to leave the country, so I’m telling you now. You can’t trust anything they tell you.”
“Who, Jason? Your mother? Your Uncle Lester?”
Jason chuckled a chuckle with no humor in it. “My uncle’s never going to tell you anything, Mr. Tucker, so you don’t have to worry about him lying to you. But everyone else is a total liar, okay?” He hung up.
The front door opened and Leah walked in with Warren on the leash. He was panting happily, and she still had the plastic bag, which was empty.
Warren looked at me as Leah took his leash off. He seemed to grin, but that was just the panting from his exciting walk. Then he walked onto the rug in my office and relieved himself right next to my chair.
Ethan walked in from the kitchen and took a look. “Dad!” he said. “Did you know we have a dog?”
Chapter
Twenty-One
In the abstract, it’s easy to kill a dog. You just think of it as something that has invaded your house and intends to make your rug smell bad. In the concrete, material world, you have to look into those big brown eyes and watch those floppy ears, and the fact is, you just can’t do it. And bringing back a dog to the shelter is a lot like bringing back a used car. Once you’re out the door, “The merchandise is your responsibility. But we’d be happy to sell you some floor mats and a pine tree deodorant you can hang from your rear view mirror.”
Ethan and Leah were introduced, that day, to the wonderful world of rug cleaner and paper towels, and the fun-filled uses to which they can be put. They complained, but the dog was still new to their lives, and they did what was asked of them. I knew this trend would not last long, but I was powerless to stop it.
I called Mason Abrams that afternoon to tell him about Bran-ford Purell’s hair, but he wasn’t in, and I was condemned to voice mail. I would have told Fax McCloskey, but I was relatively sure he didn’t exist, and was just an illusion run by a man behind a curtain employed by the Washington D.C. Police Department. If I ever did get in to see him, I’d ask him for a brain, or a heart. Or some height.
After that, I tried getting through to Stephanie. Naturally, I wasn’t going to blow Jason’s cover for him, but I did want to see if she had any suspicions about Lester, and that would require my talking to her when she was alone. She wasn’t in, and that settled that, for the time being.
When Abby got home, she too fell under Warren’s spell. Of course, she didn’t have that far to fall, since she had pushed me toward the shelter to begin with. If it had been that easy to get her to fall in love with me, we’d have married a year earlier. Women are funny that way.
We had dinner, which Warren watched with great interest, and the kids did their best to interest him in his dog toy, which was a rubber ball in the shape of a shoe. Never give a dog a toy shoe to chew up, because that encourages them to go after the real thing.
After dinner, the three of them went to play with the dog, and I cleaned up the dishes. I was distancing myself emotionally from Warren, since I didn’t want to feel bad when the urge to kick him out the door overcame me, and besides, I hate to admit that I’ve been wrong. After all the public bitching and moaning I’d done about not having a dog, actually enjoying the dog would have made me look silly. Okay, sillier.
I did preside over a family meeting, at which the issue of a name for the dog came up, and the overwhelming winner in the election was: Warren. Go figure.
It was just after seven, and at that moment it hit me: in less than two hours, Anne Mignano would be facing the wolves at the Board of Education meeting, and I had done nothing to help. I hadn’t even failed, because in order to fail, you have to put out some sort of effort. All I’d done was question a gadfly on exercise equipment, a janitor, and a gym teacher, none of whom could actually be considered a source of information, since none of them had any.
I sat down at the kitchen table