“Okay,” Maddy announced after a while, “so everyone got to tell their story except me, which is good because I didn’t know about the robbery and the tornado yet.”

  JayB shrugged. “Since we all know about those, I’m not sure you need to include them in the story.”

  Maddy scowled. “Fine. I’ll say nothing then, all the way across Kansas. Talk about naming the chickens!”

  Alana glanced back at us. “So, Maddy. Why don’t you tell us your biography?”

  Maddy shook her head. “I don’t think it’s fair to call this my biography because I’m not dead yet. But anyway, my first boyfriend had a normal name. Elliott Turner. So you can see how JayB is a real challenge for me.”

  Rodney nodded. “When I was in high school people called me The Rod. Or, the Rodster. Still do, obviously.”

  “This wasn’t high school yet! Are you even paying attention? It was sixth grade.”

  “God, sixth grade,” Rodney lamented. “That’s when I got my braces. Remember that, JayB?”

  “Now that you mention it, no.”

  “Now my high school boyfriend, since everyone wants the plot spoiled, was Cliff Zodd,” Maddy continued. “He acted a lot like you, Rodney, only better looking. I’m pretty sure my so-called friend Samantha had a crush on him, because when I got suspended for that thing in science class, all of a sudden they were having lunch together. I was heavier then. I wasn’t permitted to exercise because of my mom’s fistfight with the gym teacher. Then Cliff moves to Kentucky with his parents, so you know what senior year was like. I had this pet turtle I had renamed Cliff … and now what? That was before salmonella.”

  “I keep thinking of going back to college to get my degree,” Rodney reflected.

  Walter snorted. “What would be the point?”

  “The point,” Maddy seethed, “which I am making, is that my college boyfriend had the same name!”

  Alana frowned. “Sorry, same name as…?”

  “Terry!”

  Alana glanced at JayB, then back at Maddy. “I’m a little lost.”

  “Terry was the name of my turtle before I changed it to Cliff. Anyway, so when I started dating Joey, naturally I became a vegetarian.”

  JayB nodded. “Naturally.”

  “You may not believe this,” Rodney warned, “but there are some vegetables I can’t stand.”

  Alana regarded Maddy curiously. “Are you still a vegetarian?”

  “What? Of course not. Joey and I broke up a long time ago.”

  “So you only stopped eating meat because of your boyfriend?”

  “That’s the biography.”

  Rodney held up a hand and ticked off his fingers. “Brussels sprouts. Spinach. Kale. Hummus.”

  Alana sighed. “I did that.”

  JayB glanced at her. “What do you mean?”

  “I became a vegetarian for a while because of the man I was dating.”

  Maddy smirked. “That’s nothing. You probably think I always lived in Kansas City, but the best plot spoiler is that I moved with Nolly to Houston. And I don’t even like football!”

  Rodney still had his fingers up. “Let me think, I know there are others. Oh, lima beans … wait, are beans considered vegetarian?”

  I opened my eyes because Alana pulled on a lever and spun her seat around so that she was facing Maddy. “Why do we do that? Why is it always the woman who has to sacrifice for the man, and not the other way around?”

  Rodney grinned. “Whoa, where did that come from?”

  Maddy shrugged. “It’s just how it’s always been, I guess. Ever since women got the vote.”

  “I do what you do, Maddy. I mark my life’s milestones by my boyfriends,” Alana marveled. “I never even realized I did that until just now.”

  Rodney nodded. “I’ll bet when my ex-girlfriends get together to talk about me, they see it as a big phase.”

  Maddy and Alana were gazing at each other. “There are lots of nice neighborhoods in Los Angeles,” Alana said evenly. “But Guy will only consider Marina del Rey, because that’s where he grew up. Period. So that’s where I live.”

  Maddy processed this, then nodded and turned to the window. “I’ll do the rest of my biography later,” she murmured.

  Alana swiveled her seat back around to face the front.

  Night was falling, and, periodically, Spartan filled the inside of the car with his astounding new scent and everyone allowed the roar of air in through lowered windows.

  A little while later, I noticed that Rodney and Walter were both sleeping with their heads tipped back. Maddy had sagged sideways. The rain had diminished as quickly as it had come, and we were driving through the darkness.

  “So, back there at the gas station, were you scared?” Alana asked JayB softly.

  He thought about it. “No, not really. I mean, the guy was pretty far away, and he had a handgun. I hadn’t heard any shots, so I figured Dad was okay. I just prayed the guy would leave us alone. It was a shock when Spartan wouldn’t let him into his own car.”

  Alana nodded, but she was gazing at him thoughtfully. “Were you thinking anything else?”

  JayB shook his head. “Well, not really. Why?”

  “Do you know you stepped in front of me?”

  JayB regarded her silently.

  She nodded. “Yeah, here’s this guy with a gun and you stepped right in front of me. You even swept your hand back to keep me behind you. You don’t remember doing that?”

  “I guess I do.”

  “You were protecting me, JayB. You could have gotten shot.”

  “Well, I mean, I couldn’t let the guy just shoot you, right?”

  Alana didn’t say anything for a long time after that.

  We all wagged when the car stopped. A new place! The people jumped out of the car and stretched. Alana and Walter walked into a big building that had glass doors. Soon, Alana shaking her head, she and Walter came back out.

  “Well, bad news,” Alana announced gravely. “They do take dogs, but the weight limit’s twenty-five pounds.”

  Even though I heard the word “dogs,” something told me this wasn’t an occasion for wagging.

  Dear Diary:

  There are many times in a dog’s life when we must wait for some indication from our people as to what we are doing, and what we will do next.

  We don’t actually need people to provide direction. A dog can sit patiently, smelling the world going by on the wind, or sniffing up interesting scents from the ground, or curling up into a nap. But when the sense of expectation is high in people, when there’s a tension to their movements, we become alert and remain so, watching for a signal.

  In fact, one of the most perplexing things about humans is the impatient restlessness they display so often when there are wonderful smells to behold all around them.

  And then, when something happens that justifies all that nervous human anticipation, it can be completely incomprehensible to dogs.

  Love,

  Clancy

  Twenty-four

  “Twenty-five pounds? Well, that’s certainly interesting,” JayB observed. “Guess we’d better put them on a diet.”

  “That can’t possibly be legal,” Maddy objected. “It’s not their fault they’re fat!”

  “The hotel will let us out of the reservation because of the misunderstanding if we want to keep going,” Alana advised.

  “I have to say, I’m exhausted,” Walter interjected. “I really need to sleep.”

  JayB thought about it. “Okay. Well, I guess as the official dog walker of this expedition, I’ll spend the night in the van with the dogs.”

  “Oh, no,” Alana protested. “That’s not fair. Odin isn’t your dog. I’ll do it, too.”

  Maddy’s eyes narrowed. “Oh, no. Do you think I can’t see what’s going on here?”

  “Maddy—” Alana started to say.

  Maddy held up her hand. “Just stop. You are not spending the night in the love van with my boyfriend. End of story.”

  “Yeah,” Rodney agreed. “I mean, I’m not comfortable with the idea, either.” He shrugged at Alana.

  “Okay,” JayB said with false enthusiasm, clapping his hands together. I wagged at the gesture. “This should be fun. Me, Alana, Rodney, and Maddy in the van with the dogs.”

  Everybody turned to look at Walter, so I did too. He shook his head. “I’m going to get a good night’s sleep.” And with that, he left us.

  What a great night! The people put the seats down and we all stretched out in the car. There was light filtering in through the windows and I could see all of them and smell all of them, especially Spartan.

  “These seats are surprisingly comfortable like this,” Alana observed.

  “Oh, come on,” Maddy responded scornfully. “Are you trying to say this is the first time you’ve ever slept in the back of a van? You’re describing my whole early twenties.”

  “We used to do this a lot when I was a kid,” Rodney noted.

  “Spend the night in a Hampton Inn parking lot?” JayB asked innocently.

  Alana laughed.

  Rodney shook his head. “We’d go camping, my whole family.” He turned to Alana. “Do you camp much?”

  “Rodney, I live in Marina del Rey.”

  Now JayB laughed.

  “You’re in for a whole new human experience,” Rodney promised. “I’ll take you to the Ozarks. You’ve never seen a natural wonder like the lake down there—they made it by damming up this huge river.”

  “But stay away from the boys in that area,” Maddy warned. “That’s where my sister had her first baby, or at least one of the places, anyway.”

  “You don’t need to worry about boys when you’re with me.” Rodney chuckled.

  “Everything you’re hearing is true,” JayB assured Alana with a smile.

  There was a long silence. I yawned, content to be with my dogs and people in such a small space.

  “Okay, well,” Rodney announced, “the part of my bio I held back is the story of the car that JayB and I bought in high school.”

  JayB groaned and put his palm against his forehead with such force that we all heard the slap. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “If JayB doesn’t want you to tell the story, it’s got to be good,” Maddy speculated. “My brother’s like that about his plastic surgery.”

  Rodney sat up. “Okay, here’s the deal. Sixteen years old. I was helping my dad in the garage, stuff like that. And JayB had a job at the Dairy Queen, which he’d been doing since he was like nine.”

  “Sure,” JayB agreed affably. “Nine years old.”

  “And JayB … well, you know the kind of guy he is,” Rodney continued. “He never has any fun. So he kept every dime he ever made, stuck it all in a bank account. Can you picture someone in high school with a bank account?”

  “I had a bank account in high school,” said Alana.

  Maddy snorted. “I don’t have a bank account now.”

  “So JayB and I decided to pool our money together and go and buy a Toyota MR2 that we saw for sale.”

  “Right,” JayB concurred. “By pool our money, I think you mean, I supplied the money.”

  Rodney shrugged. “Whatever. The point was, this guy—that wasn’t his name, by the way—was asking $5,150. But I figured, because I’m good at this kind of thing, that I could probably talk him down because of cash on the barrelhead. All we had was $4,842. No more.”

  “That’s the part I want to speak to,” JayB interjected. “Rodney’s method of negotiation was to start the bargaining by saying, ‘Hey, all we’ve got is $4,842.’”

  Alana looked over at JayB and grinned. “Sounds like a tough negotiator.”

  “Exactly. The guy never knew what hit him,” Rodney agreed. “Here he is. He wants $5,150. The next thing you know, we’re driving out in this beautiful machine and we got it for what … like, almost a grand less?”

  There was a long silence.

  “I can’t do the math,” Maddy finally admitted.

  “To be clear,” JayB corrected, “we didn’t drive out of there because it wasn’t running. We had to tow it.”

  Rodney nodded. “But that’s not the most exciting part. We took it to my dad’s garage to work on it, and let me tell you, there was a lot wrong with that car.”

  “Right. Another part of the plan had been to inspect it thoroughly, but Rodney elected to go straight into tough negotiating.”

  “Absolutely. I worked on that car for months and months.”

  “Meanwhile,” JayB prodded, “did I do any work?”

  “Oh, yeah. I mean, sure, you’d hand me tools and stuff.”

  “Right. That’s what I did. What else did I hand you, Rodney?”

  Rodney looked completely dumbfounded by the question.

  “Well, I still had a job,” JayB hinted, “and we had to buy parts. So what else did I hand you?” He held up a hand and rubbed his forefinger against his thumb.

  I looked at it curiously.

  “Money?” Alana guessed.

  “I was going to say motor oil,” Maddy added. “Or electricity.”

  “Okay, yeah,” Rodney agreed tiredly. “The Dairy Queen job. I get it. I was working on the vehicle 24/7, doing what we call ‘sweat equity,’ so we could sell it and split the profit.”

  “But what did we do instead?”

  “Can you let me tell it? So, what JayB’s talking about is that I took it up to Ward Parkway.” He turned to Alana. “That’s this beautiful stretch of road on the Missouri side. The houses are awesome and it’s mostly a flat straightaway.”

  “Okay,” Alana replied cautiously.

  Rodney nodded. “So obviously I raced that puppy.”

  “Obviously,” JayB agreed dryly.

  “Puppy?” Maddy repeated with a frown. “I feel like you just trapped us in a different story.”

  “No. I raced the car. Like, I put my foot to it. That little MR2, man, she could take off. I mean, I couldn’t beat a Corvette or something, but up against like a minivan, I blew those people away. Kids looking out the windows, crying.”

  “So far it’s a great story,” JayB admired. “And then what, Rodney?”

  Rodney thought about it. “Okay, the thing I have to tell you, Alana, and you’re going to think this is really strange, but they have these traffic circles on Ward Parkway. They’re big circles where the cars are supposed to go around.”

  “I know what a traffic circle is, Rodney.”

  “And I went into this crazy circle and I drifted a little bit, and I sort of hit this wall. I mean, I smashed into it sideways. Look, I know what you’re thinking and you’re right. It’s a miracle I survived.”

  “So, this is, in the end, a story about a miracle,” JayB said in summary.

  “Then get this,” Rodney added dramatically, “I lost my driver’s license until I was eighteen. It was absolutely ridiculous. I wasn’t the one who caused the accident. The car couldn’t handle the speed.”

  JayB was silent. Alana was silent. Maddy reached out and touched Rodney’s shoulder. “I can so identify with this,” she murmured sympathetically.

  “And what about car insurance?” JayB asked.

  Rodney shook his head. “You know the answer to that one.”

  JayB turned to Alana. “You see why I don’t like this story? Rodney goes drag racing and he winds up flying across a couple of people’s yards and smashes into a brick wall. He’s fine. The car is not. But there was no car insurance. We were supposed to leave it in the garage until it was running.”

  “It was running,” Rodney pointed out.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? I could have gotten it insured.”

  “I wanted it to be a surprise for you, and this is how I get repaid,” Rodney complained bitterly.

  “That was so nice of you,” Maddy praised Rodney. “You risked your life for JayB.”

  We spent a restless night in the car. The people were not sleeping well, I could tell. And occasionally, Alana or JayB would slide open the side door and let the dogs out to squat and sniff around. Gradually, the pungent smells were leaving Spartan’s system, but I feared the damage to my relationship with Phoebe might well be permanent—she still stuck close to Spartan whenever he lifted his leg.

  The next morning, the sun came in through the windows and JayB sat up, yawning.

  Alana stretched and looked around. “I’m going to need some coffee,” she announced.

  Maddy and Rodney stirred.

  Walter approached the car and slid open the side door. I lifted my nose to him. He’d never given me a treat, but a dog can always hope.

  “All right,” Walter greeted cheerfully, “that was great. How about I let you use my room for showers?”

  “I’m first,” Rodney responded instantly.

  JayB shrugged. “Why don’t we let Alana go first?”

  Rodney blinked, looking perplexed.

  “Oh, in fact,” JayB continued, “this’d be a good time for you to take all the dogs for a walk. Don’t you think?”

  “Me?” Rodney replied incredulously. “What am I paying you for?”

  “Rodney, you’re not paying me.”

  Grumbling, Rodney grabbed up dog leashes, though I stayed with JayB. I knew who my person was. Odin moved slowly while Phoebe, lovely Phoebe full of life, danced with excitement.

  “I’ll take Clancy out in a minute,” JayB added.

  I wagged slightly at the mention of my name.

  “Come on, Alana. I’ll show you the room,” Walter offered.

  The two of them left, so now I was sitting in the vehicle with Maddy and JayB.

  “Why did you have Alana go first, and not me? Aren’t I built to be a woman?” Maddy challenged.

  JayB nodded reflectively. “You know, you’re right, Maddy. I’m sorry. I was trying to introduce Rodney to the notion that maybe we should be thinking about people other than him, but I completely missed the opportunity to suggest that you go instead.”

  “That’s okay, because I have to talk to you about something really important.”

  “Oh,” JayB protested, “please don’t.”

  Maddy scowled. “No, this is it, JayB.”

  “This is what?”