Dog Medicine by Julie Barton Read Free Book Online Page A

pulling closed again, sleep taking me away.
    â€œOnly about an hour left,” I heard my mom say. I opened my eyes to see my mom’s small hands clutching the steering wheel, her rounded nails painted cantaloupe orange. I didn’t respond, hardly awake, noting the descending sun. Leaving Manhattan felt like flipping over a topographical map. On this side, everything lay flat, concave even. After several months of tight spaces, walls, and corners, the openness of eastern Ohio was alarming.
    Farmland rushed by: soybean fields, cornfields, enormous old barns. Soon the landmarks became familiar. Outside Pataskala, the tall red barn that leaned one degree short of tumbling over. Roush Hardware at the edge of town, the place Dad always bought us a cellophane-wrapped chocolate coconut haystack as a reward for tolerating his lengthy trips to the garden section. Noah’s Ark Pet Store where I sold my baby hamsters and guinea pigs for twenty-nine cents each. The ice cream shop our family would drive to on a hot Sunday afternoon—rocky road for everyone but Mom, who usually just had water. Then Dublin Middle School, where Mr. Niemie, my sixth-grade English teacher, with auburn curls, JohnLennon glasses, and bright eyes, was the first teacher to tell me I should keep writing.
    We turned left down Route 745 and there was Oscar’s Deli, the restaurant where I had my first job as a waitress, eating more than I served, trying not to cry when the woman who wanted her eggs poached
this
way, not
that
way, sent her unsatisfactory breakfast back to the kitchen six times. Down the long road that hugged the muddy river, past mean Robbie Thompson’s house, who sometimes joined Clay in his attacks, then my childhood playmate Tricia’s place. I imagined that all those kids had left home and not come back. I imagined them off in medical school, law school, landing fantastic jobs, slow-dancing with lovers on sparkling rooftops.
    After a few miles, we turned onto Birchwood Road, our road. We pulled up the long, slow hill that I’d jogged countless times, past Mrs. Pethel’s house and Mrs. Jacoby’s place, two elderly women who, on long, lonely summer days, took me in and gave me pie. Past the opening in the yard across the street that led to Lehman’s Pond and the pine grove I spent countless hours wandering.
    We stopped at the end of the long driveway. Mom jumped out, ran across the road to check for mail, and there was the familiar creak of the mailbox door, the echo of its closing. Then my house at dusk. Its tall central eave and big angular points modeled after Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs with loads of blond wood and enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. My parents’ bedroom was in the south wing, my brother’s and mine in the north. In between us soared vaulted ceilings over the kitchen and living and dining rooms.
    At the end of the driveway, Mom got back into the car and closed the door hard. “Ahh,” she sighed. “We’re home. Here we go.” She eased up the long driveway. I squinted, one eye closed, blinded a bit by the waning sunlight glaring through the trees. The shafts of light made our house look like a church, a place I could come to rest my battered spirit, or a place I could come to die.
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    Many things can go wrong in the first few weeks of a puppy’s life. He could miss out on essential care from his mother and die of malnutrition or hypothermia. His mother could develop mastitis and slowly poison him and all his littermates with the toxins in her milk. He could get crushed under the weight of his exhausted, milk-filled mama. Or there could simply be not enough milk to go around, and he’d die of hunger.
    I was as raw as I’d ever been, perfectly willing to become increasingly self-destructive until I finally ended my life. My mind was not well, and I knew it, which was terrifying. Knowing that you are not rational,