Free Animal Appetite by Susan Conant Page A

had only vague memories of Jack. He’d owned two or three dogs, they thought. Yes, all goldens. The person I should be talking to, I was told over and over, was that tall girl. She dropped out of dogs a long time ago. What was her name? Tracy something, I finally learned. No one came up with a last name. Jack’s family hadn’t known about his dogs, a few people told me. No one—no one in dogs—was supposed to call him. His family had thought Chip was just a pet.

    The handwritten note found on Jack’s desk? It takes more than the absence of faults to make a winner . I hadn’t read an idiosyncratic meaning into that sentence after all; Jack Andrews hadn’t been writing about himself—he’d really been writing about a dog.

    Jack Andrews, I concluded, had led a double life. His family had known nothing about his existence in the world of dog shows and show dogs, which is to say, in my own world. John Winter Andrews had had golden retrievers . The life he had kept secret felt weirdly like my own.

CHAPTER 9

    On Sunday afiternoon, Steve and I and our fifour dogs piled into his van for what proved to be a dismal trip to the island in the Merrimack where Hannah Duston had been held captive three centuries ago. Saturday’s blue sky had turned ashen, and the temperature had dropped thirty degrees. The heavy rain that slicked the highway seeped into the interior of the van to reawaken the odor of every dog Steve had ever transported in it. By the time we reached Concord, New Hampshire, we’d had to stop twice to clean up after Lady, Steve’s pointer, who sometimes gets carsick.

    As the miles and minutes passed, my relationship with Steve smelled more and more like a sick, wet dog. Neither of us said anything about my father, his mother, Thanksgiving, or his impending post-Thanksgiving trip home to Minneapolis.

    “If you’d fed her gingersnaps the way I told you,” I said, “she wouldn’t have thrown up.”

    He didn’t reply.

    “You should’ve given her Bonine. We should’ve stopped in Nashua or Manchester and found a drugstore.”

    “If I want a consult, I’ll hire a consultant.” He peered at the highway and leaned forward to wipe the fogged-up windshield. “With a degree in veterinary medicine.”

    “As a matter of fact, I wrote an article about car sickness, and obviously, I know more about it than you do. My dogs aren’t throwing up.” Neither was India, Steve’s other dog. Furthermore, I hadn’t fed Rowdy and Kimi gingersnaps, dosed them with Bonine, or done anything else to prevent a malady from which neither had ever suffered. Steve nobly refrained from saying so.

    “Which exit is it?” he asked.

    “Next one. Seventeen. When we get off, we follow the sign for Penacook, but we go only a half mile or so. The island’s actually in a town called Boscawen. The parking area’s supposed to be on the left.”

    And it was. When we turned in, the rain was pouring down, and I wanted Steve to stop so that I could take a picture of the green historic marker from inside the van, but he kept going. “You can get one on the way back,” he said. “Let’s get this over with.”

    “I didn’t make you come! You volunteered. I could have driven here by myself. In case you’ve forgotten, we decided it would be a chance for us to spend some time together.”

    Steve parked next to a path that led down a hill toward the river. Rowdy, who hates to get wet, balked at leaving his crate. Once we were all out of the van, Kimi directed an unprovoked growl at India, who looked to Steve for guidance.

    “You ought to get that under control,” he said to me. “There’s no need for it.”

    “If I want a consult, I’ll hire a consultant,” I snapped. “Preferably an expert in animal behavior, by which I don’t mean a vet.” Veterinarians don’t necessarily know anything about dog behavior, but Steve is as good a dog trainer as I am. In some ways he’s better because he’s more patient than I am.