Shiloh by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page B

Funny thing is, you’ve got yourself a dog, you sometimes feel like you don’t need anyone else. Used to be I’d be waiting at the window for David Howard to come up here for a visit. Nobody else loves you as much as a dog. Except your ma, maybe.
    That night Ma makes us fried chicken for supper. First time in a long while. I put away a wing and a thigh on a saucer—to eat later, I tell Ma—and add a spoonful of squash, which might be good for Shiloh’s insides. He eats anything. The frankfurters and cheese and sour cream is all gone, so I got to be watching for table scraps again and go out can collecting soon.
    Dad’s working on the pickup after dinner—changing the oil—Becky and Dara Lynn’s turning somersaults in the grass, and Ma’s cleaning the kitchen. Soon as her back is turned, I sneak the food off the saucer and head up the hill to see Shiloh.
    I can tell Shiloh likes the fried chicken better than he liked the sour cream-frankfurter mess he’d been eating all week. Even eats the squash, and then he licks my hands and fingers to get all the salt off, anyplace I’d touched a piece of chicken.
    Since I’d already taken him all over creation that morning, I don’t feel he’ll miss much if I don’t take him out again, so I go around scooping up all the dog doo, like I do every day, toss it over the fence, and then I lie down on my back in the grass and cover my face with my arms, our favorite game. Shiloh goes nuts trying to uncover my face, nudging at my arms with his nose, tail going ninety miles an hour. Never whines like somedogs do, though. Even when we’re out in the far meadow, racing the wind, he’ll start to bark and I’ll say, “Shhhh, Shiloh!” and he stops right off.
    Wish I could let him make a little noise. It’s not natural, I know, to keep an animal so quiet. But he’s happy -quiet, not scared -quiet. I know that much.
    I move my arms off my face after a while and let him rest his paws on my chest, and I’m lying there petting his head and he’s got this happy dog-smile on his face. The breeze is blowing cool air in from the west, and I figure I’m about as happy right then as you can get in your whole life.
    And then I hear someone say, “Marty.” I look up, and there’s Ma.

CHAPTER 9
    I can’t move. Seems as if the sky’s swirling around above me, tree branches going every which way. Ma’s face even looks different from down on the ground.
    Shiloh, of course, goes right over, tail wagging, but all the steam’s gone out of me.
    â€œHow long have you had this dog up here?” she asks. Not one trace of a smile on her face.
    I sit up real slow and swallow. “ ’Bout a week, I guess.”
    â€œYou’ve had Judd’s dog up here a week, and you told him you didn’t know where it was?”
    â€œDidn’t say I didn’t know. He asked had I seenhim, and I said I hadn’t seen him in our yard. That much was true.”
    Ma comes around to the trunk of the pine tree, unfastens the wire that holds the fencing closed, and lets herself in. She crouches down in the soft pine needles and Shiloh starts leaping up on her with his front paws, licking at her face.
    I can’t tell at first how she feels about him, the way she leans back, away from his dripping tongue. Then I see her hand reach out, with its short, smooth fingers, and stroke him.
    â€œSo we’ve got ourselves a secret,” she says at last, and when I hear her say “we,” I feel some better. Not a lot, but some.
    â€œHow come you to follow me up here tonight?” I want to know.
    Now I can tell for sure her eyes are smiling, but her lips are still set. “Well, I had my suspicions before, but it was the squash that did it.”
    â€œThe squash?”
    â€œMarty, I never knew you to eat more’n a couple bites of squash in your life, and when you put away a