Free Stay!: Keeper's Story by Lois Lowry

the kitchen.
    "He followed me home," she told her mother.
    "Really?" her mother replied skeptically, and looked down at me. I sat very still, using my best posture: cocked head, arched neck, attentive look. I flicked my tail to the side, hoping it was in a flowing, silky state. I tried to arrange it into a question-mark shape, but as you know, we dogs do not have as much control as we would like over our tails.
    "Can I keep him?"
    Her mother chuckled. "I'm sure he belongs to someone."
    "He doesn't have a collar."
    "Well, he must have lost it. We'll have to try to find his owner. Actually," she said, leaning down to look at me more closely, "he looks familiar." She patted my head and peered into my face. I liked her pat and her smell—she was without perfume but had a little cake batter on her fingers—but I feared her perceptions. I knew why she found me familiar. She had seen me sneering on magazine covers, billboards, and TV commercials. It would only be a matter of time before she remembered that.
    I arranged my lips in something of a smile, wanting no hint of the famous expression to betray my identity. Fragments of a desperate little poem began in my mind.
    Smile, lips! Hide, sneer!
    I was running through the possible rhymes (there were some spectacular ones— souvenir, pioneer, chandelier— but in truth I thought using fear would reflect my feelings more accurately) but had not yet completed the couplet to my poetic satisfaction when my creativity was interrupted by the placement of a glass bowl near my feet. Then, beside it, a second. One was a bowl of water, and the other appeared, to my amazement, to be boeuf bourguignon. I touched my tongue to it in rapture.
    "Leftover stew," the girls mother explained to me in a soft voice. Turning to the girl, she said, laughing, "Hope he likes mushrooms, Emily!"
    Ah, if she only knew my history. Champignons! They had been among my first and favorite solid foods. My brothers had disdained the delicate little morsels, but Wispy and I had tasted them with delight, and Mother had been pleased at our discernment.
    Daintily I nudged the mushrooms out of the stew with my tongue and nibbled them one by one with appreciation. Then I consumed the remaining beef and gravy, even eating the carrots—not my favorite vegetables—with enthusiasm. I followed lunch with a long drink of water from the companion bowl. Surely a good boeuf bourguignon is second only to a fine spaghetti bolognese; at least, that is my opinion.
    I tried to remember the polite way to inquire about the location of the facilities. Living in the woods, it had not been a matter of importance. Living with the photographer, I had been taken outdoors, to curbside, twice a day. And in my days with Jack, we had each morning shared companionably the amenities of the river and its banks.
    I walked with dignity to the door and stood beside it with a questioning look. Avoid the sneer, I repeated to myself. At any cost, do not sneer.
    "He wants to go out, Emily. Open the door for him." The mother was mixing her cake batter again.
    "But what if he runs away?" the little girl asked in a tremulous voice.
    I laughed inwardly, but the mother echoed my laughter aloud. "Why on earth would he run away, Emily, when he has just been fed a bowl of beef stew?" Ah, a woman who understood me completely. My heart leapt.
    Emily let me out and I investigated the bushes with their various smells. No dogs lived here. That was good. I wasn't ready for a territorial battle.
    However, I perceived that there were cats. I sniffed Cat—that distinctive, oily, pungent odor, quite disagreeable to a dog—everywhere. That could be a bore, dealing with cats. But I decided on the basis of the stew, the child, the kind voice of the woman, and the fact that I was exhausted after two days and nights of wilderness adventure that I could compromise on the cat issue. Carefully I lifted my leg against the thick leaves of an evergreen Raphiolepsis, relieved myself,