Little Boy Blue by Kim Kavin Read Free Book Online

like an army cadet puzzled by his sergeant’s reluctance to engage in the heart of the action. Stella’s safety border, Blue was figuring out, was about three feet from the fence edge. Any closer, and she got a warning buzz from her collar.
    Blue took about two days to turn Stella’s safety zone into his own. He couldn’t run as fast as she could, but he was quick enough that he could get about halfway across the yard before she caught up to him in a game of chase. He’d prod her and coax her into playing, and then he would run and run his little heart out, and she’d chase after him like a cheetah. When he heard her steps beating down upon him, he’d dart into the three-foot safety zone and run as close as he could to the fence line. Stella continued to chase him back and forth, but always from a distance where she couldn’t actually reach him. They would do this for hours a day, always with the same pattern and result. Blue had figured out how to outsmart the bigger, stronger playmate simply by using the rules of the field to his advantage.
    I watched this scene unfold for a few days, thought about making T-shirts that read “Mommy’s Little Genius,” and in general forgot that we were in fact quarantined instead of just plain having a good time. Then, after five or six days, I noticed the strategies of their game beginning to change. Instead of Blue nipping at Stella until she chased him, and then him dashing as fast as he could to beat her to the safety zone, I watched in awe as Stella intentionally—dare I say gracefully—let Blue walk right past her to get to the fence and start the game from there.
    Now, grace has never been part of Stella’s personality. Assertive? Yes. Aggressive? Never with people, but sometimes with other dogs. Polite? About as often as an Ultimate Fighter going for the title at a pay-per-view main event. And yet she had not only decided to accept this puppy, but also to accommodate him. He appeared to have earned her respect. He had softened her edges just the same way he’d eased the worst of my grief about Floyd’s death. Blue was somehow Zen-like, a calming presence in and of himself.
    The more and more I got to know Blue, the more and more I began to obsess about the things that Annie Turner had told me on the telephone. Such disconcerting information didn’t match up against the winning personality that this dog was showing me. Not even a little bit. I didn’t think about the things she’d said once in a while. I became preoccupied, and even a little bit haunted, by what seemed to be a few more bread crumbs on a trail that begged to be followed into Blue’s past.
    I did some research and learned that bleach and Monistat are a common, inexpensive home remedy for ringworm. The medicine my veterinarian had prescribed cost just less than forty dollars. I didn’t think much of that expense in the context of bringing a new puppy home, but a drugstore website told me that a three-day supply of Monistat plus bleach cost about half as much. Multiply that extra twenty bucks by, say, two hundred dogs with rashes, and the remedy would save four thousand dollars. By my math, from the day I met Blue at the RV, the money saved was enough to transport at least another forty puppies just like him to safety.
    That Turner had felt so desperate to save that money, that she had felt the need to use bleach that can burn instead of shampoo that soothes, that she is the head of a countywide rescue group and she made that decision—all of it seemed beyond strange. I talked about it with my husband in the context of our new puppy, and it gave us both pause.
    A great deal of pause, actually, and an insatiable desire to learn more.

A Journey Awaits

    Michele Armstrong looks nothing like the image that I had of her in my mind. On the day that Blue and I met her in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for breakfast at a dog-friendly restaurant with outdoor tables, I was expecting a cherub-faced, later-in-life