"Nancy Springer - Chasing Butterfly" - читать интересную книгу автора (Springer Nancy)

at the Fingerhut catalog later. For now, she slides it under the corduroy seat
cushion of a kitchen chair, where nobody is likely to notice it.

She hears the station wagon drive in. The dog jumps up. "Now, you don't have
to
bark," she tells him. "These people are family."

He barks a little anyhow, but not the way he did at the tract pushers
yesterday.
Bill walks past him with a sour look, but the children become loud and happy.

"What's his name?"

"Grammaw, can we walk him?"

She makes them wait till Bill is gone, then gives them the letters to mail.
They
go off with the dog on a leash, as she is not sure he will come when they call
him if he gets distracted in the woods, and he might not know his way home
yet.
Next time they can let him run. Nona doesn't like to keep a dog in a pen or on
a
leash or a chain. Things were meant to be free.

"Hey, Gram." It is the oldest one, the teenager, who has stayed behind to
separate himself from the little kids. "Did you hear the one about the
dyslexic
atheist? He didn't believe in Dog."

"That's not nice," she tells him. In fact she does not understand his joke,
but
she would not have laughed anyway. Seems like she's on a different wavelength
than most people these days. Hardly anything anybody can say makes her laugh
aloud anymore.

She puts the teenager to work packing away porcelain owls. He is still
grumpily
at it when the other children get back, their bluejay voices flying in the
windows long before they come m the door.

"Grammaw, this dog is stupid!"

"Grammaw, you know what your new dog did? He tried to fight Bubha!"

She hardly listens to the details of the encounter with a neighbor's Doberman
pinscher, of how the children had to drag the sheltie away so he would not get
himself hurt.

"He's not stupid," she tells them stiffly when they are done. "He's just full
of