Say Good-bye Read online

  Hello!

  There is just something about a dog that can make you feel better instantly. I’m not sure how they do it; maybe it’s doggie magic, or they can read our minds. Whatever the cause, dog kisses make for great medicine.

  Zoe sees this firsthand when she watches how a little shih tzu, Yum-Yum, cheers an entire room full of kids who are going through chemotherapy to help cure them of cancer. Yum-Yum is a therapy dog, trained to respond to people in hospitals, hospices, and nursing homes. Zoe finds that Yum-Yum and her own puppy, Sneakers, help her deal with her sadness over being separated from her mother, who is trying to find work on the other side of the country.

  Lots of families have to deal with cancer and other serious health problems. Years ago I was diagnosed with melanoma, a dangerous form of skin cancer. I am healthy now, but I will never forget how scared I was back then. (Wear sunscreen! Wear sunscreen!) Having pets around in stressful times can make a wonderful difference and help you find the courage you need.

  Laurie Halse Anderson

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  The Vet Volunteer Books

  Fight for Life

  Homeless

  Trickster

  Manatee Blues

  Say Good-bye

  Storm Rescue

  • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

  SAY GOOD-BYE

  LAURIE HALSE ANDERSON

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Kimberly Michels, D.V.M.

  To Cathy East Dubowski, with friendship and thanks

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Young Readers Group,

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  New Delhi - 110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in the United States of America by Pleasant Company Publications, 2000

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Young Readers Group, 2008

  4 5 6 7 8 9 10

  Copyright © Laurie Halse Anderson 2000, 2008

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Anderson, Laurie Halse.

  Say good-bye / Laurie Halse Anderson.

  p. cm.—(Vet volunteers ; #5)

  Summary: Seeing Jane’s dog, Yum-Yum, help cheer up children in a

  cancer ward makes Zoe think about having her puppy, Sneakers, trained to

  do therapy, too, especially when Yum-Yum becomes very ill.

  ISBN 978-0-14-241100-1

  [1. Dogs—Training—Fiction. 2. Cancer—Fiction.

  3. Veterinarians—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.A54385Say 2008 [Fic]—dc22

  2007041081

  Puffin Books ISBN 978-0-14-241100-1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition

  that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise

  circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover

  other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including

  this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any

  responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter One

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  I’m up early, making French toast—not the Wonder Bread kind, the real stuff, with thick, day-old French bread, fresh strawberries, and powdered sugar on top.

  I feel a tug on my shoelaces and look down. “Sneakers …” I groan.

  My six-month-old pup is having my shoelaces for breakfast. Sneakers is adorable, even though he’s a mutt—short-haired, with cute, floppy little triangle ears. He’s mostly black with a little bit of brown in spots. He also has white fur around his muzzle, neck, and tummy and four white legs. He looks like he’s wearing white kneesocks.

  A woman rescued Sneakers and a bunch of other dogs from an awful man who was selling puppies at the farmer’s market. The dogs were dirty, starving, and full of worms. Luckily for the pups, the lady brought them in to Dr. Mac’s Place animal clinic. That’s the veterinary clinic that my grandmother, Dr. J.J. MacKenzie, runs out of an office attached to her home.

  We found good homes for most of the dogs. But somehow this little mutt won me over—especially since he kept trying to sneak out through the clinic door into Gran’s house, like he belonged here. That’s how he got the name Sneakers.

  But the best part was that Gran decided to let me keep him. My very first pet ever! I guess she figured one stray would cheer up the other.

  Right now Sneakers is at my feet playing tug-of-war with my laces. He manages to untie one of my shoes. “Shoo!” I tell him, then laugh at my dumb pun. But Sneakers ignores my command, and I sigh. I love him, but he doesn’t mind very well. I guess it’s because he’s still so young. I’m sure he’ll do better when he grows up.

  Suddenly I hear someone pounding down the stairs. I roll my eyes. It’s my cousin Maggie. She makes more noise than an entire basketball team—of boys. She leaps off the second-to-last stair and skids into the kitchen, her reddish hair stuffed up in a baseball cap. She wads her pj’s into a ball and crouches down.

  “What are you doing?” I ask her.

  She ignores me. Leaps into the air. Shoots her pj ball into the laundry basket on top of the washer in the corner of the kitchen. “Two points!” she cheers.

  Sports. That and animals are the only two things Maggie cares about.

  She reaches past me into the upper cabinets and pulls down a box of some kind of candy-flavored, artificially colored cereal. She pours a bowlful, then leaves the opened box on the counter, and grabs the milk jug out of the fridge.

  “How can you eat that junk?” I ask her.

  She shrugs. “Simple. I spoon it into my mouth, chew, and swallow.” She always gobbles things down without taking the time to chew them. She says I’m picky about food. I say she’ll eat anything.

  Did I mention we’re not exactly twins?

  “You know what I mean,” I tell her. “I’m making French toast. Real French toast. With real French bread. Not those frozen things you like to make in the microwave. Want some?”

  “
No time.” She clunks the bowl down on the table and begins to overfill it with milk. “Basketball camp starts today. My ride will be here any minute.”

  I shrug and turn back to the stove. “Your loss.”

  As I flip the first slices of French toast onto the plate, Gran comes in from the clinic.

  “Zoe! That smells heavenly!” She unfolds the morning newspaper on the counter and reaches for the coffeepot to refill her cup. “Having a real cook around here certainly makes a difference!”

  “Thanks.” I grin at the praise and hand her a plate. I don’t know what Gran and Maggie did before I moved in. The day I got here, they had absolutely nothing to eat in the house.

  I hear Maggie’s chair scrape back, hear her plop down in her seat, then—

  “Ewww! Gross!”

  “Told you,” I say. But when I turn around, I realize she’s not talking about her cereal. She’s talking about something under the table.

  I take a quick peek.

  Uh-oh. Not again!

  Sneakers left a little “present” under the table. And Maggie just put her foot in it.

  “Zoh-eee!” Maggie says, drawing out my name in a whine. She pulls off her sneaker and carries it over to the trash can.

  “What?”

  She cleans off her shoe with a piece of old newspaper. “Did you forget to take Sneakers out again?

  Okay, I admit it. The first thing on my mind when I wake up in the morning is not whether the puppy needs to go. I mean, I really do love Sneakers. But I grew up with a live-in housekeeper—and without any pets. I never had to do any chores or think about anybody else when I got up in the morning. So all this is new to me. But I’m trying to do better.

  “I was going to,” I explain, “as soon as I made breakfast.”

  Maggie looks at me like I’m a total idiot. “Don’t you get it, Zoe? A dog needs to go out first thing—especially a puppy.” She goes to the sink and squirts way too much pink antibacterial dishwashing detergent on the sole of her sneaker. She scrubs at it with a paper towel.

  Ewww, how can she do that? It’s the sink we use when we cook and wash dishes! “Is that sanitary? Shouldn’t you do that outside?”

  Maggie just rolls her eyes as she washes her hands. After she dries her hands and her shoe, she grabs some cleanser from under the counter and dumps it into the sink. Then she sits back down at the table and digs into her cereal.

  Good. Maybe her mouth will be too full of artificial colors and flavors to complain any more about Sneakers and me.

  Then she says, “How come you let her get away with this, Gran?”

  Wrong. She’s not going to let it drop.

  “You never let me keep any of the puppies from the clinic,” Maggie complains. “But you let her keep Sneakers. You ought to make her look after him.”

  Gran looks up from her newspaper, her right eyebrow arched. “Maggie,” she says firmly, “your cereal’s getting soggy.”

  Maggie gets the message. She shuts up and eats her cereal.

  Thanks, Gran, I think—too quickly. Because then she turns that stern look on me. “Zoe, Sneakers is nearly six months old now, but his behavior’s not improving.”

  “It’s getting worse,” Maggie mumbles into her bowl.

  Gran lets that one go. “I realize this is new to you, but Sneakers needs…”

  She stops and looks around the room. “Where is he, anyway?”

  “He’s right…” I look around. Sneakers has disappeared.

  I feel my cheeks flush. I’m too embarrassed to say I don’t know where he is. I turn back to the counter so Maggie won’t see my face. I pick up the wire whisk and briskly beat the already beaten eggs in the mixing bowl. “Um, he’s… around.”

  Maggie snorts.

  Gran sighs. “Zoe. You have to be consistent with your puppy training, or he’ll never learn.”

  I stare into the bowl of thick, yellow goo. “I’m sorry, Gran,” I say. “I promise I’ll do better—”

  “Don’t promise Gran,” Maggie says. “Promise poor Sneakers!”

  Gran glares at her, and Maggie ducks her head over her bowl.

  “It’s not fair,” I say in my defense. “I try, I really do. But Sneakers just doesn’t listen. Couldn’t we hire a professional pet walker or something to train him? That’s what they have back home.”

  “Back home” is Manhattan—the heart of New York City—where I was born and raised. You can hire anybody to do anything in the city.

  “Up there the streets are filled with dog walkers,” I try to explain. “And usually they’re walking six or seven dogs at a time.”

  “Oh, brother,” Maggie mumbles.

  “It looked pretty efficient to me,” I shoot back.

  “What’s the point of having a dog if you’re gonna pay somebody else to look after it?” Maggie argues.

  I roll my eyes at her. Is she trying to be dense on purpose? “It’s just like having a housekeeper to do the dirty work. Then the owners get to spend quality time with their pets. It makes perfect sense to me.”

  “Ridiculous,” Maggie snorts.

  “It is not—”

  Gran holds up her hands between us like a referee at a boxing match. “All right, girls. This is not a debate here. And this is Zoe’s pet, Maggie. You’ve got your hands full taking care of Sherlock.” Sherlock is Maggie’s seven-year-old basset hound. He’s slow and calm—and trained. What’s there to take care of?

  I smile smugly. “So,” I try again, “can we hire someone?”

  “Absolutely not,” Gran replies. “You know how I feel about that, Zoe. If you care enough to have a pet, you should care enough to take care of it. Now, I’d appreciate it if you’d clean up this mess, and then—”

  “Do I have to?” The whine escapes my lips before I can stop it. I know Gran hates whiners.

  “Hey, this is the real world,” Maggie says. “We don’t have maids here. We clean up our own messes.”

  “Maggie,” Gran warns. “That’s enough.”

  Gran rarely gets really angry at Maggie or me, but she looks as if she’s seriously thinking about it this morning as she stares at us both. She opens her mouth to say something, but then we hear the bell over the door to the clinic. Someone’s here to see Dr. Mac.

  “I have to go,” Gran says. “Zoe, please clean up this mess. Then take Sneakers outside.”

  Maggie grins at me like a Cheshire cat.

  “And no more squabbling,” she tells us both.

  Gran grabs her coffee mug and hurries through the door to the clinic. I stare at her forgotten plate of cold French toast.

  Maggie seems to make a point of smacking her lips while she finishes her cereal. I make a point of not noticing.

  A horn beeps outside. Maggie turns up her cereal bowl and slurps the last of the milk. The spoon clatters in the bowl as she dumps it in the sink and grabs her backpack.

  I glare at the table. A few pink and green O’s lie drowned in a puddle of milk.

  How can I possibly be related to this girl? She has the table manners of a horse!

  “Hey!” I call after her. “What about ‘We clean up our own messes here’?”

  The slam of the screen door is my only answer.

  I grab a rag and wipe up the remains of Maggie’s breakfast. Okay, I know it must not be easy for Maggie, the way I moved in on her. Her parents died when she was a baby. So she was raised by Gran and never had to share her or the clinic.

  But it’s not my fault. It’s not like I asked to come here. And none of us knew I was going to be here this long.

  With a groan, I grab some paper towels and some newspaper from the recycling bin and glare at the mess on the floor. Might as well get this over with. “Sneakers, you little poop factory! Where are you?” I call out. No answer. I guess he’s smart enough to hide out until all this blows over.

  I pull out a chair and peer under the table. I hate to seem like such a wimp. Maggie doesn’t seem to mind sticking her hands in all kinds of goop�
�and believe me, we get a lot of icky messes around the clinic with all the sick animals we have.

  But I never had to clean up anything before I got here. I mean, my parents got divorced so long ago, my dad’s like a character in a movie you barely remember seeing. So it was just me and my mom living in a nice modern apartment building in Manhattan. Mom was an actress on a daytime soap opera, and she was always at work or rehearsals or auditions. In a lot of ways, she’s been more like a big sister to me than a mom. Our housekeeper, Ethel, took care of everything She got Mom to work on time, washed and ironed all our clothes, and cooked all our meals. She even helped me with my homework and taught me how to French-braid my hair. Ethel kept the place so spotless, I never saw any messes—much less had to clean them up.

  I guess I never realized how much work Ethel put into keeping our apartment nice. It was like having an aunt or a fairy godmother living with you. Only she got paid.

  Everything was perfect—till Mom’s soap got canceled. She was really upset at first, but then she got herself psyched up to move to L.A. to audition for some regular TV series. I was so excited!

  Until she told me the rest of the news. She wasn’t taking me.

  I spray at Sneakers’ spot on the floor with disinfectant, then scrub with an old rag. I scrub hard, remembering what Mom said.

  She tried to explain that it was for my own good, that she’d be too busy with auditions, casting calls, and getting settled to take me along, and that I’d never get to see her anyway. It wouldn’t be fair to me, she said.

  But was it fair to leave me behind?

  I tried to get her to let me stay in Manhattan with Ethel. I loved Ethel. But Mom said we couldn’t afford a housekeeper now that she was out of work. Then Ethel went home to look after her sick brother. And suddenly… I didn’t have anywhere to go.

  At first I dreamed up this fantasy. I would call my long-lost father and go live with him—it would be this wonderful reunion, like straight out of the movies. He’d realize how much he missed me and be thrilled to have me back in his life. Maybe he and Mom would even…