Stay!: Keeper's Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

of tender appreciation that I had a human of my own. I wondered if he had soft sheets on his bed, and perhaps a thick quilt that smelled of spilled leftovers. I felt immensely happy and poetic, and resolved that my next ode would be better than Lucky I am, which I knew to be inadequate.
    I was to be disappointed, at the end of the day, in most of my expectations. In the evening he led me to his home, and it was barely superior to the one I had left. My last resting place had been under a piece of corrugated cardboard in a dirty alley. This man's home was on a riverbank, below a bridge, under a large piece of flattened tin.
    "Here we are, Lucky," he said as he lifted a corner of the tin and indicated that I should enter, with a somewhat courtly gesture of his hand. Then he made a small fire and heated some of the cans of food that he had bought with the coins from his day's collection.
    Together we dined.
    "My name's Jack," he told me, and I was touched by the introduction, since most humans do not bother with such courtesies toward dogs. Even in my short and unsophisticated life to date, I had observed that there is a brusqueness toward dogs. "Hey, boy!" is often used as a greeting, for example; and food, even the finest French food, is simply tossed on the ground toward its recipient. My mother, a fastidious female, commented on that. "You'd think," she said to me once while cleaning her paws and chin after a visit to Toujours Cuisine, "that they'd serve something as elegant as saucisson en brioche on a plate, at least."
    I didn't, of course, compare my first dinner with Jack to fine cuisine. It was shared stew from a can, with river water to wash it down for me and a beer for Jack, who burped afterward without apology. But there was a sweetness to the camaraderie, and I felt a sense of safety which made up for the lack of elegance. I curled beside him under the tin, and we slept soundly together, covered by an old army overcoat, frayed at the seams, which he tucked around us both.
    O lucky lucky lucky me, I murmured to myself before I fell asleep.

Chapter 5
    I SETTLED IN AND stayed with Jack, the man who called me Lucky. He was not always as honest as one would like a human to be, and he was not particularly clean, a thing that matters to dogs.
    But he was kind. From his collected coins, he always purchased a can of dogfood first. (I preferred, actually, the beef stew intended for humans, but Jack thought that he was doing me a favor by purchasing food designated for dogs. It is a mistake that humans often make.) Then he stocked up on his own favorite treats, California jug wine and a bag of bacon curls. We dined together each evening, under the bridge. He always dipped a plastic bowl of water for me, from the river. could easily have stood at the edge and lapped, but he seemed to like the niceties and the togetherness, so I drank from a bowl as he refreshed himself from the jug.
    Sometimes he toasted me. "Here's to you, Lucky!" he would say affectionately, raising his jug toward the sky. Then he would scratch my ears, and I would lick his hand in acknowledgment.
    At night I slept curled by his side, the two of us under the sheet of tin that he called home.
    "I had a bed once, Lucky," he told me one evening as we arranged ourselves for sleep. "And a house. But things turned bad."
    Having never lived in a house myself at that time, I probably did not fully appreciate the downward turn his life had taken. The tin roof over us, the plastic bowl, and the dependable can of food, though not a name brand and certainly nothing like the entrées from Toujours Cuisine, seemed home enough for me.
    "Yessir," he said mournfully, "I had a home once. And a family."
    I lamented with him the loss of family, having suffered through it myself. So I looked up at him mournfully, encouraging him to talk more.
    "Yessir," Jack went on. "Had a wife once, Lucky. But just look what happens. You make a dumb mistake or two. Then it all falls