Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

became.
    “Nine, I told her, almost nine and a half. Then I’d looked at Blanche and she was limping over to the water bucket. All that running, getting the boys to chase her, her favorite game, but she was getting too old for it, even two years ago.
    “Loma said, ‘Nine. Getting on, for a bull terrier.’
    “I turned back to her then and watched as she dropped the cigarette and didn’t bother to grind it out even though we were at the dog run. Her face was hard, almost masklike. For a moment, I wanted to leave, not even say goodbye, just get up and go. But when she looked back at me, her expression had changed. Her face was full of concern. It threw me. And I stayed.
    “She went on. She said that what they’d like to do is make sure I always have a Blanche when I need one. She leaned toward me, talking softly, reaching out and touching my arm. She said her employer, who is a very charitable man, would like other people with epilepsy to have a dog as skilled as Blanche. ‘You’d like that, too,’ she said, ‘wouldn’t you?’
    “I didn’t say anything right away. I just looked at her, those gnawed nails and her nicotine-stained fingers, her scowly little face, trying to look all warm and concerned now; the way she seemed hunched into her coat, as if it was too light for the weather; and the dog, how Loma never paid attention to her, never touched her and how Smitty sat there all that time, just watching and not playing. Maybe they’re just two of a kind, I’d thought, feeling, whatever it was she wanted, I didn’t want any part of it.
    “ ‘A Blanche,’ she’d said. What an odd thing to say. I started thinking of some excuse I could make to get away from her. But once again, I didn’t leave.” She shook her head.
    “What did you do?”
    Sophie shrugged. “I asked her to elaborate. So she did. She asked if I’d read about some of this in the paper, about Dolly, the sheep that was—’
    “ ‘You mean, you want to clone Blanche?’ I said astonished to hear those words coming out of my mouth.
    “ ‘We do,’ she said. Just like that. ‘And what’s more, we can.’ ”
    I turned from Sophie to look at the dogs. Dashiell was at the water bucket where he’d tanked up and then laid down on the wet earth, his big mouth open, his big tongue hanging out. Bianca was leaning on him, as if he were a cushion.
    When I looked back at Sophie, she was nodding.
    I should have gotten up then, told her I wished her luck with whatever it was she needed me to do, but that I wasn’t interested. Clearly, I should have said I wasn’t the right person for this job.
    Hell, I’d just gotten my arm out of a cast.
    I had to get my winter clothes out of mothballs, too.
    Or, at least I would have, had I bothered to put them away in the first place.
    Still, who had the time?
    Cloning? No way. If someone was cloning dogs, I didn’t want to know about it.
    That’s what I should have said.
    But I didn’t.
    What was the problem? I kept asking myself. My arm was healed, I certainly could have used the money, and, at the time, things seemed benign, not the usual scenario in my business. Most of my work comes shortly after someone’s life has been snatched away, often brutally, and always before it was time. Of course there are those who would argue with that statement, who would say that if life ends, then it is time. Is is, my former employer Frank Petrie used to say. But in this case, I disagree. When a life should end is not a decision one human being should be making about another, especially when that decision is informed by vengeance, hate, possessiveness, or greed.
    This was different.
    Or so she said.
    So I didn’t walk away. I said, “Tell me more.”
    And she did.
    Then, later, I said, “Tell me what you need me to do.”
    She told me that, too.
    We sat there so long that dozens of dogs and their owners came and went, the dogs having run around, gotten into mild squabbles and made up, and finally gotten tired enough to leave, Sophie talking all the while, me listening and changing the tape several times so that I wouldn’t miss recording anything. After a long while, even Dash and Bianca quit playing. For the last hour of our conversation, they were asleep in the space between the bench and the fence, Bianca’s head on Dash’s side as if they’d known each other forever.
    Two more times during that long afternoon, as I sat and listened, I wanted to excuse myself and leave. It was the weirdest story