The Truth of the Matter by Robb Forman Dew Page A

like to pay for him. I have a collar around someplace, I think. I’ll be glad to have him,” she said. “I’ll take good care of him.” She turned to Ernie, who was a scrawny little boy with a very round head too big for his body, and features so unassertive that Agnes was always unreasonably annoyed at him. “You can come visit your dog anytime you want to before you leave, Ernie. You can walk home from school with me tomorrow if you like.” But Ernie looked blank, and when Agnes turned away and slapped her hand against the skirt of her coat to signal the dog to follow, the dog came right along by her side.
    She and the dog moved away from the Mullinses’ house and turned the corner onto Marshal Avenue, and still Agnes was floundering for the right thing to say. “Good boy! Good boy!” she said to the dog, finally, who moved along with her briskly. She was surprised to find that she was shy about addressing him at all, and she was especially embarrassed to think of calling him King, which seemed such a silly name for a dog, but she did want to encourage him. “Good boy! You’re a good boy, Pup!” And “Pup” was as much as she could impose on this amiable dog. She glanced at him and thought that she had no right to invent a name for him. He seemed to be a dog who was perfectly aware of who he was.
    When Dwight and Claytor were six or seven years old, Warren had come home one day with two puppies. Agnes had been baffled, but the boys were delighted, and she didn’t say anything to Warren until that night when all the children were finally in bed. “I don’t understand why you bought two dogs, Warren,” she said. “They aren’t littermates.”
    “Oh, no. I was at the Aldridge’s in Coshocton, and they have a nice hound of some kind or other who just had pups. They only had that one left.” Agnes eyed the puppy, and wondered what his father had been, because he already had coarse brown fur that stuck out all over. Not at all like any hound she’d ever seen. Maybe it wouldn’t have a hound’s personality, either.
    “Hounds are hard to train, though,” Agnes said. The other dog was about three months old, Agnes would have guessed, and looked to her like it might be part collie. It had a sweet face and tipped ears.
    “I don’t know how you do it,” Warren said to her, his voice suddenly nasal and sharp, “but you manage to throw cold water on every surprise I come up with!” He shook his head briefly in resigned disappointment. But then his tone fell back into its normal, amiable resonance as he recalled his day. “I had to search high and low to find another puppy. But when I was in the bank and happened to say I needed one, one of the clerks spoke up and said his brother’s dog had had pups a few months ago. I went on over there and there were three left, in fact. I thought that one was the best looking of the lot.”
    “He does have a sweet face,” Agnes acknowledged. “But why two
males?
They might not get on together so well . . .”
    “Agnes,” he said, explaining to her patiently, “can you imagine how bad either Dwight or Claytor would feel if there was just one puppy and it took to one of them more than the other? I remembered how I admired Robert’s dog when we were growing up. Ajax was devoted to Robert, of course. Sometimes I just couldn’t stand that idea. It was hard to feel that dog wouldn’t like me as much as he liked Robert. I was always with Robert. Always in and out of his house. Well, Ajax was really Mrs. Butler’s dog. She didn’t want him to roam. Robert and I would mark off twenty paces and then stand apart and both of us would call the dog to see who he would come to. ‘Jackie’ was what we called him. Mrs. Butler was the only one who called him Ajax.”
    Agnes waited for him to go on, but his attention had wandered back to the newspaper. “And who did he go to?” she finally asked, in spite of herself.
    Warren looked up, raising his eyebrows in a question,