You Had Me at Woof: How Dogs Taught Me the Secrets of Happiness by Julie Klam Page B

figuring out which nail polish would say to people around the country, “I’m a writer you want to get to know better!” It was a lot like my wedding, except that I hoped, in the future, I’d have other books.
    In truth, I was excited and happy and felt like for the first time in my life I was realizing myself. I loved my husband, my daughter, my work, and I was in love with a dog again, something I never thought would happen after Otto. With Beatrice I very consciously kept from getting too close to her. I didn’t want the heartbreak I had with losing Otto ever again. But Moses blindsided me. He slipped in through an unguarded entrance.
    One evening, the dog walker came to pick up Bea and Moses while Violet was taking a bath. As she was playing with the bubbles, she told me she wanted Moses to go away forever and never come back. She had also told me this in the morning. I don’t know why but that day he was really getting in her craw. I was used to her insistence.
    It wasn’t much later when I heard first the house phone and then the cell phone ring. I answered and it was the dog walker and she was upset but I was having difficulty understanding her. I finally heard that Moses had gotten out of his harness.
    “Where are you?” I asked.
    “In the lobby with Bea,” she said. “He ran out the front door before the doorman could shut it. Some men went after him.”
    I whipped Violet out of the bath and threw clothes on her and we ran down to the lobby. I told the dog walker to take Violet up to the apartment and I’d go look for him. Violet was too upset, though, and she wanted to go. As we were leaving the building, my next-door neighbor and close friend Margaret was coming in and when I told her about Moses, she dropped her bags and went to look with us. It was twilight, and the doorman had seen him go east, so that’s the way we went. We got a block away and I realized it was just impossible to try to look for Moses at Violet’s pace, so Margaret took Violet back to her apartment. I tried to call the city to see if anyone had reported him, but I couldn’t get through, so I called my mother and asked her to keep trying to call the city, and then I called Paul and left a message on his cell phone. I phoned Mattie, who was out to dinner. She said, “He’ll come back.”
    I walked and called his name, thinking of where he could have gone. I was worried that someone had grabbed him, someone not nice. We were always hearing about people who used small dogs as bait for training pit bulls to fight. I had to stop thinking of that. I worried that he’d gone into Central Park, which was now falling into darkness. I even tried to talk to him telepathically. I felt like I should’ve been able to figure out where he had gone, but my mind was blank, except for thinking about Moses being afraid. I thought about his eyes and how it felt to hold him and how terribly much I had let myself love him. If he was lost forever, I thought I might go crazy. I felt horrendous anguish and guilt for not having replaced the stupid harness when the dog walker first noticed he could get out of it.
    I decided to walk back toward my apartment and go west, look in the park by our apartment building and then head toward Riverside. I walked and looked between buildings and called his name, my voice starting to break. When I got up to my building, a group of guys who worked there and people I didn’t know were talking about where they’d looked and who had seen him go. I said I was going to try the other park. It was probably a hundred feet from the door to Broadway, where there are two wide lanes of traffic going north and two going south separated by a median. I looked across Broadway and saw him. I saw his eyes shining and he saw me. I yelled for him to stay, but he didn’t. He came toward me and into an oncoming SUV. The rest of what happened operated on some other level of my consciousness, because when that car hit Moses, my thinking