DB: Marry her.
A second one followed it almost immediately.
DB: But you’ll have to do it on camera. Nothing normal ever happens to that woman.
We all know about the funny things that have happened at weddings, but I just knew that it would be something random that happened at Evie’s. Then again, so did everyone else who watched her videos. Her weird magnet wouldn’t make it any other way.
Eight hours later…
“We’re joined today by a detective from the police department in our town. Sayla and Jacinda are still recovering from last night, though, so it’s just me and Alex and his dog, Bernice.”
Evie had set up the camera on a tripod with a weird circular light. The two of us were sitting on the couch with the dog buttons on their boards laid out on the ground in front of us, while her phone recorded from behind us, too.
“As you know, my dogs are lazy and crazy, so there was no way we could even attempt the dog talking buttons a generous company sent us. However, clever Bernice here already uses one that says ‘outside’ when she wants to go potty, so Alex has been working with her on using some other ones.”
Twisting at the waist, so she was sitting sideways on the couch now, she gestured with her hand.
“How many buttons has she learned?”
“A total of thirty-five so far. I ordered another three packs of the buttons.”
Evie blinked. “Are you sure? She’s only been learning them for, like, six weeks.”
“I read a book about how to train dogs to use them when she was a puppy, so I knew and understood how to do it. Plus, Bernice is a strong-willed dog, and she’s happy to have a voice for her demands now. She knew what all of the words meant, so it was just learning the buttons.”
After that, I figured it was probably pertinent to stress how much training my dog had gone through, pretty much every day of her life, and that every dog was different. Some picked up commands quickly, and some took forever to learn them—or never did if Evie’s dogs were anything to go by, which was fine. They were well-loved and lazy dogs, nothing wrong with that.
My dog groaned as she leaned against Evie, accepting the scratches under her chin. Off camera, Razzle and Rocket were both asleep on their backs, snoring gently while they wagged or kicked a leg periodically.
“Wow, well, can you tell us what words you went with?”
Picking up the list beside me, I nodded. “Sure. So, there was walk, no, brush, dinner, noise, water, Dad, treat, play, Bernice, tug, Evie, Cody, Dave, Tabby, baby—for my granddaughter, friend, smell, stranger, why, home, leave, talk, ball, where, want, I love you, soon, sad, thank you, bad, and then a hmm noise for questions. The theory behind it is simple, you can’t expect a full sentence, so you have to have words available so you can get the general gist of what Bernice wants to say.”
Then, tapping my hand on the couch, I called my dog to get her attention.
I stepped on a button with my foot that had Bernice written on it and then moved to the others to make a question.
“Bernice—talk—Dad—hmm?”
Moving over to the pads, she cocked her head while she figured out her response.
“The key is not to hurry them, especially while they’re learning what each one means to them,” I told the camera.
Before I could say anything else, Bernice lifted her paw and began to answer.
“Where—Cody—hmm? Want—play.”
Evie turned and smiled sadly down at her.
I could see she was about to reply verbally, so I tapped her knee with my finger. “If you reply, try to do it on the buttons.”
Standing up, she scanned them and chose what she wanted to say back.
“Cody—home—soon—Bernice. Want—play—Evie—hmm?”
Bernice whined slightly and scratched at the buttons instead of stepping on one, a sign of emotions that’d take her a minute to get past.
“Dogs abilities to do things can be impacted by emotions and noises, just like with us, so it’s best to give her a moment to work through it,” I explained.
Sitting down, Evie looked over at her dogs. “Y’all can’t see them right now, but my two Labradors are asleep on their backs, totally untrained. I’d love to think they could do this like Bernice can, but I doubt it. The only thing those two respond to are treats, dinner, potty, and bed.”
“They probably could do it,” I hedged. “But they’d need a lot more training than Bernice did. The only reason she did so well in such a short space of time was my familiarity with them, her ability to press the button she already had and her awareness of what the buttons do for her, and also the fact I saved her from a puppy farm when she was only nine weeks old and started training her a week later.”