Oftentimes the state of dreams was a kinder respite than reality. Kip flipped over four times in his sleep before he realized that a harried knock on his bedroom door was not Publishers Clearing House announcing him as their next million-dollar recipient. On the other side of his door, Mark stood anxiously with his cellphone shaking in his fist. A band of sweat dribbled over the man’s brow and soggy mustache. Once awakened by the commotion, Kip sprang from his mattress as if the coils within its casing propelled him to the floor.
“Is there a fire or something? What’s going on?” Kip exclaimed as he flung the door open. He instinctually glanced at the smoke alarm housed in the corridor’s ceiling.
Mark gestured to his phone. “Relax. There’s no fire, but I got some bad news. My mother just called. An ambulance took my father to a hospital in Bethlehem about an hour ago. He’s having chest pains. ”
“Bethlehem?”
“Yeah, in Pennsylvania.”
Kip didn’t know why Mark felt obligated to awaken him up in the middle of the night with such a dire report, but he couldn’t very well vent about this discourtesy without seeming cruel. He rubbed his eyes and waited for Mark to elaborate.
“I gotta leave right now. It’s about a two-hour drive from here.”
Kip rubbed flecks of sleep from his eyes before saying, “Fine. I understand. You didn’t need to tell me, though. I hope your father is okay.”
“Me, too. Believe me, normally I wouldn’t have woken you up, but there’s still the matter of the dog. He’s sleeping in the bathroom.”
“Oh, I almost forgot about that.”
“I’m not gonna be able to bring him to the shelter this morning.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mark. I’ll drop him off on my way to work. Just go to your parents. That’s more important right now.”
Mark looked relieved and the perspiration had already dried from his face.
“You’re a nice guy, Kip. I could sense that about you right away.”
“Yep,” Kip huffed. “That’s me in a nutshell—Mr. Nice Guy.”
“I’ll be back in town tonight if everything checks out alright. Just call me if you have any problems with the dog.”
“I can handle it,” Kip said. “He doesn’t look too fierce to me.”
Mark didn’t linger around long enough for Kip to renege his offer. Before he even paced back to his bed, he heard Mark’s Jeep pulling out of the driveway. Maybe he’d be able to force himself to return to his dream of living in a luxurious home with a model-caliber wife fawning over him. Some guys, especially the good ones, rarely unearthed trouble until it became embedded in their character.
As slivers of sunlight creased through his bedroom’s vertical blind, Kip heard another sound that prompted him to fold a pillow over the top of his head. His downy helmet didn’t muffle the noise, however, and he finally had to forfeit any hope of being adequately rested for the forthcoming day. This time, a paw scratched repetitively against a vinyl door. A sleuth wasn’t required to deduce the source of this racket. The beagle was ready to start his daily routine.
This disturbance refreshed Kip’s memory on why he shunned the whole institution of pet ownership. In the past, every time his ex-wife broached the issue of adopting a kitten or puppy, he subverted the topic by splurging on dinner or buying her a new pair of shoes. As a result, the only thing that thinned faster than Kip’s hair was his bank account, but at least it didn’t bark and piss on the furniture. Despite his reservations, he had already committed himself to playing caretaker to his four-legged guest for at least the remainder of this morning.
Upon opening the bathroom door, the beagle’s nose needled through the crevice. It sniffed the hallway’s carpet like a prototypical hound dog. The dog then looked up at Kip with mild, brown eyes; its tail twitched like a pointer on a gasoline gauge as Kip knelt down and patted its head.
“You’re probably making some family really sad right now, you know that?” Kip said.
For as long as human beings had domesticated animals, they no doubt talked to them as if their pets understood all questions verbatim. No one ever really expected a dog to supply more than a perfunctory yap or growl to even the most basic commands forwarded from its owner’s mouth. But on this occasion, Kip was about to discover that the ordinary rules governing the lines of communication between canines and their masters no longer applied.
As Kip directed the dog along the corridor, the beagle suddenly stopped and sat in the center of the rug. It didn’t appear too keen on following Kip a paw print farther.
“C’mon, boy,” Kip said. “You got to do your business outside.”
“No thanks,” the beagle answered in plain English. “I already used the bathroom. I slept next to the toilet, remember?”
Kip’s chance to respond didn’t come immediately. Instead, he just fainted on the floor.