Until Tuesday by Bret Witter, Luis Carlos Montalván Read Free Book Online Page B

think he realized, for the first time, the connection between them.
    You’re a little broken, eh, Tuesday ? Well, I understand. I’m a little broken, too.
    It’s amazing what focus can do. Training dogs is one thing, but to have a dog of your own? To watch him grow day after day, an increment at a time? To be able to say, even to yourself, Tuesday turned on a light switch, and I taught him that ? That’s different. That’s taking responsibility and having pride.
    Brendan was never frustrated when Tuesday jogged a few feet ahead or pulled on the leash. He never raised his voice when Tuesday botched the distraction test by stopping to eat the dog treats thrown onto the floor in his path. There was no failure for the children at ECAD. Lu didn’t tell them, “Teach that dog to turn on a light switch in three hundred repetitions.” She said, “Let’s see how long it takes Blue to turn on that light.” But the kids knew it usually took three hundred times to flip a light switch, so at five hundred or so most of them grew frustrated. They didn’t understand why the dog wasn’t performing, and they took it personally. Not Brendan. Not anymore. When Tuesday struggled with the multiple retrieve—picking specified objects out of a pile and bringing them back one at a time—Brendan just thought, Tuesday’s a little broken, but he means well. He’ll get there .
    And when Brendan thought that about Tuesday, he started to think that about himself, too.
    Tuesday, as always, responded to the attention. The leash goes both ways, and he could feel Brendan’s confidence in him. But he also felt Brendan’s lack of confidence in himself and his strong desire to succeed. I’ve met Brendan, and there is something about him that makes you want to help him. He’s a good kid, but he is so vulnerable that if he ever asked for anything I can’t imagine letting him down. Tuesday picked up on that vulnerability. When he asked himself, Why? Why bother with this training? he now had an answer: for Brendan. That answer was magic, because helping others was the only thing that ever seemed to matter to Tuesday.
    It was a positive cycle. The more Brendan embraced Tuesday, and saw in Tuesday’s success a reflection of his own, the more Tuesday wanted to please him. Soon, Brendan was excelling, but for the first time in his life he didn’t need to brag. Instead, he took joy in his success, and he put that joy back into his affection for the dogs. After training, he stayed to clean their kennels and brush their coats. He came in on weekends. He became the morning feeder, waking up early and trudging across the Children’s Village campus to give the dogs their breakfast. He was feeding and grooming all the dogs, of course, but he came for Tuesday. On Best Friend night, when the kids could come and watch a movie, Brendan and Tuesday always sought each other out. At the end of each training session, the children were given ten minutes to sit quietly with the dogs. Brendan and Tuesday didn’t always train together, since rotating trainers was still ECAD’s basic method, but no matter which child he had trained with that day Tuesday laid his head on Brendan’s lap. Most of the time he fell asleep, while Brendan smiled and whispered, “Good boy, good boy, good boy.”
    They got along so well that the two of them, the former problem children, started going on regular outreach trips to local hospitals and nursing homes. Brendan became a demonstration handler for public events, and he appeared prominently in an ECAD promotional video still available online. When a new litter of puppies was born, Brendan was one of the children selected to name them. It was autumn, so there were several seasonal names like Harvest. Brendan, still just a kid at seventeen, chose Mac ’n Cheese.
    Their parting was emotional, but not as difficult as Lu had feared. They had both grown accustomed to being passed off by this point, and they had each held something back.