I didn’t want a new home. I wanted the shed. I wanted Mother. I wanted the garbage heap. I wanted Yellow Man and the mice and Matthias. I wanted Bone and me curled up on our burlap nest. When Bone had walked away from our shed that morning, I hadn’t thought about why. Was it to escape a place he felt was dangerous? Was it to search for a safe new home? I wouldn’t have left, but Bone had chosen to. Maybe he had a reason, maybe not. It didn’t matter, because here were George and Marcy carrying us to their house and they were making the choices now.

Marcy unlocked the door to our new home. The house was smaller than the Merrions’ and bigger than the little one at the edge of the field, but with hardly any space between it and the house on either side. And all along the road were houses, houses, and more houses, each with a flat yard in front, planted with spindly trees.

Marcy opened the door, stepped into a cool dark room, and placed me on the floor. “There you go,” she said to me. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”

I licked at the foam around my mouth as George carried Bone inside and set him on the floor next to me. I looked miserably at Bone. My stomach was sloshing around like the stream we had played in, and I needed to pee. In our shed home, we were careful not to pee in our nest (we rarely even peed in the shed), so I stepped delicately off of the rug Bone and I were standing on, squatted, and peed on the floor by the door.

“Hey!” shouted George. “Bad dog! Bad dog! Stop that!” He grabbed me up, pee dribbling from between my legs, shoved the front door open, and tossed me onto the steps.

From inside I could hear Bone let out a high-pitched angry bark, and Marcy say, “George, calm down.”

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do out there on the steps. I had finished peeing, and I wanted to get away from George and Marcy, but Bone was still in the house. So I sat trembling before the door until Marcy opened it and brought me inside again.

“Now, look here,” she said as she herded Bone and me into a large room with a table in the center and no rug on the floor. “You can’t pee indoors. Do you understand? No peeing!”

“Marcy, for heaven’s sake, they don’t know what you’re saying,” George called. He was in the other room, swishing a rag over the puddle I had made. “And they’re not housebroken. I hope you realize that. They’re not housebroken. Do you really want the job of housebreaking two puppies?”

“How difficult can it be?” Marcy called back to him. “They’re young. This is when you’re supposed to teach them.”

She looked down and saw Bone lifting his leg against a wooden chair, saw me pooping in a corner of the room, and quietly swatted each of us on our bottoms. Then she hissed, “Bad dogs!” in a voice not loud enough for George to hear, and cleaned up our messes quickly.

Bone and I retreated under the table and hid among a maze of chair legs. After Marcy had finished cleaning up, she said, “Okay! Suppertime!” and fished under the table for us. Bone let out a long low growl, while I backed away from her.

“Go ahead, growl if you want,” said Marcy, wounded. She stood up. “You’ll come out when I offer you food.”

“What are you going to feed them?” asked George. He entered the room with a fistful of soggy paper towels.

Marcy was opening and closing cabinets. “Well, I’ll get them some dog food tomorrow. For now they can eat —”

I didn’t hear what Marcy was going to suggest, because at that moment George lifted the lid on a garbage pail, and Bone shot out from under the table, knocked the pail over, and pounced on the food scraps.

I forgot about my misery when I smelled all those familiar odors — eggs and bologna and cookie crumbs and apple peelings. I forgot about my stomach, too. I was hungry, I was starving, and here was another garbage heap. I snatched at a piece of turkey, and Bone whisked a stale piece of bread — a whole piece! — under the table and ate it in big gulps, growling all the while.

“No, no, NO!” George shouted. “Marcy, will you look at this mess.”

Marcy yanked the can upright and tried to gather the spilled garbage into a heap, while Bone and I kept darting out from under the table to grab at more bits of food.

“No!” Marcy yelled again and again. “Bad dogs!”

Bone and I didn’t settle down until we were full of food scraps. Then we fell asleep under the table.

I knew that at some point Marcy slid my brother and me out from under the table. She did this gently, saying, “Oh, tired puppies, tired puppies. Look how sleepy you are.”

I knew she and George sat on the kitchen floor for a long time, Bone in her lap, I in George’s.

I knew these things, and Bone knew these things, but after our day of traveling we were suddenly so tired we couldn’t even open our eyes.

“Tired puppies,” Marcy murmured again, stroking Bone’s back.

George stroked my back and now his hand — the one that had flung me out the door — felt more like Matthias’s.

“How old do you think they are?” Marcy whispered to George.

George continued stroking my back. “I don’t know. They must be several months old at least. I don’t think they’re baby babies. Maybe five months?”

“Still pretty young,” said Marcy. “We’ll have to get them to the vet soon. We don’t even know if they’re boys or girls.” She paused. “I wonder what they’re doing on their own.”

“They’re probably feral, you know,” George replied. “I don’t think they’ve lived with people before.”

I fell sound asleep then. I didn’t waken until I felt myself being lifted up and carried somewhere. I opened my eyes and found that George and Marcy were settling Bone and me in a large box in that room with no rug. The box was lined with newspapers.

“This will be your bed tonight,” said Marcy. She patted us on our heads. “Tomorrow we’ll get you something better. Good night, puppies.”

The room went dark and I could hear footsteps trail up and away from us. For a long time I tried to nestle into Bone, to curl into him and pretend we were safely tucked into our burlap bed. But I needed to pee and I missed the rustling of the mice and the soft sighs and mews of Yellow Man and the cats. I listened hard for anything familiar, for owls or even coyotes. I thought I heard some faint cricket songs, but that was all.

I edged away from Bone. I had to pee desperately now, but I didn’t want to go in our bed. Bone was restless, too, and probably needed to pee just as desperately as I did.

I let out a whimper. Bone let out a louder whimper. I whined. And then Bone started to howl. I joined him, and we howled and cried until suddenly the room grew bright and there stood Marcy, her hands on her hips.

“What on earth is wrong?” she exclaimed. “For heaven’s sake, be quiet, puppies.”

Bone and I stood up, resting our front feet against the sides of the box. We jumped and yipped and whimpered.

Marcy glanced over her shoulder. “It is two o’clock in the morning,” she said fiercely. “Please. You have to be quiet.”

My bladder was about to burst. I barked sharply.

“Okay. That does it.” Marcy dragged the box out of the room, down a short hallway, and into a small space. “If you can’t be quiet, you’ll have to spend the night here in the laundry room.” I heard a click, the room became dark, and Marcy left, slamming the door behind her.

Bone and I cried some more, and then I finally peed in a corner of our box. Bone peed where I had peed. Now our box was wet and it was smelly, but we were exhausted again, so at last we fell asleep.

 

When Bone and I lived in the shed we woke slowly each morning as the rays of the sun crept through the windows and lightened our home. When I awoke in the laundry room I had no idea whether morning had come. The room was as black as midnight.

I sat up in our stinky box and poked my nose into Bone. He whimpered and turned over. I heard a noise then, a small thump, and Marcy opened the door.

“Morning, puppies,” she whispered. “I see you finally settled down.” Marcy reached into the box and was stroking me when Bone woke suddenly, saw the large hand on his sister’s back, darted forward, and bit the hand.

“Ow! Stop it!” cried Marcy. She slapped Bone across his nose and stood up fast. Bone yelped.

“Marcy? What is it?” called George.

“The tan puppy just bit me.”

George appeared in the doorway. “Okay. That does it. Those puppies go today. We don’t need this, Marcy.”

“No, no, please. Just give them one more chance.”

George scowled. “Forget it.”

“No, really. One more chance.”

George shook his head.

Bone and I didn’t know what another chance was, but if we had, we wouldn’t have wanted it. In any case, we lost the chance. The moment Marcy carried us, very gingerly, back to the room where we had eaten our dinner of stolen scraps, Bone squirmed out of her grasp, tore across the floor to another pail of garbage, wrestled it over, and began tossing bits of food to me.

Marcy looked helplessly at George and said, “I have to leave for work now.”

“Great. So this is my mess to clean up?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t help it. I —”

“Never mind. Just go.”

Marcy looked at Bone and me, started to say something, then turned and left the room.

As soon as my brother and I had stopped growling and eating, George stuffed us into a carton, smaller than the one we had spent the night in, tossed the carton onto the front seat of his car, started the engine with a roar, and drove away very fast.