And I had just kidnapped a golden doodle off a front porch in broad daylight.
For a woman.
If Dank could see me right now he would never let me live it down. We laughed on how he was the tender one and how I was stiff when it came to women. That’s why he couldn’t understand the Cherish situation.
But I knew Ivy. I knew what that dog meant to her. She would tear this city apart looking for Goldie and every minute that passed without answers was going to be a minute where she thought about exactly who was unhinged enough to pull something like this. To steal a sweet, innocent dog.
She was going to eventually call me crying about this. And when she called me, she was going to understand that I was done waiting.
Goldie put her head between the two front seats and looked at me and I reached over and scratched behind her ear.
“You good,” I told her. “Nobody’s gonna hurt you.”
She licked my hand.
I kept driving. Now, I had to go get our dog some food. Maybe some clothes, and a little doggy bed.
I came back out that front door and looked at the railing and my whole body stopped.
The leash was there. Unhooked, just hanging there against the wood like it had always been empty. Goldie was gone.
I stood on that porch for a full three seconds before my brain caught up to what my eyes were telling me and then I was off the porch and down the steps calling her name before I even made a conscious decision to move.
“Goldie. Goldie!”
Up the walkway, out to the sidewalk, both directions. Nothing. No movement, no sound, no curly fur bounding toward me from anywhere. I went left because that was the direction we usually walked and I was calling her name and my voice was already doing the thing it did when I was trying not to cry, that tight high pitch that I hated the sound of.
I made it half a block before I turned around and went back because maybe she had gotten loose and gone around the back. She hadn’t. I checked anyway. Called her name at the side gate, at the back fence, everywhere that made and didn’t make sense.
Brendon came out the front door when he heard me.
“What happened?” He was already reading my face before I answered.
“She’s gone.” My voice broke on the second word. “I hooked her to the railing and ran inside for two minutes and she’s just gone.”
He was off the porch and past me immediately. He went to the railing and looked at the unhooked leash and I watched his face go through the same sequence mine had. Disbelief then alarm then that particular expression that Brendon got when he shifted into problem solving mode, jaw set, eyes moving.
“The camera,” he said, already pulling out his phone.
I looked at the ring camera mounted above the door and felt something sink in my stomach before he even checked it.
“Baby.” His voice came out different. Flat with something behind it that sounded like guilt. “The battery has been dead. I’ve been meaning to change it for a week.”
I looked at him.
“I kept forgetting,” he said. “I was going to do it this weekend.”
I didn’t say anything because I couldn’t say anything that wasn’t going to be unfair to him in that moment and I knew it. He hadn’t done anything except be busy the way he was always busy and forget a small thing the way people forgot small things. I knew that. But standing on this porch with an empty railing and no dog in sight I needed something to be somebody’s fault and his face was right there.
“Let’s just look,” I said instead. “She couldn’t have gone far.”
We went up and down the street for forty minutes. Brendon went one direction and I went the other and we met in the middle and separated again. I knocked on three neighbors’ doors. One didn’t answer. One had an elderly woman who said she hadn’t seen anything. One was a young guy who had just gotten home from a night shift and looked at me with genuine sympathy and said he was sorry, he hadn’t seen a dog.
I was crying by the time Brendon found me on the corner.
Not quiet crying either. The ugly kind that I had no control over, the kind that came from somewhere past logic and reason, from the part of me that had raised this dog from eight weeks old, that had driven her to every vet appointment and bought her the expensive grain free food and let her sleep at the foot of my bed sometimes.
Goldie was my dog before she was anything else. That was my sweet girl. And someone took her.
