Page 2 of Shake the Habit

“Let’s go!” he seemed to tell me. I’d spotted man parts, and he was definitely a he.

“Come here and let me see if you have a collar,” I told him, but he continued to do his backwards shuffle on the shoulder, a funny, lumbering movement for such a big guy. We were in the country, much farther out than where I lived, because my cousin Aria had hosted us this year. It wasn’t totally unusual to see dogsaround here that looked like strays, but they might well have wandered off from someone’s farm and would happily return when they were done terrifying drivers like me.

“Come here. You, sir, yes, you!” I told him. I walked forward but he seemed to shake his head and he sneezed again as he kept reversing. He only sat down when I stopped my own approach. I snapped my fingers and patted my thigh, but he wiggled his butt and stayed put.

After all that movement, I had to think that he was ok. “I’m sorry that I scared you,” I told him. “I’m glad you’re not hurt. Merry Christmas.” He stood up and I saw his tail wag again, and he made a funny noise that was something between a whine and a bark that started low and ended high. I smiled at him, feeling happier than I had for most of the day. It had actually been a little tough for me, but it wasn’t like I hated the holidays. In fact, I’d always loved Christmas and I usually enjoyed being with my family. There were a million and two of us McCourts, and I got along with almost all of them.

But today had been hard. Christmas Eve had been hard, so had Thanksgiving, and also all the other celebrations spanning the last couple of years. If I got together with my cousins on New Year’s, that would be even worse and I didn’t plan on it. I’d set off this morning determined that things would be fine, that I wouldn’t end up being sad. I wouldn’t feel…lost. The problem was, I still hadn’t figured out how to behave because now, I wasn’t the party girl, the one always ready to have a good time. The parties hadn’t changed, but I had. I had, for real. Right?

When I walked back to my car, I saw that it had definitely changed as well. It tilted in a way that didn’t look right, and I tilted my head at the same angle and frowned. Why did it lean like that? I bent to get a closer look, and a big body nudged against the back of my knees and almost knocked me over.

I squealed in surprise, and the dog made his funny noise back at me. “Now you want to come?” I asked him. “What’s wrong with my car?”

The thumping noise hadn’t been me striking the dog, thank goodness. Unfortunately, it had been my tire blowing out, not just flat but totally destroyed, a real mess. I stared at it and immediately took out my phone to text my dad or my mom, one of my uncles or aunts, or some of my cousins. My father was one of six brothers, so there were a lot of those.

I scrolled through the names and realized that I really didn’t want to see them again today. Anyway, I knew how to change a tire. My dad had taught me before I even got close to the age of getting my permit, just like he’d taught me how to replace all the bulbs, put in washer fluid, check my oil, et cetera. I could work on this myself, and get in touch with them if I needed backup.

I got out the jack and the big dog sat next to me as I fitted it into position. Then I popped off the hubcap, started to loosen the lug nuts, and cranked up the car. He seemed to be studying what I was doing, like he was learning. “It’s harder by myself,” I commented. “I can do it, but it’s cold out here.” I stopped to blow on my hands before I went to the back to get the spare, and the dog followed me.

And when I opened the rear door to the cargo space? Unfortunately, he misinterpreted that action as an invitation. He jumped into my car, turned around, and lay down with a big, exhaled huff.

“What? No. No, sir,” I told him. “No, sir. You get out of there. No, sir!”

He blinked and his brown eyes closed.

“No, sir,” I told him again. I reached to pull him out, but he didn’t have a collar and I stopped with my arm extended. I didn’t want to grab him—my cousin Aria had been bitten pretty badly by a dog, a stray that she’d tried to befriend. I’d never been nervous around them myself, but that incident was now on my mind.

“You can’t be in my car!” I announced, my voice stern and firm.

He couldn’t have cared less about my firmness. Was he asleep already? Ok, we’d do this the hard way, then. I opened the side door and tried to push him out from behind, but he was heavy. And dirty and smelly, I thought, as I sniffed my hand and frowned. I hadn’t climbed all the way into the back seat since my car was balanced on the jack, so it was hard to get enough leverage to really shove. He was also really big, and that extra weight couldn’t have been good for the jack either. What if the car fell? “Don’t let that happen,” my dad had said, but I wasn’t sure what would go wrong if it did.

And now I would have to call for help, I realized, and I imagined my relatives still at the family party getting the news. They would laugh so hard when they heard about the dog in my car,and if I had heard this story about one of them, I would have laughed, too. I started to smile as I looked at him asleep there, but then that faded. My family would also think that this type of situation was pretty typical for me. “Kayleigh needs help again,” they would say to themselves. “She got herself into more trouble that she can’t fix on her own. She’s the same as she ever was.”

I didn’t want to be that girl. “Come out of there!” I ordered the dog. “Now!” One of his hairy brows twitched, but he didn’t open his eyes.

I took my phone back out of my coat pocket and looked at it, still hesitating. But then I turned to look behind me, because another car had come down this road, an old pickup that slowed and pulled off onto the shoulder.

A man got out. “Are you having trouble?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s this dog’s fault.”

“What?” He walked over and looked into the cargo area of my hatchback. “Your dog is sick?”

“This is a stray, I think. He started to walk into the road and I swerved so I wouldn’t hit him, and I blew out my tire. Then when I was trying to change it, he got into my car and now he’s on top of where the spare is kept. He won’t come out,” I explained. “I don’t think he’s sick, just asleep.”

The man looked at the dog and smiled. Then he started to laugh quietly. He held up his fist and chuckled behind his knuckles.

“I know it’s funny,” I said. “If I were you, I’d laugh a lot harder.”

“It’s a predicament,” he agreed, and cleared his throat. He walked closer to my car. “Get on out of there,” he told the dog.

It blinked, stood, shook, and hopped down, back onto the shoulder with us. The car wobbled but it didn’t fall. “There you go,” the man said to me, and he looked at the animal and added, “That’s a good boy.” The dog wagged its tail and leaned against him. “You’re friendly. What’s your name?” He inhaled and shook his head. “He tangled with a skunk,” he mentioned.

I had noticed that, too. “Thank you,” I said. “Thanks a lot for getting him out.”

“My pleasure. Let’s get your tire on.”

It was easier for him in his jeans than for me in my cousin Cassidy’s dress and my heels, and he put on the spare in about a second. The dog crowded around him the whole time he did, overseeing the operation, and I watched, too.

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