W. Bruce Cameron

by The Dogs of Christmas

  “Wow, you’re really big. I mean, not fat. Well, you’re a little fat. But mostly pregnant—you’re really, really pregnant. I guess you know that.”

  Lucy gave him a disdainful glance and Josh realized he was babbling a little, and that he was pretty close to a flat-out panic. It wasn’t even two in the afternoon—less than half an hour ago he’d been curled up with a novel and now he had this poor pregnant dog to take care of and all he could think to do was insult her about her weight. What was he going to do?

  “Could I speak to the vet?” Josh asked when the receptionist answered his call. “I just had a neighbor drop off his dog and leave for France, and the dog is pretty pregnant, and I need to make sure I’m doing the right thing and everything. Also, you know, to bring her in so she can have her puppies.”

  “You want to bring her in? Is she in labor now?” the woman on the other side of the phone asked.

  “I don’t know. I mean, how would I know, do they … what do they do? Do they bark?”

  She laughed. “No, not normally. Is she pacing, panting, crying, or vomiting?”

  “No.” But I nearly am.

  “Any discharge of fluids?”

  “I don’t see any.” Yuck.

  She asked him to hold and after several minutes a man picked up the phone and introduced himself as Dr. Becker. Josh told him the story and explained what he needed.

  “Actually, dog birth usually happens in the home. You’d pretty much only need to bring her in if there were complications,” Dr. Becker informed him.

  “Sure, yeah, but I don’t, I mean, I’ve never even had a dog before. My dad was allergic to them growing up.”

  “Are you allergic?”

  “No.” Josh felt defensive. “It’s just that when you’ve never had a dog, you don’t think to get one.”

  “Do you think you could take Lucy’s temperature?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, how? Won’t she just bite it?”

  Dr. Becker laughed. “Well, no, you need to be thinking of this from the other end,” he explained, saying Josh could use a little margarine to lubricate the thermometer. Josh swallowed and Lucy raised her head to look at him as if reading his mind. What kind of way was that to introduce yourself to a dog? Hey, you’re fat. Turn around, I’ve got something for you.

  “I’ll have to buy a thermometer,” Josh speculated. “I don’t have one in the house.”

  “That’s fine. If the temperature drops below a hundred degrees, she should deliver within twenty-four hours.”

  Deliver. Josh shook his head. “I think maybe I should just bring her in, Dr. Becker. I’m sorry, but I just don’t think I’m going to be any good at this.”

  “Let’s see. We’re closing up soon, and we’re not open Sundays. Why don’t you bring her in Monday morning for an examination?”

  “Uh, sure. I have a teleconference in the morning, but I could be there by noon.”

  “That’s fine. But Josh?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I want you to understand that we won’t be boarding your dog unless there are medical complications requiring it. We clear?”

  “But…”

  “I’ll examine Lucy and we can talk more about the birthing experience, but you need to take responsibility for your dog.”

  “Okay,” Josh acquiesced weakly. After he hung up, he turned away from the phone. “But it’s not my dog,” he said aloud.

  Lucy watched him as he carried the sack of dog food into the kitchen. He poured some of it into the metal bowl and she eased to her feet and padded over to it, putting her nose into her dinner. Josh watched as she picked out a mouthful of the little unappetizing pellets, dropped them on the floor, and then ate them one by one from there.

  “Is that good, Lucy? Good dinner? Good dog dinner?” He doubted it—when he sniffed the open bag he didn’t smell anything suggestive of food.

  She ate a little, then drank some water he set out for her, and then sat and looked at him.

  “What? Do you need something? Are you okay? You’re not having contractions, are you?” Josh crouched down and peered into her eyes. “You’re going to be fine.”

  Josh picked up Ryan’s phone number off his caller ID and dialed. It rolled straight to voice mail. “Hello, Ryan, this is Josh, here. You’re probably still in the air. When you land, please call me, okay? I’ve talked to the vet, and I’m taking Lucy there Monday. I’ll obviously expect that you’ll pay me back for the appointment. And let me know, please, when you’ve made permanent arrangements as we agreed. Okay, then. Have a safe flight.”

  Josh was wincing as he hung up. Have a safe flight? Look here, he should have said, you take care of this situation or I’ll beat the crap out of you.

  Josh had never beaten the crap out of anybody, but there was no way Ryan would know that.

  Monday afternoon seemed a long way off from the perspective of this Saturday afternoon. What was he going to do until then?

  Even though Lucy was probably days, or even weeks, from delivering, Josh decided to move her bedding into his bedroom so he could monitor her condition during the night. He waited until she was up off the pillow and sniffing around in the kitchen so it wouldn’t inconvenience her. “You’ll be fine,” he kept repeating, hoping that was true. She looked so sad. Was she scared? Homesick? Josh would be feeling both. “Poor dog,” he soothed. “I’m sorry, Lucy.”

  That night, whenever she moved he was instantly awake, rolling over to look at her. “You okay?”

  Lucy got tired of wagging her tail each time he asked this and soon would just sigh in reply.

  Sunday, Lucy didn’t really do much—she mostly just lay on her pillow in the living room. Josh thawed some ground bison in the microwave and gave it to her so she wouldn’t have a diet of nothing but the cheap pellets. He found a tennis ball and put it next to her, but she didn’t seem to want to play with it. He moved her water bowl next to her and covered her with a small blanket. He rubbed her back, recalling that he’d heard somewhere that this was something that women liked when they were pregnant.

  He felt desperately inadequate. What else should he do? His Internet search turned up frustratingly little about how to make a pregnant dog feel better after she’s been dumped off by someone headed to France. It had more to say about making pregnant women feel better, but it didn’t seem transferable. Like, foot rubs? Can you do a foot rub on a dog’s paw?

  He hated leaving her alone late Sunday afternoon, but he couldn’t see the sense in taking her to the grocery store with him. Lucy was watching him from the big window as he drove off in his pickup truck, and the wounded expression he imagined he saw nearly broke his heart. I am not abandoning you. I am not Ryan. I am not Serena. In town he bought a thermometer and some high-quality dog food and a rawhide bone and a pull toy with a squeaker in it. He also bought a Frisbee and chicken strips and a rope dog toy and a monkey dog toy and a tiger dog toy.

  Lucy was there to greet him, wagging, when he opened the door, his packages crinkling. He sat on the floor with her and presented her with each toy in turn, and she wagged while sniffing each one and gave the rawhide bone a bit of a chewing, but Josh felt pretty sure she was just humoring him. Mostly she seemed to want to just concentrate on being pregnant.

  He was already in bed when he remembered the thermometer, still in the package on the kitchen counter. “We’ll do it in the morning,” he told Lucy. “I don’t think you’ll mind waiting.” Josh sure wouldn’t, anyway.

  Her bed was where he’d placed it the night before. At around four in the morning, Josh woke up with a frown, wondering what had disturbed his sleep. He rolled over on an elbow to check on the dog.

  His eyes widened. Lucy was not in her bed. She was gone.

  THREE

  “Lucy?” Josh sat up, cocking his head. The floor was cool beneath his feet as he padded into the living room. Moonlight washed in through the windows, painting the colors out of the house with its stark white. Lucy was in the kitchen, standi
ng in front of the oven, panting and trembling a little. “Hey, girl,” Josh whispered, alarmed. “You okay?”

  Lucy licked her lips. She brushed past him, went into the living room, circled around on the rug, and lay down. A second later she was up again, pacing in front of the door.

  “Do you need to go out?” Josh asked. He went to the door and pulled it open and Lucy dashed out into the yard. She stopped, squatting, and forcefully ejected a wet pile that was black in the moonlight.

  “I guess the ground buffalo was a bad idea, huh?” Josh observed, relieved that’s all it was. “Probably not so smart to change your diet all at once, either. Did it make you sick to your stomach, Lucy?”

  She seemed a lot better when she came back to the house. “Okay, good dog. I’m sorry about that.”

  Lucy settled down on her bed next to his and eased back into sleep, but when the alarm woke him up at 7:30 A.M. she wasn’t there. Josh found her in the back bedroom, of all places, lying in the small space between the bed and the wall. “What are you doing, Lucy?” he asked. She wagged and followed him into the kitchen, but when he set out a mix of her cardboard pellets and the good stuff, called Nature’s Variety, she didn’t do anything more than sniff at it and then gaze at him with a mournful expression.

  “Tummy still upset? I’m so, so sorry,” Josh apologized. Less than forty-eight hours with a dog and he’d almost poisoned it with raw buffalo. “You go to the vet after my meeting, Lucy. They know how to take care of you there. I don’t. Trust me, your life’s going to be a lot easier.” He avoided her gaze as he said this, though, feeling guilty about it. It was true, though, right? Even if being taken to yet another place to stay might be disorienting, it would all be for the best once she went into labor.

  His own breakfast was a microwave muffin and a cup of coffee. Josh showered and dove into his e-mail and then tinkered with the chart he planned to upload during his client conference, distracted and not paying attention to Lucy, who went back to her bed, or back down the hallway where the bedrooms were, anyway. It wasn’t until he was pouring himself another cup of coffee that Josh glanced at the thermometer and remembered, with a guilty start, that he had an unpleasant obligation to take care of. “Oh, Lucy,” he muttered to himself.

  The news just keeps getting worse.

  He let the dog out in case she needed to make another deposit in the yard, thinking that he didn’t want to be standing behind her with a thermometer when that happened. Lucy just trotted out into the yard and stood looking at him, so he waved at her and she came back in, giving him a what was the point of that? look.

  Josh caught sight of his face in a mirror as he was lubricating the thermometer with margarine. His eyes were slits, his mouth hanging open in slack horror. He forced himself to look normal. “Here we go, Lucy,” he grated. “We got to do this.”

  Taking her temperature was every bit as enjoyable as he thought it would be. What he saw, though, made his blood freeze.

  Ninety-seven and a half. Her temperature was ninety-seven degrees! And below a hundred meant that within twenty-four hours …

  Oh, come on. This could not be happening. Wasn’t it just Saturday that his life was completely normal, or at least as normal as it had been since losing Amanda? Now he was going to have puppies!

  “Ryan,” Josh sternly lectured his neighbor’s voice mail, his heart pounding, “you need to call me back. Lucy’s temperature is below a hundred, which means she’s going to be in labor before we know it. I need you to get on this right now. I’ll remind you that animal abandonment is a crime.” Probably not extraditable from France, though. “I’ll take her to the vet, but whoever it is who is going to take care of the dog needs to get involved quickly, and needs to be ready for puppies by sometime tomorrow. Got that? Call me!”

  Lucy went back to the bedroom, probably vowing never to speak to him again after the whole thermometer incident. His conference call was coming up; he had to get ready. He put on a clean shirt and conscientiously logged into the conference before anyone else. He adjusted his camera, cleared his throat, and then one by one people popped into the virtual room on the screen.

  The project manager was Gordon Blascoe. He was a bald man with glasses who was known for terse e-mails that everyone called Blascoe’s Blurts.

  “I’m seeing that the project timeline has gotten extended into the second quarter again,” Blascoe complained, launching right into discussion without greeting or preamble. “Since the deadline is February fifteenth I don’t get how this happened.”

  “It’s the new tasks,” someone chimed in. “Because, you know, adding dependencies—things that have to be done before the tasks themselves can be considered done—extends the timeline.”

  Blascoe never seemed to understand how his project management software worked, how adding tasks automatically rippled through the project, pushing everything out. They had conversations like this one about once every two weeks. Josh wore an alert expression like a mask while everyone patiently re-explained to Blascoe how the tool functioned, delicately avoiding pointing out that it was all Blascoe’s fault.

  Lucy came back into the room and paced around underneath Josh’s desk, bumping into him with soft impacts. He steeled himself so he wouldn’t glance at her—Josh had noticed that the distracted team members who were always shifting around and looking away and sipping coffee during their meetings didn’t have their contracts renewed. Blascoe liked everyone staring straight ahead like news anchors.

  Lucy whined.

  This time Josh did look down. She was panting a little, drooling, even, and staring up at him with a beseeching expression.

  Oh, surely, surely it wasn’t happening now. The meeting would last about an hour and a half. Surely she could wait that long. He reached his hand down and she licked it. Her tongue felt dry and rough.

  “Let’s move on,” Blascoe snapped, which was what he always said when he understood he’d screwed up. “Josh?”

  Lucy stood up from under the desk and walked over by the front door. Josh took a deep breath, nodding. “Okay, we got the first results back from user tests on the front end,” he stated neutrally. “We came in lower than expected in usability.” Actually, they hated the design, because of the stuff you put in there, Blascoe. “I think I can explain why, though.”

  Lucy yipped in distress. Josh turned and stared at her. A fluid was puddled on the floor at her feet.

  “How could that happen?” Blascoe demanded.

  “I’m, uh, the problem … I have a chart … can you, can you hang on a second?”

  “What?” Blascoe responded, sounding outraged. On the screen, everyone else shifted uneasily as Josh stood up and moved off camera. “Josh?” Blascoe called.

  Lucy’s eyes were imploring and pained. “Okay. Okay, Lucy,” Josh soothed, trying to keep the fear out of his voice. Lucy moaned, her legs trembling. Josh dashed back to his computer. “I have an emergency, I have to go,” he said quickly, switching off the conference with a click of the mouse. Even in his panic, there was a momentary flicker of satisfaction at being able to put Blascoe out like a lightbulb.

  Lucy was panting and pacing as Josh grabbed his keys and his wallet. No. This was not going to be a home delivery! “Let’s go, Lucy!” he urged.

  She didn’t follow him. She lay down on the hardwood floor, her chest heaving. Oh God. “Everything is going to be all right,” Josh told her. He ran to his pickup truck and opened the passenger door, his hands shaking, then dashed back into the house. Gingerly, he eased Lucy up, staggering a little under her weight. Her tongue lolled in her mouth. “Lucy! You okay? Lucy!” he hissed. Please, Lucy. Please.

  He fumbled, trying to shut the front door of his house with his foot while still holding the dog, and then gave up and ran around and laid her as gently as he could across the front seat of his truck. The engine started right up. He glanced wildly at his open front door as he headed down the driveway, but decided it didn’t matter—nobody ever came around, burglars
or otherwise. “Good dog, good dog, Lucy.” He stroked her head, and even in her obvious pain she managed to lick his hand. It pierced right through his alarm, that gesture, and he felt his heart heave in his chest. That she could feel affection for him under these circumstances gave him a fierce determination that nothing bad was going to happen. Not to Lucy. Not today.

  Lucy panted and moaned while Josh bounced down the rutted road. It occurred to him that he should have called ahead to let them know he was coming, but it was too late now—he’d left his cell phone in the drawer where it lived most of the time. His hands squeezed the steering wheel until his forearms trembled. “Oh please, oh please,” Josh whispered over and over. He kept glancing anxiously at his companion, looking for what, puppies? And then what? He didn’t know what to do. He’d never felt so helpless in his life.

  He left his truck door open when he got to the vet’s office, a small building just off North Turkey Creek Road. He picked up Lucy and ran with her in his arms, pounding and kicking at the front door of the vet’s like the sheriff serving an arrest warrant. A stocky woman in her fifties flung the door back, staring at him as if he were crazy.

  “She’s in labor, but there’s something wrong! She’s crying and crying.”

  “Hey now. Slow down,” the woman soothed.

  “She was fine but then I took her temperature and it was under a hundred and her water broke, I mean, there was fluid. I was on a conference call and she went to the front door and there was a puddle.” Josh tried to sound less hysterical, puffing rapid breaths through his cheeks.

  “Why are you panting like that?”

  “What?”

  “Are you doing Lamaze breathing?”

  “Of course not,” Josh snapped, aware that he’d been doing exactly that. He deliberately slowed down, taking care with his words, though he pretty much wanted to scream at this woman. What did it matter what kind of breathing he was doing, she wasn’t looking at the dog! “I am just trying to say I think there’s something wrong. She seems in distress. I mean, look at her,” he enunciated carefully.