historical figures, biking, Wiffleball, watching the sunset over the water, board games, and standing around on Main Street in Nantucket at night listening to Tim and Dave play the music they usually performed with their entire band, called Full Service.

The Kepners felt like family. Tim and Dave treated Michael like a younger brother. Tim, who had played semipro baseball, spent endless hours throwing a baseball with Michael on the beach. Dave let Michael tag along just about everywhere he went. When Michael was very young, John taught him how to throw a football and to play the Kepner family baseball game invented by John, “dice baseball.”

The Kepners were Philadelphia Phillies fans first and Red Sox fans second. John would torment Rich and Michael by wearing his Red Sox cap to the beach every day.

By sheer coincidence, Tyler Kepner, the oldest of the Kepner sons, is a sports writer who covers the Yankees for
The New York Times
. He would be covering the Yankees game against the Red Sox that night.

After we finished our lunch that first day in Florida, we went back to the hotel for a swim before the game. I sat on a chaise lounge with the sun on my face and felt completely healthy for the first time in a long time.

We met John and Mimi for an early dinner. Michael wasn’t much interested in dessert. He wanted to get to the ballpark early to watch the teams warm up. He was hoping to catch a stray ball, or get a player’s autograph, things that were nearly impossible during the regular season. Proximity to the players is what spring training is all about.

On the way into the stadium, we passed a table full of Yankees paraphernalia. Michael, a child who rarely asks for things, spied an unusual Yankees cap that must have been left over from St. Patrick’s Day. It was green, with a shamrock on the right side of the bill. Michael stopped his mad rush into the stadium long enough to look at the hat. “Now, that is a lucky hat,” he said to me. He picked it up and ran his fingers over the shamrock before putting it back on the table.

“Do you want me to buy it for you?”

“Let’s get it tomorrow. I don’t want to miss getting balls and autographs.”

We headed for our seats. They were in the sky. Section 217, Row P, Seats 1–5. We were closer to the yellow foul pole than we were to home plate. You could see the faces of the players, but could not make out their expressions. “I’m going down to the fence,” Michael said, as he took the concrete steps, two by two, and headed toward the field.

The stadium was starting to fill. Some of the trappings were a lot different from those at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. For one thing, some people were walking around eating giant turkey legs. The only other place I had ever seen people do that was in Disney World.

But other things about Legends Field were the same as Yankee Stadium. The outfield fences were the same dimensions. And the raucous, passionate fans were no different in Tampa than they were in the Bronx, like the freckled-face boy wearing a T-shirt with a giant baseball on it and the words
GET TOUGH OR GO HOME
. It was a T-shirt with attitude.

At Legends Field, just like at Yankee Stadium, there were constant reminders of the Yankees organization’s unbridled chase for money, even if it meant quashing the spirit of young fans. Two hours before the start of the game, old men in khaki pants and yellow shirts with the word
USHER
on the back stood guarding the field-level seats, keeping anyone without a ticket for one of those seats from getting a close-up look at the players. I don’t know how Michael slipped through, except that he must have learned something from his mother, the journalist, about getting into places unnoticed.

He stood patiently up against the fence, waiting and hoping. No balls or players came his way, until finally, one of the Red Sox did. It was Terry Francona, the team’s manager. In his excitement, Michael had forgotten to take a program with him for signatures. He took off his Yankees World Series cap and handed it and the pen from his pocket to the Red Sox manager. “Wrong hat, kid,” the manager said with a smile. He signed it and gave it back to Michael.

It wasn’t the signature of one of Michael’s beloved Yankees, but it was nonetheless a signature of one of baseball’s greats. John Kepner would be impressed.

We settled into our seats under a setting sun, the sky streaked with orange and red. The temperature started to drop. The groundskeepers wet down the dirt, chalked the batters’ boxes, the catcher’s box, and the foul lines. Everyone in the stadium stood and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” always one of my favorite moments at any game, and the first pitch was thrown. More than ten thousand New York and Boston fans were now packed into the stadium for the showdown.

Michael sat between Rich and John, whose encyclopedic knowledge of the game of baseball matched Michael’s. Michael never took his eyes off the game, and he never stopped talking.