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 Page B

sending me constant e-mails throughout my treatments. Shortly after I sat down at my desk that day, one arrived.
    “How are things?” came across the transom that day in June. “I lost so much hair I had to have my head shaved. I’m bald,” I sent back. Within seconds, Adam’s response landed in my in-box. “AWESOME!” I laughed out loud.
    A week after Michael came home from camp, we made our annual August sojourn to Nantucket. The air, the sun, the water were all restorative. Midway through our vacation, I left Rich and Michael on the island and I returned to New York for a couple of days to have a chemotherapy treatment. It was the sixth treatment, only two more to go, followed by six weeks of radiation. My sister Louise came with me for the hours-long session and then spent the night. She is a gentle soul and made the disruption to my relaxing beach vacation seamless.
    During the months and months I underwent cancer treatments, I went to work as often as I could. When I was home, Rich tried to take time from his work, too, and we took long walks in nearby Carl Schurz Park. Being outside always made me feel better, no matter what the weather was like. It also gave us plenty of opportunity to dog watch and get a sense of different breeds.
    Carl Schurz Park, home to Gracie Mansion, where New York City’s mayors usually live, is up against the East River. It is one of New York’s hidden treasures. The park is small, with an active corps of volunteers who hold a neighborhood tree lighting and caroling event at Christmastime and tend to its bright yellow daffodils and purple irises in the spring and its cosmos and black-eyed Susans in summer. Just when the heat is beginning to feel as though it has run its course, volunteers erect a giant movie screen on the roller hockey rink for a crowd overflowing onto the basketball court and, as night falls, show classic movies, like Annie Hall and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington . All kinds of people show up: babies asleep in their carriages and their exhausted parents, older people in need of company, teens looking for a night out, and dog owners who arrive with their dogs.
    In fact, the park is seemingly always filled with people walking dogs along the promenade that runs next to the river. By fall, Rich and I were stopping people who had dogs of a certain type at the end of the leash—ones with moxie or that seemed especially sweet or playful.
    Rich was by now so enthusiastic about getting a dog for Michael that he didn’t hesitate to approach strangers to ask about their dogs. We developed a list: beagles, Cotons, Labradoodles, spaniels, Westies, cockapoos. They were all under consideration.
    In this endless parade of dogs, it was hard to miss how well cared for they were, and how beloved they were to their owners. The dogs we met in the park were just as likely to be companions for people living alone, widows, and widowers, as they were for bustling families with children. We met a number of young couples yet unable to commit to each other but who nonetheless, together, had committed to a dog. Some dogs sat right up on the benches alongside their owners watching the boats go by on the river.
    Rich and I would go home and tell Michael and Caroline about the wonderful dogs we had just met.

    I thought surely Michael would want a Westie. But, in the end, the decision was easy. He told us he wanted a toy poodle, just like Rocket, the neighbor’s dog he had fallen in love with years ago and who still lived three floors above.
    We dreamed of and talked animatedly and incessantly about the puppy that would join our family after the long slog of treatments for stage II breast cancer came to an end. We window-shopped in our neighborhood’s many pet supply stores; Michael planned the spot in his room where his dog would sleep.
    Despite my enthusiasm, a couple of times when I felt exhausted from the treatments, I started to second-guess myself about the dog. But a friend and colleague,