I could hardly feel my feet touching the sidewalk. I was back in the deep end of the pool.

8

WAITING

ROGER AND I sat and waited. I thought of how concerned Doc Fox had looked. By the time we got there, Bootsie had gotten much weaker. She’d barely been able to lift her head to lick his shoulder.

“Good girl,” he’d growled. Doc Fox never talks much, and when he does it’s in half sentences. I also don’t know if anyone has ever heard him use the personal pronoun for himself.

“Take a seat,” he’d rumbled, motioning toward his waiting room with his chin. Then he and Bootsie had vanished into the back.

And after that, time, which had been speeding along like a runaway train, slowed to a crawl. The hands on Doc Fox’s old-fashioned clock seemed welded in place. I tried counting under my breath. One and one thousand, two and one thousand.

I made half an hour pass that way. We were still waiting. I was as fidgety as a squirrel trapped in a cage, but Roger just sat there, calm, his hands in his lap. I like that relaxed quality of his. He almost always seems at ease, comfortable with himself. He isn’t one of those annoying people who talks just to make noise or flails his arms around to get attention. He generally does just what’s right for the occasion. Just then he knew all he could do was wait, so that was what he was doing. He wasn’t even reading one of the tattered old National Geographic magazines that were stacked like a messy yellow mountain on the wicker table in the waiting room.

Me, I was rapidly becoming one of those annoying people. I kept standing up, sitting down, looking at the door, at the desk, out the window. I flipped through the one copy of People magazine that had infiltrated the table with those National Geographics like a rock star who accidentally stumbled into a retirement party. Famous people, pretty clothes, new houses, hot cars. I tried to read it, but it made me think of movie popcorn, overpriced and mostly air. Nothing could take my mind off Bootsie or what had been happening . . . or what might happen next.

“Roger,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he answered, putting his hand on my shoulder.

Then neither of us said anything more. I had a friend close by right now. That made me feel a little less scared.