Part 2: Every Night at 8 PM, My Pit Bull Pulls a Book Off the Shelf and Brings It to Me. It Took Me 3 Months to Figure Out What She Was Asking For.

I want to tell you what June was like in the first weeks.

She was, for the first day, very quiet. She did not eat the meal I put down for her until I left the room. She accepted being touched but did not lean into it. She slept on her bed that first night without moving once.

By day three, she was eating in front of me.

By day five, she was leaning her shoulder against my leg when I sat down on the couch.

By day seven, she was looking up at me when I called her name from across the apartment.

She was settling. I had read enough rescue literature to know what settling looked like. I was patient. I did not rush her.

I noticed the bookshelf thing on day eight.

It was about 8 p.m. I was on the couch. I had just finished dinner. I was reading something on my phone. June got up off her bed, walked across the rug to the bookshelf along the far wall, and stood in front of it.

I looked up.

She was looking at the books.

She lifted her front paw — slow, deliberate — and tapped the spine of one of the books on the lower shelf. Tapped, then dropped her paw. She tilted her head and looked at me.

I said, “What, baby?”

She put her nose against the spine of a different book. She pushed.

The book did not come out. Books wedged between other books are hard to dislodge with a nose. She pushed harder. The book moved about an inch. She used her teeth — gently, just to grip the corner — and pulled it the rest of the way out. It fell on the carpet.

She picked it up off the carpet. She walked back across the rug. She set it down at my feet.

She lay down in front of me. She put her chin on her paws. She looked at me with her ears up.

I said, “You want to play?”

I picked up the book. She did not get up. She did not wag her tail in the play-tug way. She did not do the play-bow. She just lay there, watching me, with the book between us.

I tossed the book gently, the way you’d toss a stuffed toy.

She did not chase it.

She got up, walked to where the book had landed, picked it up, walked back to me, and set it down at my feet again.

She lay down again.

She looked at me again.

I said, “Okay, weirdo.”

I put the book on the coffee table. I went back to my phone.

After about ten minutes, June got up, picked the book up off the coffee table, and put it back on the floor in front of me.

She lay down.

She watched me.

I went to bed at eleven that night. The book was still on the floor. June carried it back to her bed and slept with it under her chin.

It happened again the next night at 8 p.m.

It happened again the night after that.

By the end of the second week, I understood that this was a routine. I just did not understand what kind of routine it was.

I tried, in the first month, to understand what she wanted.

I tossed the book. She did not chase. I held the book out for tug. She did not tug. I gave her a treat next to the book — she took the treat, but she did not get up, and the book stayed at my feet. I tried to teach her fetch with one of her actual toys. She was politely uninterested. She would carry her toys around. She would lie on them. She did not bring them to me at any specific time.

The book thing was different.

I started paying attention to which books she chose.

The first book she had brought was a paperback of Jane Eyre. The second night she brought a hardcover of To Kill a Mockingbird. The third night she brought Cold Mountain. The fourth night she brought a battered paperback copy of a Dorothy Sayers mystery that I had owned since college.

Every book she chose was a novel.

She never brought a book of poetry. She never brought a cookbook. She never brought a memoir. She never brought any of the dozen non-fiction books I had on the bottom shelf — a book about urban beekeeping, a guide to identifying birds in Pennsylvania, a long technical book about hospice grief work that I had bought for my job.

She brought novels.

I did not put it together for the first six weeks. I assumed she was choosing books at random. I assumed her preference for the lower shelf was just because that was the shelf she could reach.

But I started watching more carefully.

She would stand in front of the bookshelf for about twenty seconds before she chose. She would move her head, slowly, along the row of books. She would sniff a few of them. She would tap one with her paw. Sometimes she would tap one and then move on. Sometimes she would tap one and then start working on it with her nose to dislodge it.

She was picking.

She was picking specific books, by some criterion I could not see, and she was bringing them to me at 8 p.m., and she was lying down in front of me with the book between us, and she was waiting for something.

I did not know what.

I called Patty at the shelter at the start of week six.

I said, “Patty. I need to ask you something about June. I know you said the family didn’t give you much. But — was there anything you noticed when she came in? Anything in her crate? Anything in her bag? Anything they said before they left?”

Patty was quiet for a second.

She said, “Caroline. Hold on.”

She was gone for a minute. When she came back, she said, “I’m pulling her file. Okay. Let me see.”

I waited.

She said, “Her bag had a soft blanket, a half-bag of dog food, and — okay. There’s a note here. In the bag. I forgot we’d photographed it for the file. We don’t always include personal items in the adoption packet. Hold on.”

She emailed me a photo two minutes later.

It was a Polaroid-style photograph somebody had clipped from a phone screen. A note in handwriting on a piece of stationery. The handwriting was older — the kind of careful slanted cursive that you do not see anymore.

The note said:

Her name is June. She was my mother’s dog. My mother passed last week. June was very loved. Please find her a quiet home with a person who reads.

I read it twice.

I read it a third time.

I read the last line again.

A person who reads.

I did not put it together immediately.

I want to be honest about that, because hindsight makes everything look obvious.

I read the note. I felt the weight of it. I cried a little — I cry easily; I am a hospice social worker; we are paid to cry — and I wrote Patty back and told her thank you and saved the photograph to my phone.

I did not connect it to the books.

I went home. I made dinner. I sat on the couch.

At 8 p.m., June got up. She walked to the bookshelf. She tapped a book with her paw. She nosed it out. She picked it up. She walked across the rug. She dropped it at my feet.

She lay down.

She looked at me.

I picked up the book. It was a small paperback. Anne of Green Gables.

I held it in my hand.

I thought about the note.

A person who reads.

I thought about the fact that, in six weeks of living with me, June had never once seen me read out loud. She had seen me read on my phone. She had seen me read the back of a cereal box. She had seen me take notes for work at my kitchen table.

She had never seen me read out loud.

She had been waiting for me to read out loud.

For six weeks.

Every night at 8 p.m.

I sat there for a minute with the book in my hand.

I opened it to a random page.

I cleared my throat.

I said, out loud, “Marilla looked at the small girl with the red hair, and her face softened in a way she had not expected.”

(I do not actually know if that is the line; I had opened to a random page. I am writing this from memory, and I no longer remember exactly what I read first. I just remember saying the first sentence.)

I felt very strange saying it. The apartment was quiet. There was nobody to hear me but a Pit Bull on the floor.

I kept going.

I read a paragraph. I read the next paragraph. I read for about three minutes.

By the second paragraph, June had let out a long, slow breath. Her chin had settled deeper onto her paws. Her eyes had closed. Her tail — and this is the part I have not been able to stop thinking about — had begun to move.

Not the wag of a dog who is excited to play.

A slow, soft, rhythmic wag.

The wag of a dog who has been waiting a long time for a thing she was afraid she had lost.

I read for forty-five minutes.

By the time I stopped, June was completely asleep at my feet, her chin on the book.

I sat on the couch and cried the way you cry when you have figured something out too late, and also exactly on time.

I emailed Patty the next morning.

I told her what had happened. I asked if she had any way of getting in touch with the family who had surrendered June. I told her I was not asking to give the dog back. I was asking because I had a question.

Patty wrote back two days later.

She had been able to track down the surrendering family. The note had been left by the deceased owner’s daughter, a woman named Rebecca, who lived outside of Cumberland, Maryland.

Patty said Rebecca was willing to talk to me.

I called Rebecca that Saturday.

She was in her late fifties. Her voice on the phone sounded tired, the kind of tired you carry in the months after losing a parent. I introduced myself. I told her I had adopted June. I told her June was happy.

She started crying immediately.

She said, “Oh, thank God. Oh, thank God. We didn’t know — we didn’t know if she’d be okay.”

I told her she was okay.

I told her about the books.

I told her about 8 p.m.

There was a long silence on the line.

Then Rebecca said, “Caroline. My mother read to June every single night at 8 p.m. for the last three years of her life. Every night. Without fail. She had a stroke about a year ago that affected her mobility, but she kept reading. June would lie at her feet on the couch. My mother had — she had a very particular voice she used when she read out loud. A reading voice. She said it was the voice my grandfather had used to read to her when she was a girl.”

She paused.

She said, “When my mother died, we found her in her chair. She had a book open on her lap. June was at her feet.”

She said, “We — we should have known the dog would be looking for the reading. I’m so sorry. We didn’t think to tell the shelter. We were so — we were just so —”

I told her it was okay.

I told her June had figured out how to ask.

Rebecca cried for a while.

Then she said, “Caroline. I want you to know something. My mother always said that June didn’t understand the words. She just understood the voice. My mother said — she said reading to her was like — it was like the dog could hear love directly. Like the dog didn’t need the language. Like the voice was enough.”

She said, “My mother said it was the most pure form of communication she had ever experienced.”

I sat on my kitchen floor and held the phone.

I said, “She was right.”

I have been thinking, every night for the last four months, about what June taught me.

She does not understand the words.

I want you to sit with that for a second.

She does not understand the words. She has never understood the words. For three years before me, she lay at the feet of an old woman in a chair in a house in Maryland and listened to a voice she could not parse. She did not know who Anne of Green Gables was. She did not know what Maycomb, Alabama looked like. She did not know what a moor was, or who Heathcliff was, or why Atticus Finch told his children not to kill mockingbirds.

She did not know any of the engineering.

She knew the function.

The function was: at 8 p.m., the woman I love makes the warm sound. The warm sound means I am safe. The warm sound means I am loved. The warm sound means I am home.

For three months, she lay in front of my bookshelf at 8 p.m. and waited for me to make the warm sound.

I did not make it.

I read on my phone. I scrolled through emails. I texted my friends. I watched television.

I had a dog at my feet who was asking me, every single night, for the only thing she had ever known love to sound like, and I did not understand the question.

I have been a hospice social worker for sixteen years. I have sat with hundreds of dying people. I have learned, in my work, that the voice of someone who loves you is the last thing your brain processes before death. People who cannot speak, cannot move, cannot open their eyes — they can still hear. They can still hear the voice. The voice of a husband, a wife, a child, a sibling — that voice gets through when nothing else does.

I had been doing this work for sixteen years and I had not understood, until a Pit Bull explained it to me, that it works the other way too.

The voice of someone who loves you, said out loud at the end of the day, in your own quiet living room, to a creature who cannot understand the words but can understand the love — that is also a sacred thing.

That is, it turns out, the sacred thing.

Rebecca’s mother had figured it out before I did.

Rebecca’s mother had figured it out, sat in her chair every night at 8 p.m., for three years, and read out loud to a Pit Bull who could not understand the words.

Rebecca’s mother had given that dog the most consistent, most reliable, most loving thirty minutes of any dog’s life I have ever heard of.

When Rebecca’s mother died, the only thing the dog knew to do was bring a book to the next person she loved.

And wait.

For three months.

Until that person figured it out.

I read to June every night at 8 p.m.

I have done it for one hundred and thirty-six nights in a row as of writing this.

I read whatever she brings. Pride and Prejudice, Beloved, Great Expectations, The Brothers Karamazov (we are halfway through it; it is taking us months), The Color Purple, a battered paperback of Watership Down that I think used to be mine in high school. She has a slight preference, I have noticed, for novels with female narrators or strong female characters. I do not know if that was Rebecca’s mother’s preference or June’s. I will probably never know.

I read for thirty to forty-five minutes. June lies at my feet. Her tail moves the slow soft wag. Her eyes close.

I have started doing it in a particular voice.

It is not the voice I use during the day. It is a slower voice. A softer voice. A voice that is, in the quiet way of these things, the voice my own mother used when she read to me as a child.

I had not used that voice in twenty-eight years.

I do not know when I will stop doing this. I do not know if I will stop.

Some nights, when I am tired, I think about skipping. I think about saying not tonight, baby. I think about telling her I am too tired to read.

Then she gets up at 7:58 p.m.

She walks to the bookshelf.

She taps a book with her paw.

And I remember a woman in a house in Maryland, in a chair, with a book open on her lap, and a Pit Bull at her feet, and forty-five minutes of love made of a voice that did not need to be understood to be received.

I read.

Last night June brought me a book I had not seen in months.

It was Anne of Green Gables.

The first one she ever brought me.

I did not realize it until I picked it up. I opened to where I had bookmarked it, three months earlier, the first night I read.

I read for forty minutes.

She slept at my feet.

I closed the book.

I said, into the quiet of my apartment, “Goodnight, June.”

She lifted her head.

She looked at me.

She thumped her tail.

Once.

I think Rebecca’s mother heard.

Tag someone who’s ever been loved by a dog who carried something they couldn’t tell you.