Notes from the Dog (2 page)

Right now Johanna was the skinniest, palest thing I’d ever seen. I didn’t think “babe” was a look she was going to pull off.

“I don’t know.” Matthew studied her carefully. “Why go back to all that washing and combing? Besides, you have a nice skull.”

Johanna laughed. “Now, there’s something you don’t hear every day. Dylan as in Dylan Thomas or Dylan as in Bob Dylan?” She turned to me and changed the subject smoothly. I wished I could do that.

“The songwriter. My dad thinks Bob Dylan is”—
and here I repeated the words I’d heard him say a million times—“a cultural icon, and that the socio political meaning and impact of the music is more than worthy subject matter for his master’s thesis.” I paused, saw her nod and then went for it. “Johanna—as in ‘Visions of Johanna’?”

She beamed at me. “Dog people
and
Dylan fans. I’ve come to the right place.”

I shrugged, trying not to look pleased. She got it!

“Would you both sign my book?” Johanna pulled a tattered notebook from her backpack and handed it to Matthew. He scrawled his name and handed it to me.

“Okay,” I said, “but … um … why?”

“Because every day in my journal I write down the best thing that’s happened to me. Today it’s you.”

When Johanna said that, I felt light, warm in that spot just above my stomach where it usually feels clenched and tight.

Before Johanna, I had never been the highlight of anyone’s day.

The morning after meeting her I was back on the front steps of our house, eating breakfast. My dad had left for work and Matthew had headed out with some guys from school, so I was alone. Except for Dylan, of course.

Dad works as a bookkeeper for a neighborhood clinic, and he’s been in school part-time for as long as I can remember. First he went back to get his bachelor’s degree and now he’s working on his master’s. He’s hardly ever home. And when he is, he looks a little surprised when I speak to him, as if he hadn’t realized I was in the room. We get along fine, but I’ve never once gotten the feeling that I’m the best part of
his
day.

My mother “pulled up stakes” when I was a baby.
That’s how my father always says it, like she went looking for a better place to camp rather than abandoning a husband and son. She left us to go back to school in another state and we haven’t heard from her since she left. “As if,” I overheard my dad telling my grandpa once, “raising a son and pursuing higher education were mutually exclusive.”

There’s a lot of going back to school in my family. Even my grandpa takes classes at the retirement community where he lives—bridge, computer programming, and now he’s starting to paint.

Dylan probably thought I was the greatest thing ever. I don’t think it takes too much to make his day, though.

My father found him on the street, brought him home and named him. But I feed him and de-poop the yard. I brush the tangles and dead hair from his coat and check him for fleas and ticks. I make him scrambled eggs and buttered toast when I’m sad because you always feel better when you do something nice for someone you love.

So that makes him mine.

He protects me. I haven’t gone to the bathroom alone since he came to live with us. I don’t know what kind of Evil Potty Monster he envisions, but he sits by me when I pee to keep me safe from it. He sleeps on my bed and growls soft and deep in his throat when anyone walks down the sidewalk in front of our house.

That makes me his.

The only bad thing about him is that he throws up if you feed him frozen waffles. But a little barf is a small price to pay for having such a great friend.

He’s like a person to me except that he can’t talk or read. But that morning, I wasn’t so sure about that anymore.

I pulled the note from my pocket and read it again.
You’re not as ugly as you think
.

That was the note I’d gotten from the dog a few minutes earlier.

As I had come out of the house to eat my toast on the front steps, Dylan had been standing there with the note in his mouth. He pushed at my hand with his nose to get me to take the piece of paper from him and wiggled his whole body in excitement, as if he
knew
what the words said.

Dylan’s a border collie, so the whole note thing is not as out-of-the-realm-of-possibility as it first sounds. I’d read about a border collie in Germany who could understand a couple hundred words and knew how to figure out the name of something he’d never seen before by the process of elimination. “It’s just a matter of time, my boy,” Grandpa had said when I told him, “before that dog of yours has his own e-mail address, if that’s the kind of bloodline he comes from.”

My dad is not the note-writing kind. And who else could have left it for Dylan to find and give to me
?
Carl
was off on his “custodial summer” with his divorced dad. Jamie was away at camp, and Christopher’s school runs year-round. Matthew would just come out and tell me something, he wouldn’t bother writing it down.

As I reread the piece of paper, Dylan nudged my hand with his nose. I looked at him, thinking.

“Did you”—I paused, looked around and then whispered—“did you mean it, Dyl?”

“Woof.”

Sounded like a yes to me.

Dylan kissed my nose. Another yes. Then he leapt off the stairs after a rabbit that hightailed it around the corner of the house into the backyard.

It made sense that Dylan would try to cheer me up about how I looked. He’d been with me when I freaked out after I’d seen my yearbook picture on the last day of school.

Matthew, ever helpful, had said, “You’re not completely repulsive, Finn. But I wouldn’t worry about the girls beating a path to your door, either.”

I looked up from the note. Nope. No girls headed my way. I read the note again and wished I could ask someone if I was really ugly, if I’d ever get any better-looking and, most important, if someday a girl would like me no matter what I looked like.

“Mind if we join you?”

I jumped at Johanna’s voice and turned to see Dylan leading her toward me from the back of the house. She
was wearing her wig. She sat next to me on the step, bumping my hip as she settled herself. Closer than I would have expected.

“Oh … hi …,” I said. “Dylan’s supposed to stay on our side of the bushes. Did he go into your yard?”

“Not much of a yard.” Johanna snorted. “I’m only house-sitting for the summer while the Albrechts are in Europe and I can’t change anything about their property, of course, but oh, what I’d like to do with that space.” She looked at the Albrechts’ place and sighed.

“You garden?” I couldn’t think of a more boring thing to do.

“Nope. Never so much as planted a single flower. But I can’t stop thinking about having my very own garden these days.”

“Then why did you move to a place where you can’t have one?”

She didn’t answer, instead looking around our yard. I followed her glance. While I kept the lawn mowed, we had no garden, unless you counted the straggly little bush thing called a hosta that grew around the mailbox, which, my father had said more than once, we couldn’t kill with a stick.

“Do you have a job this summer?” she asked.

My mood took another dip. I didn’t want to confess to Johanna that my only plans for the next three months involved reading as many books as I could right here on my front steps and avoiding people.

After an entire school year of eight classes a day, with thirty other students in each period, I figured I’d come into contact with two hundred and forty people each and every school day. And that’s not even counting people on the bus, in the hallways and in the cafeteria. For a guy like me, that was sensory overload, and I needed to turtle up for a while.

I planned, in fact, to speak to fewer than a dozen people over the entire summer.

I’d figured that idea would work if I only went places with Matthew or my dad or grandpa and left the talking to them. I’d wear my iPod and a pair of sunglasses if I had to go anywhere alone, and act like I couldn’t hear or see anyone.

Just meeting Johanna the day before, I’d already used up a third of my summer communications quota. And it was only the first week of summer vacation.

I doubted my dad and my grandpa would notice that I’d decided to limit my speaking, and Matthew had said he understood my plan.

What he actually said was “You’ve got the personality of a mushroom and that freaky idea of not talking to anyone creeps me out.”

But I knew he had my back. I could count on him to run interference for me, at least for a little while. He’s good like that. Even if he disagrees with you, he’ll always help you out.

I realized Johanna was asking me a question.

“Would you like to work for me?”

No, not in a million years, I said to myself.

“Uh, what do you do?”

“I’m in graduate school.”

Great, I thought, another one.

“Master of Library and Information Science. And I work at Anderson’s Bookshop part-time. How would you like to plant a garden for me?”

No, not in a million, bazillion years. I cleared my throat and tried to think of a way to say no.

But somehow I didn’t have the heart to come right out and tell her that digging in the wormy dirt and pulling weeds in the sun all summer long was not anything I’d ever want to do even if I knew the first thing about plants and flowers. Which I didn’t.

“I thought you said you weren’t supposed to do anything to your yard.”

“Not my yard. Your yard.”

“You want to hire me to plant a garden for you in my own yard?”

“I most certainly do. This house needs a garden, you need a job and I …” She trailed off. Something in her voice made me drop my eyes from her face. I looked at Dylan. When he saw me look at him, he put a paw on her knee.

She turned back and her eyes were bright. “So will you do it?”

“Yes,” I said. “I most certainly will.”

I would have said anything to make the sad look in her eyes go away.

We spent most of the rest of the day, the day that gave the world Johanna’s Great Idea About the Garden That Was Going to Kill Finn, at the library.

There are literally hundreds of books about dirt.

Just dirt.

She took notes and made sketches and I tried to look interested as I paged through the first pile of books she’d shoved in my direction. But after barely getting through one chapter, I was so bored that I started alphabetizing the books she’d discarded so I’d look busy. I excused myself to go to the bathroom so many times I wondered if Johanna thought I had a bladder infection or an attachment to public rest-rooms. The librarian shelving books nearest the men’s room started to look at me funny.

I finally headed over to the fiction section and took my time picking out the novels I wanted to read that week. I returned to our table with a bag of books; she hadn’t even noticed I was gone.

I’d originally thought Johanna had a few rows of flowers in mind, but I soon realized that she aimed to smother every square inch of the yard under flowers, plants, shrubs, bushes, vegetables and something called container gardens. She sat muttering to herself, “USDA zones and plant hardiness … slope and drainage of the property … cliché of having upright plants on either side of the entry …” and so on.

A garden? This was a farm.

She showed me photos of bushes that had been trimmed in the shapes of animals and, for the first time all morning, I was kind of jazzed. I started reeling off cool ideas: pouncing tigers, bears standing on their back legs, huge spiders and killer sharks with wide-open mouths …

“That’s not,” she said finally, “the image we’re going for.”

“But the koi pond
is
?”

“I see your point,” she said, making a big X in her notes. “You’re signing up to be a gardener, not a fish wrangler.”

I wasn’t “signing up” for anything. She’d ambushed me, and I still couldn’t figure out how she’d done it.

“Okay!” Johanna finally jumped up, stuffing her
notes in her backpack. “Enough for now. Let’s get something to eat. How about Java Joe and Juice?”

“Um, I’m not really, you know, into organic fruit smoothies with bee pollen or whatever.”