As Dog Is My Witness Read Free Page A

My underwear flew in various directions as I
walked to the kitchen.
    Abby was taking a plate out of the oven with a
potholder. She set it down on a ceramic tile with an Al Hirshfeld
caricature of Groucho Marx on it—I had bought it when I was in
college, and it had somehow survived. I could see the plate held
oven-fried chicken and a baked potato with some broccoli hidden in
it. My wife looked after me well.
    “You were ready for me,” I said.
    “Watch out, the plate’s hot,” she said, turning
perfectly into the next set of embraces I’d planned for her.
    “So are you,” I said.
    “Eat. You’ll need your strength for later, unless the
jet lag’s gotten you.” She smiled and walked to the dishwasher.
    “Remember, I gained three hours. My body
thinks it’s late in the afternoon right now. By eleven o’clock,
I’ll be at the height of my energy.” She pretended to look
horrified. At least, I think she was pretending.
    She sat next to me at the table. “So you didn’t get
the option yet, huh?”
    “Keep in mind that ‘yet’ is the operative word in
that sentence,” I told her.
    “Still, you flew out there for four days
. . . 
    “To get to the point where I understand what Glenn
wants, and once I give it to him, I’ll get the option. It’s a
question of weeks—a couple of weeks probably.” The chicken wasn’t
the least bit dry. It was crunchy and flavorful. If I had cooked
it, you could have used it for a game of shuffleboard.
    “It’s not a sure thing, though, is it? I mean, we do
kind of need the money, Aaron.” Abby had a point. When a pipe had
burst, we’d had to tear out and replace all the plumbing in the
upstairs bathroom, and though our semi-resident contractor Preston
Burke had been sympathetic, he didn’t forget to give us a bill.
Owning a home is more fun than human beings should be allowed to
have.
    “It’s close to a sure thing,” I said through potato.
I was hungry, and Abby is about as fine a chef as I’ve ever met.
It’s one of the many ways in which my wife is perfection
personified. “I’ll make some changes—not really big ones,
either—and send it to Glenn, and he’ll pony up the cash. Believe
me, I’ve been through this before. He wouldn’t have flown me out
there if he didn’t think he could sell it.”
    Abby raised an eyebrow as she thought a moment. “I’d
feel better,” she said, “if I knew a check was in the mail.”
    “So would I, but what could I do?” I asked. “Dazzle
him with my non-existent reputation and flash the Writer’s Guild
card I don’t yet have? I have no leverage.”
    “Larry Gelbart doesn’t work on spec, you know.”
    “Larry Gelbart is god.”
    “True.”
    The phone rang. “I’ve got it!” Leah screamed as she
ran from the living room into my office.
    “Check and see who it is,” I reminded her. Before we
added Caller ID to the office phone, she would answer no matter
what, and then hand me the phone to fend off the inevitable
mortgage refinancer or siding salesman interrupting our dinner.
    “I will!” She looked at the hard-to-read display.
“It’s somebody named Cherry.”
    “Cherry?” Abby and I looked at each other. “You mean
Shery?”
    “Oh. Yeah.” Leah is a fine reader, but she panics a
bit when the answering machine is about to pick up.
    I stood and walked to the phone, looking at Abby.
“Lori’s calling again? It must be important.” Abby nodded, but
looked at my plate with some dismay. Great artists don’t like to
have their work interrupted, no matter how reasonable the
pretext.
    “Lori?” I said.
    “How’d you know? . . .  Oh, you have
that box, don’t you?” Lori Shery, the president and co-founder of
ASPEN (ASPerger Syndrome Education Network), doesn’t call often,
but her voice is always welcome on the other end of the phone. Even
now, through what sounded like stress, it had a friendly, warm tone
to it that is the perfect sound for a parent whose child has just
been diagnosed