Days That End in Y Read Online Free PDF

depressing sign I’ve ever heard of.”
    Truth be told, my spirits have dipped a little low, too. A big part of me was looking forward to learning about BillDavies. But looking for him online was like looking for a needle in a haystack, only the haystack was the internet — the biggest haystack in the world.
    “Can’t you just ask your mom?”
    I shake my head. “No way. I told you, she’d read into it and take it too seriously.”
    Mattie wasn’t finished. “But she must have some way to contact him. Maybe she’s been waiting all these years for you to ask, letting you come to her in your own time.”
    “You read too many books,” I say.
    “Maybe you should read
more
books,” Mattie says, just the slightest bit of sass in her voice.
    “Why should I? It’s summer.”
    Mattie rolls her eyes, but laughs. “You never know unless you ask,” she says.
    “Trust me, I know. She’d completely freak out,” I say.

MOVE-IN DAY
    For the past two weeks, whenever he dropped by, Doug brought a box or two over with him. The house is like an obstacle course: boxes in the living room, boxes stacked in the hall outside the master bedroom — there are even a few boxes in the bathroom beside the toilet. I have no desire to open these.
    But today Doug has brought over the final load of boxes and the most significant piece of baggage: Suzy. For such a little dog she sure comes with a lot of stuff. Along with her stainless steel bowls and enormous potato-sack sized bags of food, she has a travel crate, a regular crate, a sleeping pillow, a variety of very worn blankets and an entire box of toys. I don’t mean a shoebox; I mean a box that originally held a microwave. It’s possible that Suzy has more toys than I ever did.
    Having Suzy around might be the weirdest part about Doug moving in. I’ve gotten used to seeing him at the dinner table or watching TV on the couch with my mom, but Suzy will be a new fixture in our everyday lives. Doug will be at work for part of the day, so I won’t really see him much more than I used to before he moved in. But now Suzy will always be around, sniffing at our heels, trying to eat our shoes and crying if we don’t give her enough attention.
    Tonight my mother puts her foot down for the first time since the move-in started. She does not want Suzy to sleep in their room.
    “She’s a cutie, but I don’t need to vacuum dog hair off my comforter every day,” she says.
    Doug appears to take the news quite hard. He looks truly sombre, as if imagining the moment he has to break the news to Suzy. Eventually, he agrees. Annie Delaney is a hard woman to argue with.
    “For now, let’s confine her to the kitchen at night,” Doug says sadly. “It’s probably better if she gets used to the house one room at a time.”
    Suzy has been to our house plenty of times, so she doesn’t seem to get that something is up until Doug traps her in the kitchen with a complicated series of baby gates. At first she thinks it’s a game, jumping around in circles and growling at us through the gate.
    “That sounds threatening,” I say, taking a step back toward my room. “Are you sure that gate will hold?”
    “She’s just playing,” Doug insists.
    “But what if she decides that I’m responsible for locking her up and manages to get out in the middle of the night, hunting me down in my sleep?”
    “She’s a dog, not a tiger, Clarissa.”
    She may be a dog, but right now she’s growling like a tiger. But neither Doug nor Mom seems worried by her aggressive behaviour.
    As we head to our rooms, the growling turns to whining and then barking in loud, evenly spaced barks. It sounds like she’s sending out some kind of doggy distress signal. Any minute now other dogs, from all over town, are going to start barking in response.
    “Is she going to do that all night?” I ask.
    “Probably not,” Doug says.
    “Probably not?” I repeat.
    “Just ignore her.”
    Easier said than done. Suzy has more