The Good Son by Carolyn Mills (best novels for teenagers .txt) 📕

rather straightforward. Roger lent me his skill saw, which he promised would cut through the wood like a hot knife through butter. After measuring and marking out where I wanted the opening to go, I took my back door off its hinges and laid it on the floor of my garage. When I tried to cut along the straight lines I’d so carefully traced, the saw seemed to follow its own wobbly route and I ended up with far less than perfect cuts. It’s too bad I hadn’t met Amir before then, because he could have installed that door in five seconds flat and it would have looked a hell of a lot better.

Even though I had measured exactly, the stupid frame for the doggy door wouldn’t slide into my cut-out. I tried to bang it in with a hammer, but it wouldn’t go. I needed to make the opening bigger, but just by a hair. I didn’t like my chances of attempting precision adjustments with the skill saw, but I didn’t exactly have any other options so I started cutting slowly, aiming to shave off just a sliver around my jagged opening, perhaps smoothing it out a bit in the process. When I was done, though, the left side veered off at an obvious angle.

I sat back and studied my lopsided cut-out. Something about it brought me back to the afternoon Ricky found me crying in our backyard because I couldn’t get the training wheels off my bike. “You’re not going to cry about this,” I muttered, although the same feeling of ineptness was clawing at me, making my throat thick.

The frame sure slid in now. With room to spare. I marched into town with Champ trotting happily beside me, tied his leash to a tree in front of Canadian Tire, and went inside to buy a tube of caulking. At the end of the day, with a thick line of caulking around the frame of the doggy door, you could hardly see what a hack job I’d done. Besides, it was the back door, which nobody, other than me or my mom, would likely ever see. It’s not like I was entertaining hordes of guests on the weekends.

All that was left was to train Champ how to use his new door. First, I had to teach him that he could push through the flap. He wasn’t too keen to try it. I stood outside with his bag of treats and called him over and over, but he remained on the other side of the door and barked. I ended up pinning the rubber flap open so that all he had to do was climb through the wide-open hole. I figured that would at least be a start.

Very gingerly, eyeing me with suspicion the whole time, he stepped through the hole. I rewarded him with several treats and an overly enthusiastic rub-down. Then we switched places and I encouraged him to come back through, this time into the house. We repeated this charade again and again. Him walking through the hole, me acting delirious with joy and giving him treats.

Once he’d stopped hesitating and was stepping confidently through the hole, I unpinned the flap and we started all over again. He nosed past the rubber material, pushing his face through the opening, but he wouldn’t step all the way through.

“No Champ, your whole body has to come through!” I said, backing farther away from the door, shaking his bag of treats.

Finally, he climbed through and the flap slapped into place behind him. I was so excited that he’d actually done it, I nearly cried. Instead, I went back inside, insisting Champ use his new doggy door to follow me, and I celebrated our success by having a very full glass of white wine.

Life was good. If Champ would just use the doggy door to go outside when he had to pee, we’d be set. Even though we practised using the doggy door every day, I still came home from work to puddles of pee under the table.

“He doesn’t know he’s not supposed to pee inside,” Mom said on one of her visits. “You let him do it for so long.”

“He’ll learn,” I said, and the hope in my voice sounded, at least to me, just like conviction.

“OH, COME ON, CHAMP!” I did my best to sound angry. When he looked up at me hopefully, I dragged him over to where he’d piddled in the back hall, and in the harshest voice I could muster called him a bad dog. Roger had suggested I stick Champ’s nose in the pee, but since I figured I was just as much to blame as poor Champ, I didn’t have the heart to be that cruel.

“Bad dog!” I repeated, before dragging him by his collar to the doggy door and shoving him through. I made him stay outside, alone, for almost an hour, which I figured was punishment enough to both of us.

Eventually, I think he got the message. There were fewer accidents. And some days, when I came home, Champ would come bursting through his doggy door to meet me, suggesting that he was starting to spend more and more time outside on his own.

I settled into a comfortable routine, working at the plant, then returning to my bungalow where Champ would greet me happily, trailing my feet as I puttered around the kitchen making myself a simple dinner. Walter called one night near the end of April to tell me he was staying in Waterloo for the summer, and I knew, as I listened to him, that we’d never hang out again. He said he planned on coming down to Dunford at least a few times over the course of the summer, and we both pretended like that meant we’d stay friends or stay in touch. I didn’t offer to visit him in Waterloo, and he didn’t suggest it, either.

This was around the same time that Richard proposed to Lauren, and