The Second Handler

Happy Paws smelled like oatmeal shampoo, rubber chew toys, and the faint metallic tang of kennel bars. I pushed the front door open at nine o’clock sharp.

From the outside, it still looked like what it used to be: a feed store on the edge of town, low and tan, with a painted paw print the size of a garage door on the side wall and two pots of half-dead mums by the entrance that Mrs. Casteel refused to give up on. Inside was where it turned into the best place in Sierra Vista.

The lobby was quiet. Mrs. Casteel sat behind the front desk in a lavender cardigan with a small enamel pit bull pinned to the collar, her reading glasses hanging on a beaded chain, a plate of lemon bars wrapped in plastic at her elbow. She didn’t look up from her crossword. She just slid the sign-in binder across the counter with one finger.

“Morning, Deshazo.”

“Morning.”

From somewhere down Hallway A came a long, wobbling howl that climbed three notes and cracked at the top.

“Maverick’s been doing that since seven,” Mrs. Casteel said. “He thinks he’s a wolf.”

“He’s a seventy-pound mutt.”

“Don’t tell him. It’ll crush him.”

I signed in. Charcoal fleece zipped to my chin, sage lanyard, badge with the rust stripe across the bottom: CLEARED: ALL DOGS. In the photo, my hair was sleek and my face was very serious, the face of a girl who had never needed help with anything. Treat pouch on my hip. Clicker on my wrist. Slip lead over one shoulder.

My thigh had been quiet on the drive over, mostly. Stetson had dropped me off three hours before his shift started, because Pops had made it very clear that the Lexus came with the job of driving your sister places. He had blasted music with the windows down the whole way, and I had kept my leg still against the seat and told myself the throbbing was just from the bumps in the road.

When I stepped out of the Lexus, my left leg took a second longer than the right to straighten. I waited until Stetson was halfway down the block before I started walking.

I hadn’t answered Chandler’s question. I wasn’t planning to.

The main kennel room was my favorite room in the building. Twelve kennels, raised beds, whiteboards clipped to every door with feeding notes in Miss Davison’s neat capital letters. The big window at the far end turned the whole room gold by nine-thirty. Kendra, the vet tech, was hosing out the end run in her purple scrubs and rubber boots, earbuds in, and lifted two fingers off the hose at me without turning around. That was a full conversation, for Kendra.

I went down the row the way I always did, every dog getting a hello in the order they preferred. Maverick howled at me for not coming to him first, head thrown back, his one crooked ear flopping over sideways like it had given up halfway through standing.

“You’re fine,” I told him.

He howled harder.

At the end of the row, in the last kennel, a gray-brown shape was pressed into the back corner so tightly he looked like part of the cinderblock.

Dashiell.

He was maybe thirty pounds of wiry, scruffy terrier mix, ten months old, with a coat that stuck up in every direction no matter how often anyone brushed it, and dark brown eyes that never stopped checking the door. He had come in with the hoarding case in August, thirty-one dogs pulled from one house outside Limon, and for the first three weeks, he hadn’t come out of that corner for anybody.

Then he had come out for me.

Nobody knew exactly why. Miss Davison said it was because I was quiet, steady, and predictable, the three most important things you could be around a scared dog. I thought it was simpler than that. He had decided I was safe, one afternoon in August, and he had never changed his mind.

Every shift, when I left, he followed me to the end of Hallway A, where the corridor opened into the lobby. Then he stopped at the threshold, like there was an invisible line he could not cross, and watched me go.

I opened his kennel door, sat down on the floor just inside, and looked at the wall.

It took him four minutes. Then his nose touched my elbow, and he crept out of the corner to press his whole body against my back, his heartbeat fast and light through my fleece.

“Hi, buddy,” I whispered, without turning around.

When I got up to take him to the training room, he walked at exactly the distance of my leg. When a volunteer opened the door to Hallway A with a clatter, Dashiell was behind my knees before I even heard the latch, shaking, his wiry coat prickling my calves.

“It’s just Rhett,” I told him. “He’s harmless.”

“I’m right here,” said Rhett.

“You’re holding that mop bucket like a weapon.”

“I’m holding it like a mop bucket.”

Miss Davison found me in the training room at eleven.

I was sitting on the rubber mats with my back against the mirror and my left leg stretched straight out in front of me, because bending it was worse. Dashiell was doing touch over and over: nose to my palm, click, treat. He never missed. It was just me, and every time his scruffy face bumped my hand, something in my shoulders unclenched.

The door eased open. Dashiell slipped behind me before I saw who it was.

“Just me,” Miss Davison said, sliding in sideways so she wouldn’t spook him. She carried two coffees in a cardboard carrier and a slim folder under one arm, the color-coded kind she made for every dog in the building. Graying bun with one strand escaping, reading glasses pushed up on her head, her standard Happy Paws polo with the embroidered paw-heart logo on the chest.

She lowered herself onto the floor across from me, her knees cracking.

That was how I knew something was up. Miss Davison sat in chairs.

She opened the folder to the green tab. “Front Range Second Chance in Boulder called back.”

My hands stopped moving.

Front Range was the good kind of rescue. Foster homes, real training, people who knew what they were getting into. I had sent them Dashiell’s file myself three weeks ago and refreshed my inbox so often since then that I had to force myself to stop.

“They’ll take him,” she said.

I didn’t let myself react. “But.”

She smiled, a little tired. “But. They want a behavior evaluation first. March twenty-first. Their evaluator comes here. And they require a second handler.”

She turned the folder toward me, pointing to a single line highlighted in yellow.

Dog must demonstrate calm, cooperative behavior with a minimum of two handlers, including one handler other than the primary trainer.

“I’m the primary trainer,” I said.

“You’re the only trainer.” She tapped the paper. “If he can only function when you’re in the room, they’ll say he isn’t ready for a foster home, and he’ll go to the long-term facility in Limon.”

The place in Limon had good intentions, a lot of kennels, and not nearly enough staff. I had seen their website. Same photos a year later. Same sad bios.

Dashiell rested his chin on the back of my hip.

“I’ll find somebody,” I said.

“Who?”

“Rhett.”

We both looked toward the door. We both remembered the mop bucket.

“Someone else, then.”

“The rest of the staff is already stretched thin, and none of the weekend volunteers have the hours,” Miss Davison said. She flipped to the next tab, where she had already mapped out a training calendar through March in neat block letters. “Whoever it is has to come every Saturday. Same person. And he has to not run from them the first time, or we’re starting from below zero.”

“I can do it by myself.”

The words came out sharper than I intended. Miss Davison didn’t flinch. I wasn’t the scariest thing she had dealt with before lunch.

“I know you can do almost everything by yourself,” she said gently. “This is the one thing you literally can’t.”

I clicked the clicker once. Dashiell’s ears pricked up.

He was mine. He had come out of the corner for me. And now the only way to save him was to hand him to somebody else.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“Think fast,” she said, setting my coffee on the mat beside me.

I didn’t drink it.

At 2:07, the lobby bell jingled, and Dashiell didn’t move.

I was at the front desk finishing his training log. Stetson was working until six, so Chandler was supposed to pick me up at 2:30. Dashiell was curled against my ankles under the counter. He had followed me past the end of Hallway A for the first time, crossing that invisible line, and lain down on my feet like he had been doing it his whole life. The front bell usually sent him scrambling back into the hallway.

This time, his head only lifted.

Chandler stood inside the glass doors in a navy work polo with his name tag clipped crooked and a gray beanie pushed back off his forehead. He looked tired, the calm kind of tired, like someone who had been unloading pallets since eight in the morning and had made peace with it.

“You’re early,” I said.

“I got off at two. Came straight here.” He shrugged. “Stetson texted me this morning to make sure I didn’t forget you.”

“He could have texted me.”

“He did. You had him on read.” He lifted his phone. “You had me on read, too. From Thursday. So.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. He didn’t smile, but his mouth hitched slightly at the corner.

Then his gaze dropped to the space by my feet, and I watched him notice Dashiell.

What he did next, I had never seen anyone do with that dog. He didn’t crouch, or reach out, or use the high, wobbly voice people save for dogs they think are broken. He just sat down on the lobby floor, cross-legged, his back against the metal donation bin. All six feet of him folded up small, lower than the desk. Lower than me.

Lower than Dashiell.

He looked straight at the corkboard of adoption flyers instead of the dog, and waited.

Nobody had told him to do that. I would have remembered telling him.

Dashiell stood up.

My pen froze above the log.

The dog took one careful step out from under the desk. Then another. His tail stayed tucked, but not completely flat, the tip lifted slightly off his hocks. He stretched his neck out as far as it would reach, his dark nose working the air around Chandler’s sneaker. Chandler didn’t move a muscle. His chest rose and fell, slow and even.

Dashiell sniffed the rubber toe of his shoe. Then the frayed hem of his jeans.

Then he turned around, walked calmly back under the desk, and sat down on my foot.

He didn’t bolt. He walked.

I hated how easily it worked. Mostly because I knew exactly what it meant.

Chandler noticed things.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me,” Miss Davison said.

She stood in the doorway to Hallway A, staring at Chandler like he had just solved an equation she had been wrestling with since August.

“No,” I said quickly.

“Sloane.”

“No. He works weekends. He’s busy. He has a whole life.”

“I’m right here,” Chandler told the corkboard.

Miss Davison crossed the lobby, crouched down to his level, and held out her hand. “Heather Davison. I run this place. Any interest in helping with a dog who is headed to Boulder if he passes an evaluation in March?”

Chandler shook her hand. Then he looked at me over her shoulder, lifting his eyebrows in a silent question.

Heat rushed up my neck. “He doesn’t know anything about dog training.”

“He sat on the floor,” Miss Davison said. “Do you know how many adults I have to explain that to?”

“It was one time.”

“It was one time that worked.” She stood up smoothly. “It’s your dog, honey. You ask him.”

She walked back down the hallway as if she had no further interest in the outcome. I didn’t believe that for a single second.

The lobby went still. Behind the far wall, a washing machine thudded into its spin cycle.

Chandler waited.

“So,” I began, looking down at my hands. “The thing is, he needs a second handler for the rescue evaluation. Somebody who shows up every Saturday, every single week until March. It’s going to be repetitive, and he might not even let you touch him for a month, and if you…”

“Yes,” Chandler said.

“I didn’t finish.”

“I know.”

“You don’t even know the schedule.”

“Every Saturday. Until March.” He looked at Dashiell’s scruffy muzzle peeking out from under the desk. “I heard.”

He said yes. Chandler always said yes.

It was one of the things I loved about him, and one of the things that made it impossible to tell when he actually wanted something for himself.

He had said yes when Stetson wanted a ride to Colorado Springs at midnight for one specific taco truck. He never knew how to turn down a favor, which meant this wasn’t about Dashiell, or me. I was just one more task on his mental checklist.

That was fine. Better, even.

“You work Saturdays,” I pointed out. “Until two. I’m here from nine.”

“I’ll figure it out.”

“That’s not a real plan.”

“It’s a plan.” He shrugged, easy, like his time cost nothing. “It’s just a short one.”

Miss Davison reappeared in the doorway with a clipboard and handed it to me.

“Evaluation criteria,” she said. “Approach, handling, leash transfer, novel objects. You run him through all of it every Saturday. Chandler shadows you until he doesn’t need to.” She turned her focus to Chandler. “And Maverick needs a walk.”

Maverick had already been walked at ten. It was written on his whiteboard in her handwriting.

“Sure,” Chandler said, before I could intervene.

Maverick had the energy of a toddler after a double shot of espresso.

“Short leash,” I told Chandler at the play yard gate. “Don’t let him get ahead of your center of gravity.”

Maverick spotted a squirrel on the fence line.

Chandler went with him.

He didn’t let go of the lead, which was the only thing he managed to do right. He just went sliding, sneakers skidding across the loose gravel, one arm locked straight out, past the agility tunnel, under the shade sail, and around the plastic kiddie pool someone had forgotten to drain, until Maverick hit the chain link and started barking hysterically at the fence.

Chandler bent over with his hands braced on his knees, gray dust coating his jeans.

He was laughing. His shoulders shook, his head dropped down, and then he looked up, straight across the yard at me. Checking.

I pressed my lips together hard. My shoulders started shaking anyway.

He grinned, full and crooked.

“You’re supposed to plant your feet!” I called out.

“Now she tells me!” he yelled back, just as Maverick jerked him another two feet to the left.

I laughed so hard my weight shifted, and without thinking, I pressed my palm flat against my left thigh.

The laugh vanished instantly. The pain didn’t.

Across the yard, Chandler’s smile faded. He was looking at my hand.

I dropped it to my side.

By a quarter to three, I had walked six dogs, guided Dashiell through touch and sit and the slow approach, and let Chandler shadow me through every step. By the time we walked out to the parking lot, my eyelids felt heavy. Deep in the bone of my thigh, the ache had settled into a slow, rhythmic throb that kept steady time with my pulse.

The chills hit me the second I got into the Jeep.

They started at the base of my skull, shivering down into my shoulders, my forearms, and finally my teeth, clicking so hard I had to lock my jaw to keep them quiet.

I reached across the console and shut the air conditioning off. Then I twisted the dial for the heat all the way to the red line.

Chandler glanced at the dashboard, then turned his eyes on me.

“It’s seventy-eight degrees out,” he said quietly.

“Your air conditioning is aggressive.”

“It was on low for four minutes.”

“It was aggressive for four minutes.”

He didn’t touch the dial. He kept driving while the vents blasted hot air across my knees and sweat began to glisten along the nape of his neck. At every red light, I felt the weight of his attention against the side of my face.

I pressed my forehead against the passenger window. The glass felt icy against my skin, which made no sense at all.

The house smelled of roast garlic and fresh laundry.

Pops was in the kitchen, singing along off-key to an early 2000s playlist while he wrestled with a chicken, butcher’s twine, and half a dozen lemons. Dad sat at the island with his reading glasses perched on his nose, scrolling through case files on his tablet with a mug of coffee steaming beside him.

“SUNSHINE,” Pops called out musically. “How are my shelter babies? Did you save them all?”

“Most of them,” I answered, already moving toward the stairs. “Gonna jump in the shower.”

Dad looked up over the rim of his glasses, his eyes sharp and assessing.

I kept walking. I didn’t pause in the doorway. I didn’t give either of them a chance to read my face.

“Dinner is at six-thirty when your brother gets home!” Pops shouted after me.

“Got it!”

Bernard followed me up the steps, his claws clicking against the hardwood. When I reached my bathroom, I let him inside, clicked the lock into place, and pulled open the bottom drawer beneath the sink.

My fingers trembled against the handle.

Inside lay boxes of adhesive bandages, an old tube of antibiotic ointment, and the digital thermometer Pops had bought in a multi-pack from Costco.

I sat down on the closed lid of the toilet with the plastic tip tucked under my tongue. Bernard pressed his heavy, warm body against my shins, tilting his head to watch me.

The small electronic chime sounded.

101.4.

I stared at the screen. The numbers didn’t change.

I had spent six hours on my feet in a thick fleece. I had slept four hours the night before. It was probably just some seasonal flu passing around the volleyball locker room.

Downstairs, my dads were twenty feet away. All I had to do was unlock the door, walk down the stairs, and show them the screen.

I pressed the button, clearing the numbers to blank gray, and slid the thermometer back into the drawer beneath the bandages, in the exact spot where I had found it.

Down in the kitchen, Pops was still singing.