Excerpt From Beastly Business

By Myrna Milani

Chapter 2

At seven o'clock the next morning, I sat with another client on the floor of the small room my friend, veterinarian Tony Minnini, had converted for my use in his clinic. Jay was eight-years-old and learning-disabled, and scars on his arms marked where a neighbor's dog had bitten him. As biting cases go, it was pretty typical. Kids sustain far more than their share of bites, boys get bitten more often than girls, and their own or their neighbors' dogs do most of the biting.

This case wasn't typical, though, because unlike the majority of kids bitten, Jay then became very afraid of dogs. The school psychologist suspected the bites were the last straw in a year that included his parents' divorce, a new home, and a new school. All that plus not being able to read as the other kids. She wanted to know if Elizabeth and I could help.

So here we were and, for as often as Elizabeth seems determined to ruin me professionally with her behavior, she takes her job as a reading therapy dog very seriously. While Jay and I sat on the floor reading books to each other, she lay on her pillow on the opposite side of the room with her big brown eyes glued on him. His slightest look in her direction caused her airplane ears to prick up and her whole body to quiver in anticipation, but she didn't budge an inch.

It had been like that for almost two months. One, sometimes two mornings a week, Jay's mom would drop him off at the clinic on her way to work, and he and I would read or talk while Elizabeth watched until it was time for me to drop him off at school. During our last meeting he said that Elizabeth could ride to school with us—if she stayed in the back seat of my old Saab, which she did.

Today's session started out like all the others except that Elizabeth wanted to give that child a doglick more than ever. Had she possessed the necessary muscles and nerves to do so, I'm sure she would have curled her fat little toes around the edge of her pillow to keep herself from bouncing over to him. Everything about her radiated the same message: When?

But I couldn't tell her when because that was a question only Jay could answer.

When the answer did come, at first it was so subtle that I missed it. However, Elizabeth did not. It began when Jay started periodically tapping his fingers on the floor beside him, keeping time with a poem I was reading about marching ants. Every time he did this, Elizabeth would prick up her ears. When he stopped, her ears would sag. Soon boy and dog were involved in a finger-tapping, ear-flapping game that made him forget his fears. Once I realized what was happening, I kept reading the same stanzas over and over again so I wouldn't break the tempo that sustained the game.

Suddenly Jay laughed and called, "Elizabeth, come!"

Elizabeth leaped to her feet, then froze and looked at me. I nodded and, in a gesture that canceled out all her past dog-sins and elevated her to the level of corgi sainthood (if such exists, which seems doubtful), she slowly crept toward him, gently laid her head in his lap, then sighed as if she'd just died and gone to dog-heaven when he began petting her.

It doesn't get much better than that.

* * *

Just to show you how crazy working with animals can make you, though, my benevolent feelings about Elizabeth experienced a complete reversal less than two hours later when I arrived home and grabbed the ringing phone at the same time I noticed my best pair of panties, minus the crotch, under the kitchen table.

"You support a dangerous dog ordinance for Holderness County, Doc?"

I stared at the chewed panties as the caller's words flowed into my ear.

I wanted to say, "God, yes—especially if it includes the dangerous dog currently sitting on my foot! Off with her big-eared, pointy-nosed, undie-eating little head, I say!"

But because I expected the reporter from the Somerset Eagle to ask my views on barking coyotes, foraging bears, blanket-sucking cats, or some other animal behavior like he always did when he called, I merely said, "What?"

"The dangerous dog ordinance. The one everyone's been talking about since that pit bull killed the woman renting Joe Talbot's cottage."

Jeezus.

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