“Jolly works with police officers in dangerous situations. I don’t think a gym full of first graders is going to rattle him.”
“But there are a lot of us. And some kids are really loud. Tommy Weller screams at recess every single day for no reason.”
“I think Jolly can handle Tommy Weller.”
He was quiet for about ten seconds, which was a new record for the morning.
“Mom?”
“Yeah, buddy?”
“Everyone’s going to see how amazing he is.” His voice had changed. Softer and private, like he was sharing something that cost him. “They’re all going to want to be his friend.”
I glanced in the rearview mirror. William was still looking out the window, but his hands had gone still on the seat belt straps.
There it was. The thing underneath the excitement. William had kept Jolly a secret for weeks, a friendship that belonged only to him, conducted through a gap in the fence where nobody else could see. And now his whole school wasabout to meet the dog he considered his best friend in the world.
He was proud. He was also terrified of sharing.
“You know what’s special about you and Jolly?”
He looked at me in the mirror.
“All those other kids are going to meet Jolly today for the first time. But you already know him. You know what games he likes. You know how he listens when you talk to him. You know what his eyes look like up close.” I held his gaze in the mirror. “Nobody else in that gym is going to have that. Just you.”
He turned this over, the way he turned over everything, examining it from every angle before deciding what to do with it. Then he nodded once, and his feet started drumming again.
We pulled into the school lot, and I found a spot near the gym entrance. William was out of his booster and standing on the asphalt before I’d turned off the engine. His backpack hung from one shoulder, his jacket was unzipped despite the morning chill, and his eyes were scanning the parking lot with the focus of a kid on a mission.
He found what he was looking for before I did.
Ben’s truck was parked near the side entrance to the gym. The tailgate was down, and Ben stood beside it in jeans and a dark pullover, unloading a duffel bag. Jolly was already on the ground, sitting at Ben’s left side with his harness on, ears up, tail sweeping the pavement in steady arcs.
William grabbed my hand and pulled. “Mom. Come on.”
“William, slow down. He’s not going anywhere.”
He did not slow down. He towed me across the lot at a pace just short of running, weaving between parked cars, his backpack bouncing against his hip. We were twenty feet away when Jolly’s head turned.
The tail went from sweeping to frantic. Jolly’s whole body shifted toward William, his ears flattening in that particular expression of uncomplicated joy. He stayed seated because he was trained, but every other part of him was straining forward.
William dropped my hand and closed the distance at a dead sprint. He hit his knees on the asphalt, and Jolly’s discipline dissolved. The dog surged forward, and William threw his arms around Jolly’s neck and buried his face in the dark fur.
“Hey, boy. Hey, Jolly. I told you I’d see you today.”
Jolly’s body wiggled against William’s, trying to be in all the places at once, nose pushing into the boy’s neck, his ear, his hair. William was laughing, wild and free, a sound that belonged to a kid who’d forgotten anyone was watching.
Ben watched them. His hands were still on the duffel, but he’d gone motionless, and something in his expression had opened up in a way that he probably didn’t know was visible. The hard angles of his face had softened, just barely, like they always did when Jolly did something that reminded him the dog was more than a working animal.
Ben looked up and found me standing a few feet back.
“Morning.”
“Morning.”
Last night, I had kissed this man across a gap in a fence and then walked back to my house, smiling so hard my face hurt. Now we were standing in a school parking lot in broad daylight with families arriving around us, and neither of us seemed to know what to do with our hands.
Ben held my gaze for a beat longer than neighborly. There was warmth in it, and something careful, like he was measuring how close he could stand to an open flame without changing the terms of an agreement neither of us had made yet.
