Free Patricia Gaffney by Mad Dash Page A

again, keep the dialogue going. Let’s get a drink one night this week. We’ll talk again, Andrew. Think about it, that’s all!”
    “Yes, all right,” he mumbled over his shoulder as he tugged on Hobbes’s leash, trying to make him go faster. TAP. The word kept him company all the way to his first-floor class; he set it to the rhythm of his footsteps. Smiling falsely at people he passed in the hall, it occurred to him why he’d never heard it before. Nobody used the word terminal around a dying person, either. Simple decency.
    The worst was that there was no one to whom he could repeat this conversation. Not Dash, certainly; never, ever. And not even Tim Meese, his best friend in the department. Tim was as big a TAP as he was.
    He could think of one person who would really enjoy hearing about it. His father would throw his head back and open his mouth in silent laughter, flaunting eighty years of fillings, bridges, and graying crowns. He’d slap his hands on his knees and grin up at him from his motorized wheelchair. “What’d I tell you?” he’d rasp. “Yes, sir, that’s my boy. I raised a TAP!”

     

    “H obbes!” cried Heather Kuhn, Andrew’s shiest student, when he brought the dog into the classroom and led him over to a sunny spot under the window. She even rose from her desk at the very back of the room to help get Hobbes settled. Heather was like a nursing-home resident who only comes to life on therapy pet day. “How is he?” she asked. “You haven’t brought him in lately, Dr. Bateman, so I was afraid…” She trailed off delicately. “Is he still lonely?”
    The question puzzled him until he remembered: That was the excuse he’d used for bringing Hobbes to class last time, that he was lonely in the house by himself all day. It had seemed kinder to the old boy than “He pees on the rug if somebody doesn’t walk him every three hours.”
    “Yes,” Andrew said solemnly, “still lonesome.”
    “Maybe you could get him a playmate. Another dog for company.”
    “Yeah, or a cat,” said Marshall Denny, reaching down from his desk to pet Hobbes’s graying haunch. “We had a dog who was thirteen when we got a kitten, and she perked him up, he lived three more years.”
    “Good idea,” Andrew said, “except that I’m allergic to dogs. Hobbes is an anomaly.” What if Dash’s puppy had been an anomaly, too? Would she have stayed then, or would she have stumbled on another excuse to leave him—he drove too slowly, he left whiskers in the sink?
    “Thomas Jefferson wasn’t much of a dog man,” he said in his professor’s voice, rising from a crouch beside Hobbes to some good-natured groaning at the obviousness of the segue. “He greatly admired the sheepdog, though. In fact, in 1809, his good friend Lafayette sent him two sheepdogs from France, and Jefferson immediately put them to work at Monticello. ‘Their sagacity is almost human,’ he wrote, ‘and qualifies them to be taught anything you please.’ Think about that, class. ‘Their sagacity is almost human’—do you see how relevant Jefferson still is? He could’ve been speaking of anyone in this room. ”
    Laughter, more groans. It was an excellent class. All history majors, although most of them would go on to careers in law, journalism, government. But a few would become teachers, and some of them would regard that as a comedown. Andrew never had. Teaching had always been his first choice, and it was always history. Nothing else had tempted him.
    Today they were comparing Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress’s final version. “There’s a revolutionary sentiment in the second sentence,” he began, leaning against the blackboard. “Who knows what it is? Something brand new in the history of governmental doctrine.” The usual hands went up. He called on Heather, who never raised her hand but always knew the answer.
    “The pursuit of happiness?” she guessed almost