License to Shop (6 page)

“
Yes,” I promised,
wondering how I would make it happen. My mother hated to do things
for free. She thought it cheapened her brand.

“
Excellent!”

After the business was
conducted, though, I threw my non-puppy-related problem out to a
few moms who I knew wouldn’t judge me…much. “My house is a mess, my
week is crazy, and I don’t know how I’m going to get it cleaned up
in time.”

Nancy, my Girl Scout
co-leader came through like a champ. Having heard me complain in
the past about my mother, the Martha-Stewart-wannabe, she didn’t
try to convince me my mother wouldn’t care about the mess. Instead,
she said, “Well, why don’t we have a house-cleaning party for
you?”

“
What’s a house-cleaning
party?” It was the word “party” that made me suspicious. “Is it
anything like one of those parties the teens throw when mom and dad
are out of town?”

“
Sort of. Except the house
is clean at the end, and there’s no broken furniture, or calls to
the police.” Nancy laughed. “You supply the house, the cleaning
materials, music, and food. We supply the cleaning.”

“
That sounds wonderful.” I
felt guilty. “But you have no idea how messy my house
is.”

“
We can handle
it.”

In about five minutes,
Nancy had three moms who had agreed to show up in the narrow window
of time on Thursday morning I had available this week. The only
problem was that one of them was the new mom. Did I really want her
to be able to report to Dr. Stubbs just how messy my house
was?

I realized there was only
one answer — I had to do a cleaning before the House Cleaning
party. Somehow. Somewhen.

Deb picked up her sleeping Sarah from Anna’s room
and thanked Seth, while I asked fretfully, “You haven’t named the
dog yet, have you?”

“
Not yet,” he said. I
didn’t miss that the puppy was asleep on his lap, exhausted from
her big day. “Anna favors either Jasmine or Mocha, and Ryan wants
Cocoa or Poopsie.”

“
I asked around to see if
there were any moms in the PTA fool enough to want another puppy.
No takers.”

He laughed. “She’s just a
dog. We can manage.”

“
Are you sure?”

“
Why not?”

“
For one, my mother is
allergic.”

“
Sounds like a plus to
me.” Seth and my mother were polite enemies, but I didn’t want to
fight the issue with him right now. Instead, I told him about my
busy week, and the house cleaning party…and the need for a
pre-house-cleaning-party party. “I’m not really going to have time
for a puppy. I’m taking Anna on a field trip tomorrow. Not to
mention — again — my mother hates dogs.”

“
That last one is a reason
to keep her, isn’t it? Maybe she’ll spring for her own hotel room
if you tell her we have a dog.” He grinned. “Emphasize she’s a
puppy, still whining and chewing, and not fully trained
yet.”

“
She’ll give me a Bad
Daughter of the Year trophy.” Again. My mother really liked to
award those imaginary trophies. “But I doubt she’ll refuse to stay
with us. Besides, annoying my mother still doesn’t solve my
problem. I can’t take the puppy with me on my shops, and I can’t
leave her at home alone for at least the next few weeks. And if I
get this job, I’ll be gone all day. Is that fair to do to a
dog?”

He gently stroked the
sleeping puppy’s fur with his fingers as he thought about what I’d
said. Slowly, almost as if he weren’t speaking to me, but to
himself, he said, “I could bring her to my office. My students
would love her.”

He’d said it aloud, so I
ignored the tentative nature of his statement and pounced on it as
if he’d sounded certain. “Can you? That would be great.”

His voice slowly warmed up
as he said, “A couple of other faculty bring their dogs. It should
be no problem.” He looked almost convinced.

Not about to give him a
chance to back out of the offer, I said cheerily. “Okay then. Let’s
give it a whirl.”

“
We’ll still have to
figure out who’s going to feed her, walk her, play with her, while
she’s home,” he warned.

I volunteered a tidbit
that had come up in the children’s litany of pleading. “Ryan says
he’ll walk her.”

We both burst out
laughing. The puppy woke up and peed on Seth before he could get
her outside.

He came back in and put
her into her dog bed and picked it up to carry it to our
room.

“
What are you
doing?”

“
She’s a puppy just taken
from her litter. She’s used to sleeping with others.”

“
She’s not sleeping with
us.”

“
She’ll whine all night
long.”

“
Seth.”

“
Molly, you have to do
what you have to do. You brought her into the house, now you need
to treat her like you would any other member of the
family.”

I wanted to argue, but the
puppy was looking at me with the sweetest expression. I stopped
protesting, gathered up some newspaper for the midnight peeing that
would no doubt occur, and followed Seth up the stairs. We cleared a
corner in the master bathroom for the puppy and her bed. “The floor
will be easier to clean if she has an accident,” I said.

“
Smart thinking,” Seth
answered, as he grabbed his toothbrush. I left the two of them to
settle in while I went to my office to work.

I wrote up my pet shop
report, turned it in, and then caught up on my mystery shopping
list. People were having trouble with one company being behind on
their payments. And one shopper had had her purse snatched, her
house robbed, and her identity stolen, all in one week. She was
sure it was the purse snatcher who had done all three, but others
had piled into the discussion talking about all the big data
breaches that happened all the time anymore. In the end, it seemed
like the conclusion was that there was nothing to do to avoid
identity theft except to have an identity not even a thief would
want to steal.

By the time I got to bed,
the puppy was in our bed, sleeping on Seth’s chest. They were both
snoring.

CHAPTER FIVE

Field Trip to the Moon

My alarm woke me an hour earlier than usual. I
slapped it off groggily and stumbled out of bed. Seth opened his
eyes sleepily. “Why is the alarm going off so early?”

“
Field trip,” I
said.

He turned over, suddenly
awake. “Where’s the puppy?”

I bent to look under the
bed. No puppy. I imagined explaining to Dr. Stubbs that I’d lost
the puppy after one night. That would make for a very bad
interview.

Then I heard Anna’s laugh
coming from the living room.

I straightened. “I think
we’ve raised a pair of puppynappers.”

Seth smiled and headed for
the shower. “I forgot that about dogs. They’re even more insistent
than alarm clocks.”

Surprisingly, I found the
kids wide awake downstairs, puppy safely in their care. Normally,
they protested having to wake up any earlier because of a field
trip.

Unsurprisingly, they
hadn’t dressed, eaten breakfast, or in any way made themselves
ready for the school day ahead. No, they’d focused on the puppy. It
sounded like they were arguing about the name, although they were
laughing at her antics at the same time as they argued.

“
Jasmine,” Anna
proclaimed, for probably the third or fourth time.

“
Champ,” Ryan countered,
just as forcefully, his voice slightly louder than his sister’s, as
if that would settle things.

“
We’ll do a family vote
tonight, after dinner, okay? Now go get ready for school, or Dad
and I will pick the name ourselves.”

They tried to go, but
neither one wanted to leave the puppy behind. I wondered when the
new puppy spell would wear off. Probably as soon as the reality of
the chores set in. Maybe.

I sighed, taking the
squirming bundle in my arms. I could feel my robe absorbing dog
hair that would never wash off. “Go. Now. Or the dog goes to the
pound.”

Anna dragged her feet.
“Maybe we should take her on the field trip with us, Mom. Or maybe
I should stay home with her. Just until she’s used to us. I bet
she’ll be scared to be alone.”

“
Daddy’s going to take the
puppy to work,” I said, mentally crossing my fingers that Seth was
still willing. No way would a puppy be a good carry-along on a
field trip.

If Seth didn’t take the
puppy to work, I would have to find someone to dog-sit. I just
hoped that dog-sitters didn’t charge as much as baby sitters. I was
pretty sure, from what the young woman at the pet shop had said,
that doggie schools were different from people schools — you didn’t
drop dogs off a doggie school. You had to stay with them. The
training sounded like it was more for the owners than the dogs,
when it came right down to it.

Seth came downstairs at
that precise moment. Not about to let him squirm out of his duties,
I deposited the puppy in his arms and said, “Daddy is taking the
unnamed-as-yet puppy to work with him today. So if you don’t get
upstairs and get dressed for school right now, we’ll let his
students name the puppy.”

“
You wouldn’t,” Ryan
challenged.

I tilted my head,
quizzically. “Why not? Might be interesting to have a Quark or a
Charm in the house.”

“
No,” they protested
together.

“
Then go.”

They shot up the stairs
without further argument. I turned to Seth, “I have to pack lunches
and get breakfast. You’re on puppy duty.”

I waited for Seth to
protest, or worse, to back out of his commitment to take the puppy
to work. He had to be crazy to take a puppy to his office. But he
just kissed the puppy’s head, carried it out to the backyard, and
watched it run around for a while while he drank his coffee. I had
a flashback to the colicky baby years. He’d done his share of
walking the floors when they kids were little. Maybe this puppy
thing would work out.

Anna came down the stairs
in record time dressed and singing, “We’re going on a field trip,
we’re going on a field trip.”

As Ryan followed her down,
he put his hands over his ears and groaned. “It’s too early to
sing.”

She made a face at him,
and kept singing.

I patted his shoulder —
the equivalent of a hug for a seventh grader. “You loved the space
museum, as I recall.”

“
Field trips are for
kids,” he said scornfully. “Seventh graders get math
tests.”

I’d forgotten that today
was his big math test. My stomach clenched. “Remember, if you need
help reading a problem—”

“—
ask my teacher.” He held
up his hands. “I know, Mom, I’m not stupid, I’m just
dyslexic.”

I smiled. “Exactly.” I
patted his shoulder again. I wish he had more conviction, though.
His after-school tutor was helping him make amazing strides in his
reading. He had gone from reading at a first-grade level to a
third-grade level in seven months. Of course, Ryan had wanted to go
from first-grade to seventh-grade in an hour, so he didn’t look at
it the way I did.

“
I don’t have a math test,
I don’t have a math test,” Anna sang, changing her lyrics as she
fixed her own bowl of cereal and reached for the milk
jug.

“
Hey, concentrate on what
you’re doing and sing later,” I said, as the jug of milk she held
threatened to upend and spill milk all over the table.

Ryan looked so miserable
that I said, “Hey, Dad is going to stay home until it’s time for
you to go to school, since Anna and I have to leave early. Why
don’t you go walk the puppy with him?”

Glad for the reprieve from
Anna’s singing, he nodded and headed out to the yard where Seth and
the puppy were playing.

I texted Seth,
Math test today
.

Before Anna and I drove
off, we transferred the car seat and other puppy-related items to
his car. Seth and Ryan had not come back from their walk, so I
texted him again:
Put car seat in your
car. You are now properly armed with newspaper, puppy chow, toys,
and the dog bed.

He texted back:
Thanks. Math test handled.

I crossed my fingers and
toes that I was not going to get a call in an hour to come pick the
puppy up. I texted one final warning:
You’re on your own with puppy. Field trip all day.

He texted back:
Glad the museum is only a half hour
away.

I sighed. It would not be
out of the realm of possibility that he would offer to come pick me
up if he had a puppy-related catastrophe.

At least the cell phone
had Caller ID, so I’d know if it was Seth calling me and I could
avoid the call. Since I only heard my phone half the time, and it
was on low battery almost as often, he wouldn’t know — for sure —
that I’d been dodging him.