7

—

Later that night it started snowing. It was still snowing the next morning, Boxing Day, when Nicola walked June Bug over to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church. Out front, the nativity scene was blanketed in white. All that showed were the heads and shoulders of the three plywood wise men and the plywood angel hovering above them, painted gold.

Nicola didn’t really expect to find Ignacio at the church. She only hoped. She hoped, and there he was, shoveling the steps in a big hat with earflaps.

Eventually he noticed June Bug — her black patch, one black ear and two pleading black eyes, emerging from the white blur.

“Your dog is cold,” he told Nicola, who was attached to the other end of the leash. “Do you want to bring her inside and warm her up?”

“I don’t think we should, Ignacio. I really don’t.”

Only when she said his name did he recognize her. “You’re Lindsay’s friend. Nicola, right?”

“She sits beside me at school.”

“And this is the bad dog you told me about? You don’t think she’d make trouble in a church, do you?”

“I know she will,” Nicola said.

Ignacio left the shovel and came down the steps. He asked if he could hold June Bug.

“Be careful,” Nicola said. “If she really likes you, she’ll bite your nose.”

He unzipped his parka and slid the dog’s small, shivering body in against his chest. June Bug licked his face.

Nicola got straight to the point. “What you told me before, Ignacio? That dogs don’t go to hell? Are you really sure about that?”

“Pretty sure,” he said.

“She almost got arrested.”

“What? This little creature?” He looked down at June Bug’s head poking out so sweetly from under his chin. “I don’t believe it.”

Nicola nodded. “Yesterday. Christmas Day. Anyway, I got another idea. Once there was a scary movie on TV that I wasn’t allowed to watch. I wasn’t allowed to know anything about it. So of course my brother Jared told me everything and I couldn’t sleep for a whole year. It was about a girl who got infected by a devil. She had to be exercised.”

“I think you mean exorcised,” Ignacio said.

“A priest exercised her,” Nicola said.

“How?”

“Jared didn’t say. He just said her head turned completely around and the devil left. Do you think June Bug got infected?”

The janitor laughed.

“Could you ask the priest to exercise June Bug? Just in case?”

“Father Mark? I don’t think he does that. But I could throw a ball for her,” Ignacio said.

“That’s not going to do it.” Nicola sank to her knees with her mittens pressed together. Huge white flakes floated silently down around her. “Please, Ignacio. She only has One More Chance. Then they’ll send her away. She’ll go to hell for sure.”

Ignacio’s face under the earflap hat was already red from shoveling and from the cold. Nicola thought it looked redder now. He asked her to get off her knees. When she refused, he sat on the bottom step and looked at her with his kind gray eyes.

“What do you do when you’ve done a bad thing, Nicola?”

“Yesterday? After June Bug stole someone’s turkey? Me and my mom tried to find the people.”

“She stole someone’s turkey?” He looked shocked.

“Yes! We brought what was left of our turkey so they could have Christmas dinner. Also fifty dollars from June Bug’s damage fund. Mom said it looked like a fifty-dollar turkey. Well, the part we saw looked like thirty dollars. The other part you couldn’t pay someone to take.”

“So you tried to do a good deed to make up for it?”

Nicola brightened. “That’s a good idea! I’ll do something good!”

“Now, Nicola. You already confessed for June Bug, which is fine. She can’t talk. But if you do her good deed, too, nothing’s going to change. She has to do the good deed herself.”

“That’s going to be difficult.”

“It will be easy! A few minutes ago I turned around and saw June Bug for the first time. You know what I felt? I felt filled with happiness. Just looking at this cute dog made me happy. Looking at her now, warm in my coat? I’m overjoyed! I’m ecstatic!” He threw one arm in the air. The other was holding the dog.

Nicola smiled. “She’s good when she’s asleep.”

“What else is she good at?”

“Besides being bad? Kissing. And she can do tricks.”

“Tricks?” Ignacio said. “People take their pets around to hospitals and nursing homes and places like that. You could do that. She could show off her tricks.”

“I’d be afraid to take her to a hospital.”

“You could try. Do you want to? I’ll ask Father Mark if he knows a place. Come back next week, okay?”

Nicola tried not to sound discouraged, but a week was a long time. Long enough for a little dog to do a lot more damage.

Ignacio unzipped his coat and lifted June Bug out. Nicola decided to carry her. Taking her from the warm place next to Ignacio’s heart and setting her down in the cold snow seemed cruel.

“See you soon,” Ignacio said before he went back up the church steps to finish shoveling. “We’ll save June Bug.”

“I hope so.”

Nicola trudged off with her little dog under her arm, heading in the general direction of home, preoccupied with worry and paying no attention to which street she took. Except for the squeak of her boots in the cold, the whole white world was silent.

June Bug squirmed to be put down.

“There you go,” Nicola said.

June Bug started pulling. She pulled and sniffed and made those strange ork ork ork sounds that used to frighten Nicola until the vet explained that June Bug wasn’t having an asthma attack, but reverse sneezing.

The snow was getting up her nose, but still she sniffed and sneezed and pulled Nicola on, excited about whatever scent she’d picked up.

Until, abruptly, she stopped.

In the snow bank, some child had swished out an angel — a crisp, perfectly outlined impression with a skirt and wings. June Bug sniffed at it and her stubby tail wagged.

Beyond the snow angel was a low concrete building with high windows and a wooden fence. It could have been an office or a small factory, except for the sign:

SHADY OAKS RETIREMENT HOME

Nicola gave herself a little shake. June Bug did, too, jangling the tags on her collar. She looked at Nicola and tilted her head.

Sometimes it seemed to Nicola that she and June Bug communicated perfectly. Like now. June Bug seemed to have pulled her to the very place they ­needed.

Now she seemed to be saying, “Let’s go in.”

“Okay,” Nicola said.

No one at the Shady Oaks Retirement Home had recently shoveled. Nicola carried June Bug again, stepping in the old footprints half filled with fresh snow. These led up a wheelchair ramp to the front door, which was glass. In the vestibule, a few coats hung on hooks. An inner glass door faced a desk.

Nicola tried the outer door, but it was locked. She pressed the intercom button — twice, then three times — before an impatient voice answered, “Can I help you?”

“I’m here to talk to someone about visiting. With my dog.”

Through the glass doors, Nicola could see a plump woman with dyed blonde hair. Not young, but not old, either. A nurse, Nicola guessed from her pajama-like uniform. She was standing behind the desk, which must have been a nursing station, holding the phone and looking through the glass doors right at June Bug.

The second the nurse laid eyes on the little dog, she smiled, just like Ignacio had said.

The front door buzzed and unlocked with a click.

Nicola put June Bug down in the vestibule and stamped the snow off her boots. June Bug sniffed the doormat madly. To her, a doormat was a list of all the people who had ever been to a place. June Bug seemed very interested in who came and went from Shady Oaks.

The nurse met them at the inner door, which was also locked. When she opened it, an odor washed over Nicola, a combination of disinfectant and pee tinged with something sweet.

“And who have we here?” the nurse cooed to June Bug, who wagged, then almost burst through the nurse’s legs and into the building that smelled so awful to Nicola, but obviously not to June Bug.

“What’s your dog’s name?”

“June Bug.”

“Help! Get them out of here!” a man’s voice called.

The nurse bent down to pat June Bug. Behind her, Nicola could see an old woman hunched in a wheelchair beside the nursing station. She was wearing a bib, her head tipped forward. Somewhere nearby, commercials blared out of a TV.

“So cute,” the nurse said. “He or she?”

“She,” Nicola said.

The man called for help again.

“And you want to bring her to visit? I’ll have to ask Mr. Devon. He’s the manager. We’ve been under new management since the summer. There are so many different rules now.” She pursed her lips, and Nicola could tell she didn’t like these new rules.

Meanwhile, the person calling for help was either coming closer, or yelling louder. “Help!”

“I’ll tell you what, sweetheart. What’s your name?”

“Nicola.”

“Nicola, I’m Jorie. Come back tomorrow. I’ll run it by Mr. Devon this afternoon.”

Around the corner came an old man in a stretched brown cardigan flecked with dried bits of food. He was bald except for his eyebrows — which were like insect feelers — and the tufts of white hair above and in his ears. The way he walked, stepping with his left leg and dragging the other up to meet it, his right arm dangling, reminded Nicola of a monster in a horror movie.

June Bug rushed over with her usual greeting.

“Who are you?” he boomed at Nicola.

“Mr. Milton,” Jorie said in a voice nearly as loud as his. She didn’t sound angry. She was trying to soothe him. “This little girl has dropped by with her dog. Maybe you’ll get to visit with them tomorrow, if Mr. Devon says it’s all right.”

Words slurred from the stretched side of his mouth. “Are you a stranger?”

Nicola was too frightened to answer.

Jorie said, “She’s not a stranger. Her name is Nicola.”

“Do not forget to entertain strangers!” Mr. Milton bellowed.

Jorie patted the old man’s shoulder. “We won’t, Mr. Milton. We certainly won’t.”

To Nicola she said, “Sweetie? Come back tomorrow.”

Nicola turned to go, pulling June Bug, who seemed to want to stay.

Back outside, Nicola paused on the ramp, gulping air that, though freezing, was at least fresh. Then she and June Bug retraced their steps down the snowy walk, June Bug leaping from footprint to footprint.

They reached the sidewalk and had just turned for home when Nicola heard an ominous thunk behind her. A gray car pulling up at Shady Oaks.

The driver got out, a man dressed in a dark overcoat, a large fur hat like a tea cozy, and tinted glasses. A cigarette dangled from his lips, his exhalations forming clouds in the cold air.

When the man reached the place where the angel was swished out in the snow bank, he stopped, the way Nicola and June Bug had.

What he did next made Nicola cringe.

He stepped on the angel, sinking his boot knee-deep into the snow. He stamped and stamped.

Then he continued up the walk to Shady Oaks Retirement Home.