This was the only way—the only way to tire of Lydia, as his father had tired of Yom’s beautiful mother.
What would it take to make you leave me alone?
He finally had a reply for the question Lydia had practically spat at him.
And he no longer cared whether she liked the answer.
There was no key under the mat, but as it turned out, he didn’t need one.
When Yom opened the screen door to test the lock, he found the door inside partially cracked.
As if Lydia had been so eager for this hook-up, she’d forgotten to close it.
That detail iced over any reservations he had about continuing the Rustanovs’ terrible legacy of taking pets as he walked through the door—only to stop and squint.
The house was freezing-cold inside, and Yom immediately spotted the reason why: a wide-open back door.
Confusion began to dissipate the ugly black rage inside Yom’s chest, and instead of heading straight to the bedroom, as he’dplanned during his angry ride over, Yom frowned and walked toward the back door leading to the yard behind the house.
What in the hell?
Yom once again stopped short on the outside porch when he saw the scene laid out in front of him.
Lydia, on her knees in blood-speckled snow. Wheezes of labored breathing cut through the night.
“Oh my God, thank goodness you’re here!”
Lydia’s voice tore with relief when she looked up to see him standing underneath the back porch light.
“Can you help me?Please, you have to help me!”
Lydia
It all startedtoward the end of winter break, when a customer came into the Gemidgee Animal Shelter during one of my volunteer shifts, demanding an exchange for a puppy he’d bought.
Not from us, but from “one of them Yolks hockey players. Tommy somethin’ that starts with an H.”
The guy had some serious daytime alcohol breath, and he slammed a thirty-pack Natural Ice carton on the counter, claiming he’d been scammed out of fifty bucks.
Val, the shelter manager, and I exchanged a look. Fifty dollars was way below the standard rate for a puppy—even from backyard breeders.
“Can you tell us this Tommy person’s address?” Val asked in the flat tone she used with especially surly customers she had no intention of letting adopt one of our animals.
While Val questioned him, I pulled the topless beer carton the guy had used as a carrier toward me and found a sick black-and-tan male puppy inside. His square muzzle helped me identify hisbreed in an instant. A newborn pit bull—the runt of the litter and probably not even a week old, if his teeny-tiny size was any indication.
I wasn’t a vet. One shift back in high school, which was supposed to be a whole summer of volunteering at an emergency animal hospital, had made me let go of that teenage dream with a quickness. My heart was just way too fragile.
But judging from all the green gunk clotted around his square muzzle and his labored breathing, he was suffering from a respiratory infection—one of the many illnesses newborn puppies can fall prey to if not given adequate care after birth.
I gathered the supplies to clean his nasal passages and administer antibiotics while Val pried more information out of the guy demanding a trade-in for the “defective” puppy.
He eventually admitted that he didn’t know where Tommy H. lived because he’d answered a Craigslist ad.
“What happened to the rest of the litter?” Val asked while I tended to the poor puppy, wiping off his nose.
“Hell if I know,” the guy answered with a victimized tone. “Made the exchange in a parking lot at night. That’s why I couldn’t tell how sick it was. Thought I could trust him because ‘Go Yolks!’ but that hockey player totally screwed me. So how you gonna fix this?”
Val switched to a much firmer tone after that, and the man ended up storming out with an “Aw, you can keep it then!” when she refused to exchange the sickly puppy, who was barely holding on, for a “real dog” who could actually guard his trailer.
