Hotel For Dogs Read Free Page A

“Please? Just think if this was Bebe, all hungry and nobody feeding her —” Her eyes began to get teary again at the thought.
    “Well, he’s not Bebe,” Mrs. Walker said. “He probably has a perfectly good home around here and just wandered away from it. Now, take him back outside and give him a little shove to get him moving. Maybe he’ll take himself home in time for dinner.”
    “He doesn’t have a home,” Andi said with certainty. “He doesn’t have a collar or tag or anything, and he’s so dirty and shabby and neglected —”
    “Outside, Andi,” Mrs. Walker said. “Now! Before Aunt Alice comes down from her nap and gets a sneezing spell. This is her home, honey, and we are her houseguests. We have to live by Aunt Alice’s rules and fit into her way of doing things.”
    “Oh, all right,” Andi said mournfully, and carried the dog outside.
    “Poor baby,” she murmured, rocking him back and forth in her arms. “Poor little unwanted thing!”
    Glancing up the street to the left, she said, “There’s no sense sending you off in that direction. The people who own the yellow house are off on vacation or something, and there’s the vacant lot and the empty brown house. The other direction’s worse.” She gave a shudder as she turned to the right. “That horrid Gordon boy lives there. He’d probably pull your legs off.”
    Looking across the street, she noticed a pleasant gray house with a swing set in the side yard and bicycles parked out front.
    “Maybe you’ll find a home there,” she said, trying to sound hopeful. “At least, it looks like your best bet.”
    Carrying the dog gently, she crossed the street and set him down in front of the gray house and gave him a little push in the direction of the porch. Then, quickly so that he would not follow her, she ran back across the street.
    A new thought struck her just as she ran up the steps.
What if Bebe ran away! What if she ran away from the Arquettes and set off to find me! What if she’s out wandering now, just like that poor dog, with nobody to feed or care for her!
    It was such a dreadful thought that she felt sick to her stomach. Hurrying into the house, she rushed up the stairs to the room that was hers — it had been Aunt Alice’s sewing room, but it contained a couch that folded down into a bed — and flew inside and slammed the door.
    On the table by the bed were a pencil and note pad. Snatching them up, Andi threw herself across the couch and began to compose a poem. “Bebe” was the title, and the words came pouring out, hurling themselves upon the paper:
    Weeping through the morning mists,
I wandered all alone,
Searching for the only thing
That I could call my own.
    Whenever she was upset, Andi wrote poetry, and by now she had a large collection of poems. Shewrote when she was happy, too, and sometimes when she was bored, but those poems never seemed to turn out as well as the ones she wrote when she was miserable.
    When her poems were completed, she copied them neatly onto clean paper and sent them off to
Good Housekeeping
and
The New Yorker,
which had been magazines on her parents’ coffee table at home. She had started doing that the year she turned nine. She had heard somewhere once that Shakespeare had written his first play by the time he was eleven, and she had made up her mind that if she reached the age of eleven without having had a poem published, she would give up writing and turn to something else.
    Sometimes poems were hard to write, and sometimes they were easy, but because she was already so worked up and filled with feelings, Andi found that this poem was the easiest she had ever written. Words came spilling out onto the page without her even having to think about them.
    She was just finishing the last line when there was a rap on the door.
    “Andi?” It was Bruce’s voice. “Mom wants you to come down and set the table.”
    “Is it that time already?” Andi glanced up in astonishment to see dusk