Читать книгу Ordinary Sins - Jim Heynen - Страница 12

WHO LOVED HER DOG

It was a little wiry dog. A yapper. With big bulging eyes. Not a purebred, just a tiny thing she picked up at the pound when it was the size of a rat. It was the only survivor of a litter of eight, and the mother had died at the pound after delivering. It would have been hard to imagine what the ones that didn’t survive looked like. The woman chose this leftover. She called it Pee-Wee then, and the name stuck.

She took Pee-Wee home from the pound in a shoebox with tissue paper on the bottom. The dog was so small that she wasn’t sure of its sex until Pee-Wee lifted its leg over her two-inch high bronze fireplace cricket.

So you’re my little boy, she said, though gender and size were never factors in this woman’s affection for Pee-Wee.

When Pee-Wee was full-grown—or at least as big as he was likely to get—he was not only a wiry yapper with bulging eyes, he was a shiverer. He yapped and trembled and trembled and yapped, all the while glaring at strangers with his bulging eyes. Pee-Wee had long toenails that clicked like little icicles and scratched the wood floor. When he ran around yapping in a state of great excitement, he had bladder control problems.

Nothing about Pee-Wee bothered this woman. She held his shaking, wiry, yapping tiny body as if he were the most precious creature on earth. She cradled Pee-Wee on her lap when people visited, constantly stroking his trembling body, and saying, There there, my sweet. There there.

She had pictures of Pee-Wee sitting on her piano. She had an assortment of little sweaters for Pee-Wee hanging by the front door. She had a lavender silk-covered cushion for Pee-Wee to sleep on, though Pee-Wee rarely settled down long enough for a nap.

When people first saw this woman with her dog, some thought she was more than a little strange to love an uncontrollable freak of nature named Pee-Wee. Those who saw them together often felt something else happening. Their eyes moved past the jittery dog and to the calm hands and eyes of the woman. Her affection for the dog moved out and around her like an aura that filled the room. Some felt their own eyes staring, almost bulging, in the direction of the lady, as if they were trying to understand the small creatures that trembled inside themselves.