Free 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 Page B

like his presents?” Michael asked me as I was kissing him good night.
    The next morning, Michael, ignoring the presents spilling out from under the tree for him, went right for Huck’s stocking. He sat on the floor, pulled Huck onto his lap, and tried to get Huck to take one of the presents in his teeth to tear the paper. With some assistance from Michael, Huck ripped the paper off the first present. “Huck, it’s a new toy!” Michael exclaimed. “It’s a Santa.” Huck took the soft plastic squeaky Santa in his teeth, ran around the room, dropped it, and sat right down on Michael’s lap again, seemingly waiting for the next present. It was hard to believe this was Huck’s first Christmas. He behaved like an old hand.
    It went on that way until all the new doggie toys had been opened. It wasn’t until Huck’s stocking had been emptied that Michael turned to open his own gifts.
    And I opened the gift Rich and Michael gave me, a pair of earrings with three interlocking rings to celebrate the strength our small family had shown these past months.

C HAPTER 4
    T HE POSTHOLIDAY WINTER was long and cold. By March, when Michael had his midyear school break, I was ready for some sun. It was time to hold Auntie Babs to her word, time for her to make up the spare doggie bed. It would be our first vacation since my cancer treatments had ended and the first time we left Huck for more than a few hours.
    Michael, a baseball worshipper and die-hard Yankees fan, wanted to go to Yankees spring training. The Yankees were going to play their archrivals, the Boston Red Sox. Rich and I agreed to take Michael to see the Yankees in Florida and decided to add a side trip afterward to a beach resort. Sun, baseball, the beach—the kind of vacation to make me feel young, healthy, and very much alive. No demands, no newspaper, no computers, no phone calls. Perfect.
    I had gone through the rigors of cancer treatments fixated on getting myself in shape. The doctors had said that one of the little-understood consequences of the treatments for breast cancer was weight gain. Weight gain? I had always thought chemotherapy leaves everyone depleted and thin. Apparently chemotherapy for breast cancer is different. The depleted part was the same, but the thin part was not. I was determined not to gain weight. Bald AND fat? That really seemed cruel.
    All through my treatments, I had spent a lot of hours in the gym doing whatever I had strength for, and I was disciplined about what I ate. I walked everywhere I could. It worked. Despite the months of poison dripped into my body, and the weeks of having my chest, neck, and arm radiated every day, I had come out of it all in better shape than I had been in before it started, back when we sat sipping cappuccinos in Venice.
    At a follow-up visit with my surgeon in January, he commented on how fit I was. I told him that exercising had given me the illusion of control over my body. While I am extremely fond of him, and eternally grateful to him, he said in a detached way, “Well, it is just that, an illusion.” I wished he would have just let me take refuge in my denial.
    For our trip to Florida, I treated myself to a new bathing suit and a pair of white shorts. I bought gobs of suntan lotion and a new hat, having thrown away the one I had to wear the previous summer to cover my then bald head. In fact, I had thrown away or given away just about everything I owned that was in any way cancer related.
    Once I had enough hair to go to work comfortably without a scarf, I took out the stack of scarves given to me by dear friends, washed and ironed each one, wrapped them in tissue paper, and gave them to a woman I knew who was suffering through chemotherapy for the second time. Nearly everything else went into the trash. It was as though I had the garbage collector carry away all the pain and fear that had insidiously become a part of our daily lives. We had a new life now. We had Huck.
    The night before we left