The Moment of Truth

“I brought him into bed with me.”

“To pee on your sheets? And mattress?”

“He didn’t pee. But if you’re worried that he might, you could put down a puppy pad.”

“What if he moves off from it?”

“If you’re a light sleeper like me, you’ll wake up and put him back on it.”

He studied her as if she was from another planet. “You’ve done this with a puppy before?”

“Several of them. My mom raises poodles, breeds them and sells them all over the country. My sisters were never really interested in helping, but I was.”

“Are they around here? Your family?”

He seemed genuinely interested, but she wasn’t. Not in having this conversation with him. Or thinking about how second rate she always felt when she thought of her family. So she shook her head and said, “It also helps, if you’re going to keep him in a kennel, to have some kind of rhythmic noise beside him. Like an old-fashioned alarm clock. Or maybe some classical music playing softly.”

The puppy had his nose pressed into a weed.

“Have you ever had a dog keep you up all night?”

It sounded, at the moment, like a full night’s rest would be more valuable to him than winning the lottery. And he’d only had the puppy one night!

What was the guy going to do if he ever got married and had kids?

Thinking of him as a father—and what he’d have to do to get to that point—brought her thoughts to a screeching halt.

“Mom gave me a puppy for my thirteenth birthday—and a little kennel, too—so that I could keep her in my room. She wouldn’t be quiet in the kennel. And she wouldn’t lie down on the pads and go to sleep, either. I was afraid she was going to be whisked away from me and back out to the climate-controlled kennels Mom had in the backyard so I moved the little kennel onto my bed. The puppy was only four pounds so the kennel didn’t take up much room. I threaded my fingers through the bars of the kennel and the puppy curled up next to them and went to sleep. We slept like that for about a month, until she was house-trained, and for the rest of her life she slept curled up by my side every single night.”

He shook his head, as though he’d been transported to a very strange and unknown land.

She wondered about him again. About where he’d come from. And why someone as obviously educated and gorgeous as he was had landed in a place as out of the way as Shelter Valley.

“For the rest of her life? She died?”

“Yeah, the life expectancy of a toy poodle is anywhere from twelve to fifteen years, though we had one live to be eighteen. My little girl made it to twelve and died of congenital heart failure.”

“You got her for your thirteenth birthday?”

“Yeah.”

“So how old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“Then you just lost her?”

“This past summer. Right about the time I got the Montford scholarship.”

He asked her about the scholarship. She told him the same thing she’d told Cassie Tate Montford. And then she said, “We’ve been out here fifteen minutes.”

“About that.”

“Has your puppy gone to the bathroom?”

He looked at Little Guy. It was the first time Dana had seen him glance the puppy’s way.

“I... He’s contained and amusing himself. I didn’t think...I don’t know—has he gone to the bathroom?”

“Probably not because he hasn’t had anything to eat or drink since he made such a mess inside. But the first rule of house-training a puppy is that you watch him every second he’s out in the yard and praise him immediately every single time he does his business. Either variety. And conversely, from this point forward, every single time he goes in the house, even if you don’t think it’s his fault, like maybe you forgot to put him out, or he’d been alone too long, you have to scold him. The sooner he figures out that you’re not pleased whenever he goes in the house and that you are pleased when he goes outside, the sooner he’ll start to hold his business until you put him outside.”

She was rambling again. The guy was going to think she was a big geek.

And maybe she was. Mostly she was okay with that. So why not now? It wasn’t like this Josh Redmond was anyone special.

“And another thing,” she added, because she felt awkward, standing there gawking at him, “you need to schedule an appointment with Cassie or Zack to have him neutered.”

“Neutered...”

“Yeah, it’s free when you adopt a pet, and because he’s a boy, you want to have it done as soon as it’s safe to do so.”

“You have something against boys?”

“Of course not.” She concentrated on the dog, not the man. “He squats when he pees.” She forced the words past the dryness in her throat. “Mature male dogs, if they aren’t neutered early, lift their leg to pee. It’s a territorial marking thing. You don’t want that. Once a male starts spraying you can have a hard time keeping him from marking his territory inside as well as out.”

“I’ll call the clinic Monday morning and make an appointment to have him neutered.”

“We don’t know how old he is for sure, but he can be neutered at eight weeks so they should be able to do it.”

She talked to him about feeding schedules and about establishing who was the boss from the onset.

The puppy went to the bathroom. Dana told Josh to praise him. And grinned when he did so. There was something very endearing about such a perfect specimen of manhood bending over and congratulating ten pounds of matted fur on the little pile he’d just dropped. If there was a self-conscious bone in Josh Redmond’s body, he sure didn’t seem aware of its existence.

Maybe that was what endeared him to her more than anything else.

And when, another couple of minutes later, the puppy peed, Josh congratulated him again and they moved back into the house. He invited her to sit at his kitchen table. He offered her some iced tea and she accepted. “Here,” he said, drawing her attention to the can he held out to her.

“Oh, sorry,” she said, feeling the heat rise up to her cheeks. She’d been busy staring at the arsenal of cleaning supplies on the kitchen table. “It’s just—” she glanced back at the table “—laundry detergent, hand soap, liquid body soap, dish soap, dishwasher soap, bar soap, car wash, carpet detergent, upholstery cleaner...” They were all lined up, obviously brand-new, two brands of every single item.

“I...am on a mission to try the top two brands of each to find out which I like best,” he said.

She had the distinct feeling that he was making up every word as he went along. Someone who liked to clean also had brand preferences for every job.

But it wasn’t her business.

“Have you picked a name for him?” she asked instead, pointing to the puppy who was sound asleep with his head flopped against Josh’s chest.

He shook his head. “It didn’t occur to me.”