Free Giant George by Dave Nasser and Lynne Barrett-Lee Page A

knew she’d be inconsolable, either.
    It had been less than a year since we picked up our puppy, far less time since I’d cursed him under my breath (and out loud) for all the inconvenience and hassle he’d brought into mylife. It had been even lesstime—a few hours—since I’d picked up his poops and muttered to myself about having to do such an unpleasant job every day. Yet, as I worked (I was ripping out some old cabinets that day—good, solid, take-your-mind-off-stuff toil), I had my ears on full alert for the sound of my phone and the call from the clinic with the news that it was over, and all was well—Georgie was okay.
    The call camein a little after noon, and when I phoned Christie, which I did immediately, I could hear the relief in her voice too. George was supposed to stay overnight at the clinic, so they could keep an eye on him, but neither Christie nor I could imagine us not being with him that night. We wanted him home safe with us. It wasn’t what normally happened, they told us, but as long as we were sure we could keepa close eye on him, they agreed that we could come pick him up.
    We met back at home, then set off together in the truck, and arrived around seven in the evening. We were so glad to see him, looking sleepy but well.
    It was one hell of a thing to get him up into the truck, though. I couldn’t help but wince when I thought about the location of his stitches, and how they must really, really hurt,especially when we hefted him up into his bed on the backseats, and he whimpered in obvious pain. But soon we were home and, though he was moving very slowly, we could see he still had a spark of the old George in his eyes.
    Getting onto our bed was obviously beyond him, even though I’m betting it was the place in the world he most wanted to be. You could almost see him standing there, weighingtheoptions: should he risk attempting it or not? On the plus side, there’d be the comfort, but on the other, the pain—how much agony would he have to deal with to get up there? He hovered beside our bed for a moment, swaying slightly, looking tempted, but then lowered himself gingerly down onto his own bed.
    He was up only once more—to totter outside into the yard to use the bathroom. In theend, he spent the entire rest of the night on the bedroom carpet, not even attempting to climb back onto his bed. But he slept soundly, even if we didn’t.

CHAPTER 7
Party Animal

    Was it a displacement activity, or was it inevitable? Christie and I weren’t sure, but, as we approached the end of George’s first year, he seemed to have found something different to do instead of humping furniture. He’d calmed down, and then some, in the furniture department, but he’d replaced that activity witheating—eating, that is, as an Olympic sport.
    It wasn’t that he was obviously scoffing a lot more. He’d been eating an awful lot of food since we’d gotten him, and had never shown any sign of wanting to slow down. If we’d have let him, we knew he’d have eaten way more. But his growth spurt had become something different—not so much a spurt as a heavy-duty juggernaut. He was putting on weight inspades, and it was showing.
    His last weigh-in with Doc Wallace, which was done as a part of his post-op check, had seen him tip the scales at one hundred and eighty pounds. He definitely weighed more than me now—more than a whole lot of other guys, in fact—and he wasn’t showing any sign of stopping.
    And he’d not just grown wider; he’d grown taller as well. By now we’d learned not to leave anythingedible on the kitchen counter, as any foodstuff that was placed within reach of a quick tongue-swipe would be gone long before you could open your mouth in amazement, let alone say, “No George! Get down!”—although “get down” was no longer the right command; he was
already
down, wasn’t he? Likewise, the business of having a barbecue, previously such an undramatic, everyday pastime, had become