Emily squealed in surprise. "It's the dog on the TV!"
Her mother, staring at me, said, "Keeper?"
But I did not resume my Keeper persona, not yet. I continued to sneer.
The veterinarian looked at me closely. He put his stethoscope down. "Where did you get this dog?" he asked Emily and her mother.
"Why, ah, he just—"
Emily interrupted. "He followed me home from school! And he didn't have a collar, so we couldn't..."
I dropped my sneer and listened intently. My ears were erect, and I'm certain that my eyes had an intelligent, querying look.
Thoughtfully, the doctor rubbed my fur. "He's not sick," he said, stating the obvious. "But he looks very familiar."
"Well, no wonder he looks familiar," Emily's mother said impatiently. "We brought him in here for his shots just last spring."
"No, no, of course I remember that. But he looks familiar in another way."
I sighed. Still on the table, I stood, repeating to myself what had become a sort of mantra of self-display.
Upright, my tail! Forward, my paws!
I tried to shed any remnant of the placid household pet and to show them that I had had a previous existence as a star. Of course I couldn't strut forward, or I would have fallen off the table onto the tile floor, defeating my purpose and destroying my own dignity. And the steel table made it difficult to stand properly, because there was no traction for my claws. But I posed the way I often had in my days as a supermodel: eyes forward, expression one of profound aloofness and disdain.
"Pal?" the veterinarian said suddenly. I turned my head in his direction and felt that we were on our way to revelation.
"Keeper?" Emily said in a puzzled voice. I turned my head to her, too. She raised her hand toward me and I licked it gently. It tasted of sweat and pocket fuzz, not a great combination. But it tasted of Emilyness, too.
The veterinarian went to his filing cabinet, the same cabinet from which he had, just a few minutes before, removed the medical records of a dog named Keeper. This time he rummaged until he found those of Pal. Carefully he compared the weight and description, glancing over at me from time to time as he studied the chart.
"He can't be that dog on the TV," Emily's mother said, "because just this morning I saw that dog in an ad for yogurt!"
"They run those ads over and over, Mom," Emily pointed out. Her voice was very glum. "Probably he made the yogurt ad months ago."
She could, of course, have been correct. But she wasn't. I had never made a yogurt commercial in my life. One does have one's standards.
"Will we have to give him back?" Emily asked in a small voice, and I could see that there were tears in her eyes.
The veterinarian, with Pal's chart and its information in his hand, went to the telephone and began to dial.
We drove home, back to the little ivy-covered farmhouse, and fed the cats, both of them wild with curiosity though they pretended to be blasé. Instead of the usual conversation at dinner between Emily and her mother, there was only the sound of forks against the plates. Occasionally someone said something about the weather, the way humans do when they are overwhelmed by situations. I sat before my bowl, that silly thing with FIDO painted on its side, and nibbled halfheartedly at my food. Gloom filled the kitchen.
In the morning all of us were silent in the car as we proceeded to the city. Each of us, I'm certain, was remembering with dismay the photographer's response to the veterinarian's phone call. He had been overjoyed to hear that I had been found. Yes, he had explained, he had found a substitute dog—a female, he said, confirming what I had known, that it was Wispy—but just think! Now he would have a pair of them! Picture the excitement in the world of advertising!
Emily sat in the back seat with me, and I placed my head in her lap so that she could stroke behind my ears. Gazing up at her, I saw that she was crying, preparing herself sadly to relinquish her beloved pet.
It was not what I had wanted, not at all what my intention had been. I had no desire to return to the photographer and my glamorous city life; those things were what I had run away from months before.
All I had wanted was to see my sister! But I had no way of telling anyone.
As we approached the familiar neighborhood, I lifted myself up and pressed my face against the window of the car. I confess that I gave an extra little lick to the glass, trying to leave as much of myself as possible behind with my family, even in the form of smeared spit. I was gratified to notice that there was dog hair on the seat as well, and a half-chewed rawhide bone lying forgotten on the floor.
I watched Toujours Cuisine slide by as we turned a corner, and I whimpered, recognizing my birthplace there behind it, in the alley. How long ago it all seemed.
Not far away, Emilys mother, checking the written directions she'd been given, parked the car in front of the photographer's apartment building. He still lived in the same luxurious building; I could see that my family was impressed. Sighing, Emily clipped a newly purchased leash to my newly purchased collar. Thankfully, both were tasteful black leather, nothing with rhinestones or a monogram; still, they were a leash and a collar, and I had lived for so long now a free, unfettered country life. It made me sad. It made me inspired to compose. Leash and collar, collar and leash
Make a dog look nouveau riche.
Oh, the irony of it! That under these most unfortunate and worrying circumstances I had put together, with no effort at all, what might have been one of my better poems! The reversed repetition in the first line, the incorporation of the second language, and the clever, clever rhyme—
But I had no time to ponder it further. My brave, beloved Emily held the end of the leash as we ascended in the elevator to the familiar eighth floor, and it was she who patted my head reassuringly as we waited for the photographer to respond to our knock on the door of 8-E.
But it was dear Wispy who, standing at the photographer's side, first looked at me, startled, then sniffed, and finally leaped in joyful recognition and yelped in delight at my return.
"What's going on?" the photographer asked as he and Emily and Emily's mother watched my sister and me roll ecstatically together on the floor. "I thought she'd be territorial and aggressive. I thought he'd be upset at seeing another dog here in his place."
"I thought he'd be frightened," Emily's mother said. "He seemed very nervous in the car."