shepherds tearing at him. He had a stick in his hand—he was the aggressor, the bad guy—and he didn’t shout, “Bad dog!” No, what he was shouting was “Good dog!” over and over again. That was how they trained them. That was the kind of people they were.
Her throat was dry and her heart was pounding when she stepped through the door, the barking from the pens in back rising in volume and yet another functionary standing there gazing at her from behind another desk. They murdered dogs here, that was what she was thinking, euthanized them, and from the sound of it, provoked them just for the pleasure of it. She didn’t say hello or state her business, but just gave the functionary—a woman in her twenties dressed in khaki shirt and shorts—a shocked look. “What are you doing to them back there?” she demanded.
The woman—girl—smiled. “They’re all excited,” she said, and the smile widened. “It’s feeding time.”
Feeding time. Did she feel foolish? Maybe. A little. She shifted her gaze to the bulletin board on the side wall, which was plastered with head-shots of dogs and cats up for adoption, and then to the cats themselves, ten of them or so, each in a separate cage tricked out with a mini hammock, as if they were on vacation with all the time in the world at their disposal, as if they were happy to be here, when the truth was they were only waiting for their appointment with the furnace in back. There was an antiseptic smell about the place, a scent of formalin and Simple Green, and something else she couldn’t quite place, something caustic. The counter before her offered brochures on pet care, vaccinations and neutering and a hallway led to another door, the one that gave onto the inner sanctum. “I came for my dog,” she said, bringing her focus back to the girl. “I would’ve been here last night, but you were closed.”
“Name?”
“Kutya.”
“Kutya what?”
“Just Kutya, that’s all. I mean, does a dog have to have a last name?”
The girl let out a laugh. “Sorry,” she said. “Your name, I mean.”
“Sara Hovarty Jennings. That’s H-o-v-a-r-t-y, Jennings. They took my dog away from me yesterday afternoon, the cops, when they impounded my car. And they brought him here.”
Still smiling—they’d broken the routine, shared a joke—the girl focused on the screen of her computer and tapped away at the keyboard. Sara stood there at the counter studying the girl’s face while the dogs barked distantly and a pale finger of sun poked in through one of the windows she’d briefly considered smashing the night before. She watched the smile fade and then die. “I’m sorry,” the girl said, looking up at her now, “but we can’t release the dog at this time.”
“What do you mean? I’m the owner. Do you need proof, is that it?”
The girl looked embarrassed, the way people do when they’re about to drop a bomb on you. “No,” she said softly, and Sara could see that it wasn’t her fault, that she was sympathetic, somebody’s daughter just doing her job. “It’s that—well, the report says here that the dog bit someone, is that right? And that you don’t have a certificate of rabies vaccination?”
Sara went numb. She just shook her head. The dogs barked and barked, but it was joyous barking—they were barking for their kibble and the cold comfort of their cages.
“She’ll have to be quarantined for thirty days—”
“He.”
“He will, I mean. It’s right here, see?” She swung the monitor round so that Sara could see the regimented blocks of words suspended there, as if they meant anything, as if the official who’dtyped out the order had any authority over the dog she’d raised from a puppy so tiny he couldn’t even climb the two steps to the back porch.
“My dog doesn’t have rabies,” she said.
But the girl was ahead of her here, the girl, who despite her youth, sympathy and good humor, had been in this very position before, a girl
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