Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

he looks up at your face when you walk with him. He just didn’t scare me. Anyway, Sophie worked on me. She convinced me that if I had a seizure-alert dog, it would help me to live a normal life.”
    A normal life, I thought, what the hell was that?
    “And you feel you could overcome your fear,” I asked her, “and that you wouldn’t mind all the work?”
    “No. I’m sure I could do it. Sophie said I’d love my dog to pieces and I wouldn’t be at all afraid of her, that once I had her, I wouldn’t be afraid of anything.”
    “Of anything?”
    “Of living,” she said. “And she told me the work of taking care of my dog would get easier and easier as I bonded with her. She said she’d never had a dog before and she came to love the work she did to take care of hers. It’s part of it, when you have a dog, she told me, that you take good care of her and she takes good care of you.” She took two fries this time. I waited for her to go on. “You give them the best food you can afford, she told me, and lots and lots of exercise. She met Herbie at the dog run, you know.”
    “I wonder if he still goes there.”
    “Why not? Unless he moved away or his dog died.” She picked up another handful of fries.
    “What kind did he have?” I asked, figuring it would be easier to identify him by a description of his dog than one of himself—brown hair, medium height, you know, average looking. Good luck on that, unless he had a prominent scar or was six foot seven.
    “What kind of what?” she asked.
    “Dog. Did Sophie ever say?”
    She shrugged. “Oh, just a dog, I guess. Sophie usually talked about him, not the dog.”
    “Did she ever describe him to you?”
    “Brown.No, maybe black. I don’t remember.”
    “No, I mean Herbie. Did she ever show you a picture of him?”
    Ruth’s mouth was full. She shook her head.
    “She never mentioned how blue his eyes were or—“
    “He had blue eyes, Herbie? She never said.”
    I smiled. “I don’t know if he had blue eyes. I was just asking that as an example of something Sophie might have said.”
    She nodded. “Oh. So you would be able to recognize him if you saw him at the dog run.”
    “Exactly. It’s a slim chance, but a lot of what I do is. Sometimes you get lucky, despite the odds.”
    Ruth looked out the window for a moment, watching an old woman make her way in front of the coffee shop, all bent over, balancing herself on one of those aluminum walkers. I wondered if I was getting enough calcium in my diet and thought about eating some of Blanche’s Swiss chard when I got home.
    “Will you continue to look for Side by Side?”
    “I’m not sure. I want to see what I can find out when I get into Sophie’s apartment. Without Sophie’s help, this whole thing could come to a dead end in no time. But I’ll be in touch. I’ll let you know.”
    She nodded.
    “Sophie told me something strange the day she hired me.”
    “Sunday?”
    “Yes, on Sunday. She said that this woman who spoke to her about cloning Blanche, Loma West, said she’d heard about Sophie from The School for the Deaf, that she’d called there looking for people with service dogs to interview for some sort of survey.”
    Ruth had her mouth full again, but she began to shake her head vigorously.
    “Were you the receptionist then, two years ago?”
    “Yes, but there was no such call.”
    “How can you be sure?” I asked her. “Like, for instance, now, while you’re having lunch, isn’t someone answering the phone?”
    “Actually, no. We have voice mail. When I don’t pick up, it’s done electronically. If you know your party’s extension, you can punch that right in and it’ll ring through to their phone. The system also gives you the extension to dial for different departments. You can leave your name and number for information on the school. Then when I get back, I take care of the messages.”
    “And when you’re out sick?”
    “The same. They’re not going to hire another receptionist. Basically, the school spends money on the kids. Everything else is no frills. As for the phone system, it works. It’s efficient and most people use it.”
    “Meaning?”
    “We don’t get a lot of hang-ups.”
    “So one way or another, Loma would have had to speak to you?”
    “Me or the machine. And she didn’t do either. I’d remember.”
    “Why are you so sure, with all the calls you must get? It’s been two years, and—”
    “There are only a few kinds of calls that