Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings Read Online Free PDF Page A

biopsy in three days and I could call her at four o’clock on Thursday—just what I was hoping for, more waiting.
    I got dressed, thinking only about what I could do to get more information. But when I went up the stairs to pay my bill and saw Rich sitting by the desk, my detached journalist mode gave way and I wanted to cry. But I didn’t. I paid my $1,500 bill with Rich standing next to me. He took my hand and we left the office.
    Once the elevator doors closed, Rich took me in his arms and said “I love you,” as he held me tight. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it. I promise.”
    And then, finally, we walked out into the cool, moist afternoon air.
    I met Rich Pinsky when I was twenty-three years old and he was thirty-one. I had now known him for more years of my life than I had not known him. We met while working temporary jobs at a social service agency, each of us on our way to writing careers. My memory is that Rich said something to me about my smile; his memory is that I updated him on that day’s political news, that Jimmy Carter had appointed Edmund Muskie secretary of state.
    Neither of us had any money then. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other on a tight budget—walking through Central Park, sitting in coffee shops, wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and taking the PATH train to Hoboken, New Jersey, where at night you could sit and look across the Hudson River at the glittering Manhattan skyline.
    In the years we had been married, we had our share of trials—my father’s death, Rich’s hip replacement surgery, periods of financial struggle, the death of close friends. But we had never faced a health matter that threatened to take one of us from the other.
    There was not much to do at this point but pray. We walked home, hand in hand. I explained to Rich about the morose doctor and the sonogram and the needle that made a popping sound. I told him I really had no information beyond the doctor saying that she thinks the mass she saw is likely to be cancerous. He reacted the way I did—he pushed his emotions to some far corner of his heart. “Let’s wait and see,” he said. “Let’s wait until we know what if anything we are dealing with and then we’ll figure out how to proceed.”
    We stopped by my local church, St. Ignatius Loyola. We slipped in through a side door of the Roman basilicalike church and walked down a long aisle, past the baptismal font and depictions of the first seven Stations of the Cross, to a small altar. I lit a candle and prayed for strength. I don’t know if I felt the closeness of God or the closeness of childhood, but I felt calmed.
    I sat down in a pew with Rich beside me and I thought about my childhood, the happiest days of which were spent in Fairfield, Connecticut, where I lived with my parents, two sisters, a brother, and a dog in a white colonial house on a dead-end street with a brook at one end and a hill at the other. At the top of the hill, a stone fence and two white boulders marked the divide between our street and the property of an adjacent country club. When I asked my father why we didn’t belong to the country club, he told me it was because “Clubs are designed to keep people out, and I don’t think that’s something we’d want to be a part of.”
    It was a close-knit neighborhood. On hot summer nights, the kids on the block stayed outside playing kick-ball in the middle of the street until it was so dark we could no longer see the ball. We went sled riding and ice-skating in the winter. In spring, we rode our bicycles down the hill, daring each other to do it without holding on to the handlebars and without falling off at a spot where tree roots pushed through the concrete.
    My sister Barbara and I used to play “train” on the winding steps leading to the attic bedrooms. Barbara had been given some toy suitcases one Christmas. We’d pack them full of our dolls’ clothes, take the luggage and the dolls, and