The Dog That Saved Stewart Coolidge by Jim Kraus

the produce is getting close to being out of date.”
    Lisa wrinkled her nose again.
    She looks pretty when she does that.
    “Hubert stole another bone this morning,” Stewart declared. Hubert sort of glared at him, with a dog’s sort of glare, appearing a little offended, as if Stewart had just called him an importune name.
    “Sorry, Hubert. I just wanted Lisa to know,” Stewart said, and Hubert’s expression softened.
    “I know,” Lisa replied. “It was all over the coffee shop in the afternoon. Seems like this dog crime wave has got the entire town talking.”
    “I know. A lot of customers make a point of asking if the dog bandit came in yet.”
    Lisa beamed.
    “My story got a lot of attention.”
    “It should. It was funny.”
    “A lot of attention.”
    Lisa looked as if she was ready to burst.
    “You’ll never guess who noticed it. Never in a million years.”
    Stewart pursed his mouth, trying to appear deep in thought, even though he had no real idea who might be interested in the story and why Lisa was excited. It was a subject he had simply not considered.
    “I don’t know. I give. Tell me.”
    Lisa sat up straight.
    “KDKA.”
    “Who?”
    “KDKA. The big TV station in Pittsburgh! I think they have a radio station, too, but this TV producer called me. They say they want to come out and do a feature on the bandit dog. And they want to talk to me! Stewart! This is huge. KDKA. That’s a real TV station. Not some cable show, I mean, like two guys in a van with an iPhone for a camera.”
    Stewart hoped his smile appeared genuine and authentic.
    But right after he heard the word “Pittsburgh,” he immediately developed a scenario in which Lisa was offered a job and she left Wellsboro forever, leaving him—and Hubert—forever, alone, bagging groceries at the Tops Market until he was in his forties and then almost dead, or something equally as bad.
    “That’s great, Lisa. Really great.”
    But I don’t mean it. Not at all. I don’t like being left alone. And I don’t want it to happen again.

Chapter Eleven
    B ARGAIN B ILL was in a great mood—the best mood he had been in for months and months, even better than when he sold ten cars in one day.
    “Ten cars! All by myself. Can you believe it?”
    His wife had smiled that day when he’d entered the house, then nodded and gone back to doing her word search puzzle. She was never far from a book of word search puzzles. Their house was home to perhaps twenty different word search puzzle books, each one with a pencil stuck between the pages of the last completed puzzle. In the garage, there were seven plastic bins, the large size, filled with completed word search puzzle books. She refused to let her husband discard any of them.
    “They’re not hurting you. Just let them be. It’s my hobby, not yours.”
    But none of that mattered just now.
    His lost-dog ruse had worked. People were stopping in at the car lot, asking him about the dog—Rover, he now called it, “my sweet Rover”—and how he got the dog from that rescue shelter in Lewisburg, the one that just closed down, and how it ran off during a spring thunderstorm and how he was nearly heartbroken until he saw the posters in town and how he would do anything to get him back.
    “The five-hundred-dollar discount is hardly enough—but it is all that I can do. I am just a struggling businessman who lost his most favorite companion.”
    His wife simply nodded as he laid out his somewhat complicated scenario of the lost dog and the rescue shelter, and the trip to Lewisburg, and all the rest, but she had assured him, several times, that she would back up his story, no matter how outlandish she might have considered it to be.
    “It’s not a big enough lie for me to lose sleep over,” she told him. “It’s not like you embezzled or held back taxes. It’s a dog. A dog no one wants.”
    This morning, the assistant pastor at the Good Hope Church stopped by to ask about the dog, but Bargain Bill