Me and My Baby View the Eclipse Read Online Free PDF Page B

named Olan Barker who had moved in with his family up the street. So Sandy was doing better, all in all, and his interest in Bob had waned. Oh, Sandy still patted him, and fed him sometimes, but he never took Bob walking—and in all fairness to Sandy, he almost
couldn’t
. For Bob had grown and grown. Sandy couldn’t control him. Bob had become Cheryl’s dog, finally, totally, after all. And sometimes he still got out of his pen: He’d move a cinder block, tunnel out, and run wild until somebody called the police, who came and got him and put him in the pound.
    *   *   *
    T his happened in late September. When Cheryl went down to the police station to get him, the officer in charge was very friendly. At first he said there’d be a forty-two-dollar fine and then when Cheryl looked stunned to hear that—it was the end of the month, she wouldn’t get paid till the first, and David had paid only half his child support for reasons he hadn’t explained—when she looked so depressed, the officer in charge said, well, nobody was there but them, and why didn’t he just tear up the ticket like this?—he tore it up before her eyes and dropped it in the basket by his desk—and he’d issue Bob a warning instead. He filled out the warning on a green card and handed it to her.
    This officer was young, blond, and plump, with a big wide smile. He said that actually he didn’t give a damn, that he didn’t think the police ought to have to deal with dogs anyway, that every other town he’d ever heard of had a dogcatcher. He said this was a one-horse town in his opinion, with no nightlife. He said he was from Gainesville, Florida. He wore a badge that said “M. Herron,” so Cheryl guessed this was his name. She looked around the police station, and he was right. Nobody else was there at all.
    The police station used to be the agriculture extension office. She’d had 4-H in here. The gray painted concrete floor was exactly the same. Almost the only way you could tell it was a police station now was by the messiness of it—cigarette butts jabbed down in sand-filled containers, paper cups on the floor. The county extension agent, Louise Gore, would never have allowed this disorder. Cheryl remembered Miss Gore’s tight yellow curls and how particular she was about buttonholes. It was right here, all those years ago, that Cheryl had started sewing. She’d made an apron, an overblouse, a Christmas-tree skirt with felt appliqués. Now wanted posters hung on the wall, full-face and profile: One man, bearded, looked like David. Or she thought he did.
    Cheryl, daydreaming, was so confused that when M. Herron offered to pick up Bob at the dog pound and bring him home after he got off duty, she said yes. Later she realized she should have said no. But by then it was too late. And when M. Herron showed up just at dark in his police car, it was real exciting. Clearly, Bob was glad to be home. He barked and lunged at them all and rolled on the grass. It took Cheryl, M. Herron, and Louis all working together to catch him and put him back on the stakeout chain, where he’d have to stay until Cheryl could get his pen fixed.
    Then M. Herron let Mary Duke and Sandy get in the police car and showed them how everything worked. They even got to talk to headquarters on the radio, and M. Herron drove them around the block with the blue light flashing. He told Netta he loved children. When he finally left, Angela said he was cute. “Ha!” Netta said.
    M. Herron came back on Tuesday, Cheryl’s morning off, to give them some free burglar-prevention advice which he said they needed. By coincidence, Netta was not at home, having gone to the outlet mall. M. Herron was not wearing his uniform. He walked through every inch of their house checking doors and windows and then advised Cheryl to go right out and buy deadbolt locks. “You can’t be