Reagan Goes to Work

Reagan had a job on Friday, and she took it more seriously than I take most of mine.

It started because of the boy. There's a family that moved to town over the summer. New to Oakridge Harbor, still learning which of us to wave at, and the youngest is a small serious boy of about six who has decided that Reagan is the reason bookstores exist. Which, honestly, may be correct. The mother brings him in most weeks, and he sits on the floor and reads to the dog, out loud, laboriously, sounding out the words, and Reagan lies there and receives the reading like it's the finest thing she's ever heard, which, to a Labrador, it may well be.

The boy is learning to read. That's the thing. He's right at that stage where the letters are still fighting him, where every word is a small battle, and he was, his mother told me, quiet, by the counter, getting discouraged. Hated reading aloud at school. Froze up when the other kids could hear him. You know how cruel that age can be about who's fast and who's slow.

But he'll read to the dog all day.

Because the dog doesn't care. That's the genius of it, the thing the boy figured out that no teacher could have taught him. Reagan does not care if you sound out "through" four times and get it wrong three. Reagan does not sigh, or correct, or glance at the clock, or wait with that awful patient adult face for you to get on with it. Reagan just lies there, warm and enormous and delighted, thumping her tail at the good parts, and the good parts, as far as Reagan is concerned, are all of them. Every word is a good part. You could read her the phone book and she'd think you'd hung the moon.

So Friday, the boy comes in, and he's got a book from school—a real one, an assignment, something he has to read aloud on Monday and is dreading. And his mother asks me, a little shy, whether it'd be all right if he practiced. Here. With the dog.

I said Reagan would consider it an honor.

And I watched, over the next hour, from behind the counter, pretending to do the accounts, one of the better things I've gotten to watch in this store, and I've watched a lot of good things in this store.

The boy read the whole book to my dog. Start to finish. He stumbled and went back and tried again and Reagan didn't move, just breathed, just stayed, just was the least judgmental audience in the state of Maine. And somewhere around the middle the boy stopped stumbling so much. Not because he'd gotten smarter in twenty minutes, because he'd forgotten to be scared. He'd forgotten anybody could hear him. There was only the dog, and the dog thought he was wonderful, and you can do anything for an audience that thinks you're wonderful. You can read the hardest word in the book.

He finished. He closed it. And he looked up at Reagan with this expression of pure accomplishment, and Reagan lifted her big head and licked him right across the face, which the boy received as a standing ovation, which it was.

His mother had tears in her eyes. She tried to hide it, buying a book she didn't need, the way people do here when they've been moved and don't want to make a thing of it. I rang her up slow to give her a minute.

They're coming back next Friday. It's a standing appointment now. Reagan has a job.

I don't pay her, of course. She works for love and the occasional biscuit, which is a better wage than most of us get, and she'd tell you, if she could tell you anything, which thank God he can't, she'd never let me hear the end of it, that she has the best job on Water Street. A small boy who thinks reading is impossible walks in scared, and reads her a whole book, and walks out having done an impossible thing.

I own the store. But the dog's the one doing the important work. I've made my peace with that. Somebody in this building ought to be, and it was never going to be me.