Copyright © 2008 by Vicki Myron

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of publisher.

Grand Central Publishing

Hachette Book Group

237 Park Avenue

New York, NY 10017

Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

Grateful acknowledgment is given to W. P. Kinsella for permission to quote in Chapter 14 from Shoeless Joe

by W. P. Kinsella (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982).

First eBook Edition: September 2008

Grand Central Publishing is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

The Grand Central Publishing name and logo is a trademark of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

ISBN: 978-0-446-54220-3

Front jacket photo of Dewey by Rick Krebsbach

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Coldest Morning

Chapter 2: A Perfect Addition

Chapter 3: Dewey Readmore Books

Chapter 4: A Day in the Library

Chapter 5: Catnip and Rubber Bands

Chapter 6: Moneta

Chapter 7: Grand Avenue

Chapter 8: A Cat’s Best Friends

Chapter 9: Dewey and Jodi

Chapter 10: A Long Way from Home

Chapter 11: Hide-and-Seek

Chapter 12: Christmas

Chapter 13: A Great Library

Chapter 14: Dewey’s Great Escape

Chapter 15: Spencer’s Favorite Cat

Chapter 16: Iowa’s Famous Library Cat

Chapter 17: Dewey in the Modern World

Chapter 18: Puss in Books

Chapter 19: The World’s Worst Eater

Chapter 20: Dewey’s New Friends

Chapter 21: What Makes Us Special?

Chapter 22: Dewey Goes to Japan

Chapter 23: Memories of Mom

Chapter 24: Dewey’s Diet

Chapter 25: The Meeting

Chapter 26: Dewey’s Love

Chapter 27: Loving Dewey

Epilogue: Last Thoughts from Iowa

Acknowledgments

To Gran, Mom, and Jodi — three amazing women who loved

Dewey almost as much as I do

Introduction

Welcome to Iowa

There is a thousand-mile table of land in the middle of the United States, between the Mississippi River on the east and the deserts on the west. Out here, there are rolling hills, but no mountains. There are rivers and creeks, but few large lakes. The wind has worn down the rock outcroppings, turning them first to dust, then dirt, then soil, and finally to fine black farmland. Out here, the roads are straight, stretching to the horizon in long, unbroken lines. There are no corners, only occasional, almost imperceptible bends. This land was surveyed and plotted for farms; the bends are corrections in the survey line. Exactly every mile, every road is intersected by another almost perfectly straight road. Inside is a square mile of farmland. Take a million of those square miles, lace them together, and you have one of the most important agricultural regions in the world. The Great Plains. The Bread Basket. The Heartland. Or, as many people think of it, the place you fly over on your way to somewhere else. Let them have the oceans and mountains, their beaches and their ski resorts. I’ll take Iowa.

In northwest Iowa, in winter, the sky swallows the farmhouses. On a cold day, the dark clouds that blow in across the plains seem to churn the land under like a plow. In the spring, the world is flat and empty, full of brown dirt and hacked-off cornstalks waiting to be plowed under, the sky and land perfectly balanced like a plate on a stick. But if you come in the late summer, you would swear the ground is about to push up and tip the sky right out of the picture. The corn is nine feet high, bright green leaves topped with brilliant gold tassels. Most of the time you are buried in it, lost in the walls of corn, but top a small rise in the road, just a few feet of elevation, and you can see endless fields of gold atop green, silken threads sparkling in the sun. Those silks are the sex organs of the corn, trapping pollen, flying golden yellow for a month and then slowly drying up and browning out under the stiff summer heat.