ADAM

“Adam. Towhead. We speed down 680 toward Danville. He presses his mouth against the back of his seat and contemplates abstractedly the junk piled in the back of my car.

“I press his nub of a nose with a fingertip. ‘I just pressed your talk button. Now you have to tell me something.’

“’No, I don’t!’ he retorts. ‘It’s my bellybutton you have to press.’

“I tell him a true tale. He tells me a tall one.

“’Look! The llamas are out!’ I cry.

“’The llamas!’ he enthuses, adding spuriously, ‘I saw them first.’

“We pass a dirt slope on the right, surrounded by a chain link fence—within are the llamas, a fuzzy brunette burro, and assorted goats.

“’Have they put the big balloons in cars yet?’ he asks querulously, as though running out of patience with the auto industry.

                                                                            …

“His parents are punishing him for hitting a classmate with a toy shovel—no snack after school. So he snatches a stale bun from last night’s dirty dinner plate by the sink and gnaws it with a challenge in his eye. I put him in his room—but two minutes later when I go to clean the toilet, he ambushes me from behind the shower curtain with a chocolate–coated spoon and befudged grin.”

DOGSITTER

“’Callie! Max has got something!’ Adam shrieks from the next room. I chase Max the mutt down the hall and wrestle a stuffed animal from his jaws for the dozenth time that day. He drags the ten-foot hall runner into the living room, leaves masticated morsels of stereo earphones littered in the bedroom, pulls folded sheets and pillowcases off the top of the drier and tramples them, chomps the leaves off house plants.

“No sooner has Adam set up his ranks of plastic cowboys and Indians for a mock battle than Max scampers through, scattering them for yards around. Adam howls, in hot pursuit, beating him with a Batman doll.

“I’m in the kitchen, slaving over the dishpan. In an unguarded moment I turn, and Max leaps on my hands, slaking his thirst for dishwater with a great lolling tongue. When I try to load the dishwasher, he strains his head through my legs, slurping last night’s gravy from the dinner plates I’ve just stacked.

“Another mad dash and he knocks down Adam, who bumps his nose, which I have to kiss in order for it to mend properly.

“I drag Max to the door by the collar and deposit him in the back yard, where he sets himself to digging trenches, flowers flying. My patience spent, I corral him into his cage, but he leaps up on the sliding glass doors, dirtying the panes and rattling them with a thunder that reverberates throughout the house—another no-win day in the life of a dogsitter.”