The Art of Racing in the Rain. Garth Stein

kibble, which I ate too quickly and didn’t enjoy, but at least it filled the empty space in my stomach. In silence, fuming, he watched me eat. And very soon, Eve and Zoë arrived on the back porch.

      Denny threw open the door.

      “Unbelievable,” he said bitterly. “You are unbelievable.”

      “I was sick,” Eve said, stepping into the house with Zoë hiding behind her. “I wasn’t thinking.”

      “He could have died.”

      “He didn’t die.”

      “He could have died,” Denny said. “I’ve never heard of anything so stupid. Careless. Totally unaware.”

      “I was sick!” Eve snapped at him. “I wasn’t thinking!”

      “You don’t think, people die. Dogs die.”

      “I can’t do this anymore,” she cried, standing there shaking like a thin tree on a windy day. Zoë scurried around her and disappeared into the house. “You always go away, and I have to take care of Zoë and Enzo all by myself, and I can’t do it! It’s too much! I can barely take care of myself!”

      “You should have called Mike or taken him to a kennel or something! Don’t try to kill him.”

      “I didn’t try to kill him,” she whispered.

      I heard weeping and looked over. Zoë stood in the door to the hallway, crying. Eve pushed past Denny and went to Zoë, kneeling before her.

      “Oh, baby, we’re sorry we’re fighting. We’ll stop. Please don’t cry.”

      “My animals,” Zoë whimpered.

      “What happened to your animals?”

      Eve led Zoë by the hand down the hall. Denny followed them. I stayed where I was. I wasn’t going near that room where the dancing sex-freak zebra had been. I didn’t want to see it.

      Suddenly, I heard thundering footsteps. I cowered by the back door as Denny hurtled through the kitchen toward me. He was puffed up and angry and his eyes locked on me and his jaw clenched tight.

      “You stupid dog,” he growled, and he grabbed the back of my neck, taking a huge fistful of my fur and jerking. I went limp, afraid. He’d never treated me like this before. He dragged me through the kitchen and down the hall, into Zoë’s room where she sat, stunned, on the floor in the middle of a huge mess. Her dolls, her animals, all torn to shreds, eviscerated, a complete disaster. Total carnage. I could only assume that the evil demon zebra had reassembled itself and destroyed the other animals after I had left. I should have eliminated the zebra when I had my chance. I should have eaten it, even if it had killed me.

      Denny was so angry that his anger filled up the entire room, the entire house. Nothing was as large as Denny’s anger. He reared up and roared, and with his great hand, he struck me on the side of the head. I toppled over with a yelp, hunkering as close to the ground as possible. “Bad dog!” he bellowed and he raised his hand to hit me again.

      “Denny, no!” Eve cried. She rushed to me and covered me with her own body. She protected me.

      Denny stopped. He wouldn’t hit her. No matter what. Just as he wouldn’t hit me. He hadn’t hit me, I know, even though I could feel the pain of the blow. He had hit the demon, the evil zebra, the dark creature that came into the house and possessed the stuffed animal. Denny believed the evil demon was in me, but it wasn’t. I saw it. The demon had possessed the zebra and left me at the bloody scene with no voice to defend myself—I had been framed.

      “We’ll get new animals, baby,” Eve said to Zoë. “We’ll go to the store tomorrow.”

      As gently as I could, I slunk toward Zoë, the sad little girl on the floor, surrounded by the rubble of her fantasy world, her chin tucked into her chest, tears on her cheeks. I felt her pain because I knew her fantasy world intimately, as she allowed me to see the truth of it, and often included me in it. Through our role-playing—silly games with significant telltales—I saw what she thought about who she really was, her place in life. How she worshipped her father and always hoped to please her mother. How she trusted me but was afraid when I made faces at her that were too expressive and defied what she’d learned from the adult-driven World Order that denies animals the process of thought. I crawled to her on my elbows and placed my nose next to her thigh, tanned from the summer sun. And I raised my eyebrows slightly as if to ask if she could ever forgive me for not protecting her animals.

      She waited a long time to give me her answer, but she finally gave it. She placed her hand on my head and let it rest there. She didn’t scratch me. It would be a while before she allowed herself to do that. But she did touch me, which meant she forgave me for what had happened, though the wound was still too raw and the pain was still too great for her to forget.

      Later, after everyone had eaten and Zoë was put to bed in her room that had been cleaned of the carnage, I found Denny sitting on the porch steps with a drink of hard liquor, which I thought was strange because he hardly ever drank hard liquor. I approached cautiously, and he noticed.

      “It’s okay, boy,” he said. He patted the step next to him and I went to him. I sniffed his wrist and took a tentative lick. He smiled and rubbed my neck.

      “I’m really sorry,” he said. “I lost my mind.”

      The patch of lawn behind our house was not big, but it was nice in the evening. It was rimmed by a dirt strip covered with sweet-smelling cedar chips where they planted flowers in the spring, and they had a bush in the corner that made flowers that attracted the bees and made me nervous whenever Zoë played near it, but she never got stung.

      Denny finished his drink with a long swallow and shivered involuntarily. He produced a bottle from nowhere—I was surprised I hadn’t noticed it—and poured himself another. He stood up and took a couple of steps and stretched to the sky.

      “We got first place, Enzo. Not ‘in class.’ We took first place overall. You know what that means?”

      My heart jumped. I knew what it meant. It meant that he was the champion. It meant he was the best!

      “It means a seat in a touring car next season, that’s what it means,” Denny said to me. “I got an offer from a real, live racing team. Do you know what an offer is?”

      I loved it when he talked to me like that. Dragging out the drama. Ratcheting up the anticipation. I’ve always found great pleasure in the narrative tease. But then, I’m a dramatist. For me, a good story is all about setting up expectations and delivering on them in an exciting and surprising way.

      “Getting an offer means I can drive if I come up with my share of sponsorship money for the season—which is reasonable and almost attainable—and if I’m willing to spend the better part of six months away from Eve and Zoë and you. Am I willing to do that?”

      I didn’t say anything because I was torn. I knew I was Denny’s biggest fan and most steadfast supporter in his racing. But I also felt something like what Eve and Zoë must have felt whenever he went away: a hollow pit in my stomach at the idea of his absence. He must have been able to read my mind, because he gulped at his glass and said, “I don’t think so, either.” Which was what I was thinking.

      “I can’t believe she left you like that,” he said. “I know she had a virus, but still.”

      Did he really believe that, or was he lying to himself? Or maybe he just believed it because Eve wanted him to believe it. No matter. Had I been a person, I could have told him the truth about Eve’s condition.

      “It was a bad virus,” he said more to himself than to me. “And she couldn’t think.”

      And suddenly I was unsure: had I been a person, had I been able to tell him the truth, I’m not sure he would have wanted to hear it.

      He groaned and sat back down and filled his glass again.

      “I’m