Two

Once they reached the store, Mahmee brought Philip and Rodie to Aunt Candace’s office. Aunt Candace had helped Mahmee bring Philip home from the pet store when Mahmee didn’t have a car. Philip often enjoyed telling Rodie how Aunt Candace had talked to him, not to the other piglets in the cage with him. He was afraid she and Mahmee would pass him up the way so many other people had passed him up because they thought he was ugly. He could hardly believe his ears when he heard Mahmee say she would take him precisely because he was ugly, and the ugly ones always had the sweetest personalities. Aunt Candace was calling him “Philip” before the store clerk took him out of the case.

Aunt Candace was delighted to see Philip again. She couldn’t believe how big he had grown! And, she couldn’t believe that Mahmee was feeding him nothing special—just the ideal guinea pig diet of lots of hay and veggies, and a small amount of plain pellets. “He gets tons of floor and lap time, too,” Mahmee said.

With one hand under his arms and one hand under his rump, she took Philip from the carrier and held him so they were nose to nose. “Are you my baby boar?” she said in a squeaky voice.

Aunt Candace laughed. “Wouldn’t it be funny if he said yes?”

“But I always say yes,” Philip said, though to Mahmee and Aunt Candace, his words sounded like “Wheek wheek wheek wheek wheek wheek!”

One by one, Mahmee’s co-workers came to play with Philip and Rodie. With so many people around to watch her pets, Mahmee thought she would go to lunch with a co-worker she could never have lunch with because their schedules were so different. So off Mahmee went. And off went all the other workers because customers needed them or because they were arranging merchandise on the floor. Aunt Candace tried to stay in her office with Philip and Rodie, but she had to help a new sales associate with a nasty customer who was trying to return a very expensive dress that she had worn and torn.

“I guess we’re by ourselves,” Philip said after everyone had gone and the room was quiet.

“Thank goodness, I thought they’d never leave!” Rodie said in a huff. “They’re not very smart, you know.”

“Of course they’re smart,” Philip retorted, feeling insulted. “They’re Mahmee’s friends. Mahmee wouldn’t have stupid friends.”

“Then how do you explain this?”

Rodie nudged the door to her travel case. Clearly, the person who had put her away had failed to close the door properly, and it ever so gently drifted open. Out Rodie stepped, onto the cool marble floor of Aunt Candace’s office.

Philip was aghast. “Go back, Rodie! You’ll get in trouble.”

“No, I won’t. Everybody knows you can’t punish guinea pigs.”

She froze as the office door opened and Aunt Candace, talking on her cell phone, reached for a pen on her desk and started to write. It was as aunt Candace stood there, half in and half out, that Rodie gave Philip a sly glance and scooted through the door to freedom.

Philip wheeked in horror. What would Mahmee say when she came back and Rodie was gone? And what if Rodie got lost, or some stranger found her and kidnapped her? He had to get Rodie back. But how? He did frantic laps around his travel case and wheeked and wheeked, hoping desperately that Aunt Candace would look his way. But she was so caught up in her phone call that she just kept on talking and finally went away, letting the door slam shut behind her.

“No…wait!” Philip cried, placing his little paws on the side of the soft carrier. As he stood, he discovered that the mesh panel at the top of the carrier was zippered only half way. By stretching a tiny bit more, he could scramble through the opening and over the side of the travel case. In seconds, he was on the floor, crouching in fear, waiting for Aunt Candace to open the door again. Suddenly he saw the little hole in the wall behind the filing cabinet. Would it bring him to Rodie?

Before venturing into the hole, he thought he should leave Aunt Candace a note so she wouldn’t worry about him when she noticed he wasn’t in the office any more. He took one of the scraps of paper that lay around the trash basket beneath the desk and with his paws batted a pen from the open shoulder bag that hung from the chair.

“deer ant kandiss,” he carefully printed. “r-o-h-d—“ He stopped. He thought he knew how to spell Rodie’s name, but it didn’t look right. He crossed it out and wrote “r-o-a-d,” but that didn’t look right, either. So he crossed that out and put in “r-o-d-d.” But that still didn’t look right, so he played it safe and decided to refer to her as “the gurl.” “the gurl got owt. im going to fynde hur. luv and oxx, yore neffew, fillup.”

Satisfied with his note, Philip took a deep breath and stepped up to the hole. He suspected that what he was about to do was very dangerous, and he was afraid that Mahmee would be angry with him for leaving the office. But he was more afraid of something bad happening to Rodie. Mahmee would never forgive him if she knew he didn't try to help her. And what was more important: he would never forgive himself. Even though his tummy churned with nerves and he wondered if he would ever see Mahmee again, he shoved his nose into the hole and carefully lifted first one paw, then the other, over the jagged, chalk-dusty threshold.