“You see?” he asked. “An excursion. I told you it was going to be a big day, kid.” He hit a few keys, then leaned back in his chair. “You know, if you’re going into town, you’ll be by Henson’s. And if you wouldn’t mind picking me up some licorice…”
Ten minutes later, Warren, Murphy, and I arrived at Doggone It!, Warren staying a good three steps behind us. Despite the fact that I could lift Murphy with one hand—not that I wanted to; my father had been right about his smell, and we’d had to drive with all the windows down—Warren still didn’t seem convinced that he wasn’t going to turn into a murderous beast at any moment.
The store was fairly small, with birds in cages, a large aquarium full of fish, kittens in a pen along one wall, and the rest devoted to pet accessories. It looked like there was a grooming station to the back, behind the register. There was nobody behind the counter, and no helpful bell to ring, like there had been at Borrowed Thyme. I looked around for a moment, but the only sound in the store was one of the birds chirping loudly, in what I was pretty sure was an imitation of a car alarm going off.
“Hello?” Warren called, causing the bird to chirp even more loudly.
“Coming, coming, so sorry!” a voice called out from the back. The door opened, and the girl I’d seen before—the one who’d offered to make the phone call for my father—came out, wiping her hands on a red DOGGONE IT! apron that covered up a white T-shirt and jeans. Upon seeing her closer, I could tell she was about my age, with blue eyes, a sweet-looking, heart-shaped face, and long red hair in braids that reached past her shoulders. She glanced from me to Warren, smiling. “What can I do for you?” I noticed that the stitched embroidery on her apron read Wendy.
“Well,” I started, when I heard my brother make a strange throat-clearing noise. Warren was staring at Wendy, his mouth hanging open slightly, and he was apparently trying to form words, without much luck. “We found this dog,” I said as I lifted Murphy up to the counter, where he sat immediately, looking around, seeming to enjoy the elevated view. To my surprise, my brother didn’t immediately move away, but stayed right where he was, in close dog proximity. “And we didn’t know where he’d come from,” I said. “I heard you can check for microchips here?”
“Right,” Warren said, jumping in a moment too late, recovering the power of speech. “Microchips.”
“Are you lost, buddy?” Wendy asked. She reached forward and scratched just behind Murphy’s ears, not seeming to care about how he smelled. He closed his eyes and his tail thumped on the counter, onto a stack of pamphlets about flea collars. “Well, we can check for that, no problem.” She reached under the counter and pulled out a device that looked a little bit like a remote control, with a screen taking up the top half. She ran it slowly over the dog’s back while scratching his ears with her opposite hand. When she passed a spot just below his shoulder blade, the device beeped. “There you go!” she said, smiling at Warren and me. I noticed Warren smiled back, but not in time, because she was already sitting down and wheeling her chair over to the computer.
“So do we know who he belongs to?” I asked, leaning over the dog on the counter to try to see what she was looking at.
“Not yet,” she said. “That only gave us the microchip number. I just have to check the database and it should tell us where this little guy lives.”
“Or girl,” I said, since we still didn’t have confirmation on this, and I was pretty much going off the fact that his collar was blue. Wendy stopped scrolling through her screen and stood up again, lifting the dog’s front paws up.
“Nope,” she said. “Definitely guy.” She sat back down again, and started typing.
“Did you know that the name Wendy came into usage in 1904?” Warren asked suddenly, all in a rush. “Through J.M. Barrie, in his play Peter and Wendy, which later became Peter Pan.”
Wendy looked at Warren quizzically, and I felt myself do the same. I was about to interject, say that my brother had had too much sun today or something, when she smiled wide. “I never knew that,” she said. “Thanks.”
Warren nodded, then said, in a voice that sounded like he was trying very hard to be casual, but failing miserably, “Have you, um, worked here long?”
“About a month now,” she said, giving him a quick glance before returning to the computer. “Just making some extra money before starting school in the fall.”
“Oh?” Warren was practically eye-to-eye with the dog, he was leaning so far over the counter to continue this conversation. The dog took advantage of this opportunity and licked his ear and Warren, to his credit, only flinched slightly. “Where are you going?”
“Stroudsburg State,” she said, still looking at the computer. “They’ve got a great veterinary program.”
“Great,” Warren said, trying to disengage himself from the dog, who had now moved on to enthusiastically licking his face. “That’s great.”
I turned and stared at my brother, trying to contain my astonishment. Warren had always been a college snob, but it had just gotten worse since he’d gotten into an Ivy. I’d heard him refer to Stanford as his “safety.” The fact that he was talking positively about a school I was fairly sure he’d never heard of five minutes ago was so out of character that it was shocking. But then again, I’d never seen Warren this way around a girl before, ever.
“Okay,” Wendy said as she leaned closer to the screen, “it looks like we have a match!”
“Excellent,” I said, wondering what the next step was—if she would contact the owners, or if we would have to. Either way, as friendly as this dog seemed, I was ready to send him back where he belonged.
“And,” she said, scrolling down her screen, “it looks like the microchipping was actually done here, so he’s local. Which is a good thing. His address is…” She paused, then said, “84 Dockside Road in Lake Phoenix.” She looked at us and smiled, and I just stared back at her, sure that I’d heard wrong. “It’s not too far from here,” she added after a moment. “I could print out directions.”
“I know where it is,” I said, staring down at the dog. I now understood why he was so eager to make it up our driveway. “That’s our house.”