Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings by Janet Elder Read Free Book Online

the center of our lives, a declaration of faith in the future. Michael was older now, and I was less worried about leaving him asleep in the apartment alone if Rich were away and I had to walk the dog at night. Auntie Babs could take care of the dog when we went away. We could do this. We had to.
    Rich and I decided to tell Michael on his twelfth birthday, May 10, that he would finally have the puppy he had wanted for so long. Although we wouldn’t be able to get the dog until the fall, the sooner he knew about the dog, the sooner he and we would have something to distract us from cancer.
    By sheer coincidence, May 10 was also the day we were scheduled to get the postsurgery pathology report. You cannot know the extent cancer has invaded your body until you get that report. Once I had it, I would know how far the cancer had spread, how many lymph nodes were involved, whether or not I was a candidate for some of the newer drugs that offered promise for long-term survival. A friend who had been treated for breast cancer cautioned me that the week of waiting for the pathology report can be psychologically debilitating. In fact, her exact words were “It will be the worst week of your life.”
    It was the worst week of my life. The salve was plotting and planning how Rich and I would tell Michael he was finally going to get a dog. We could say it outright, or we could give him some telltale gifts, like a leash, or a bowl, or a doggie bed. We decided instead to make a poster with a picture of a small dog. That way, he’d have both a keepsake of the moment and also a minute to take it all in. And we’d have the unparalleled joy of seeing Michael’s face when he realized he was about to get a real, living, breathing dog of his own, the pet he had ached for most of his life.
    A few days before Michael’s birthday, while Michael was out of the house, Rich went into Michael’s room to use Michael’s computer, which was attached to our color printer, to print out the announcement he had made:
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MICHAEL!
FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY, YOU WILL BE GETTING A PUPPY OF YOUR VERY OWN. START THINKING OF NAMES AND MAKING A PLACE IN YOUR ROOM FOR HIS BED .
WE LOVE YOU,
MOM AND DAD
    Below the note was a picture of a black toy poodle, sitting on a sun-drenched lawn, looking straight at the camera, with a tennis ball in front of him. Like Rocket, this toy poodle had a “puppy cut,” rather than a “poodle cut,” which made him look more like a shaggy dog than a poodle, more American than, well, French.
    While Rich was busy with the poster I went out to try to find a tiny stuffed black dog that at least resembled the one we had in mind to accompany the announcement. I walked to a nearby toy store, about fifteen blocks from where we lived (a reasonable walk by New York standards). I found just the right little stuffed dog.
    It was a lot more fun thinking about how surprised Michael was going to be in a few days when he opened the poster than thinking about that pathology report.
    Little did we know, however, that our carefully plotted surprise would be thwarted by a simple oversight. While I was at the store Michael had come home from school and sat down at his computer to do homework. Microsoft Word, the program he uses, and the one from which Rich had printed the poster, keeps track of the names of the last several documents the computer user has worked on, even if the file was never saved on that computer. Sitting at his desk, staring at his computer screen, Michael looked for his history notes and saw the list of the most recently retrieved documents. There, at the top of the list: MIKE’S BDAY DOG. He was flabbergasted.
    For a moment, Michael just sat there, staring at the words. He hesitated before mentioning what he had seen. But, as he would later say, the thought of his own dog soon “crowded out” all other thoughts in his head. He got up so quickly from his chair, he nearly knocked it to the ground.
    “Dad! Dad! Dad!”