Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

My name is India Opal Buloni, and last summer my daddy, the preacher, sent me to the store for a box of macaroni-and-cheese, some white rice, and two tomatoes and I came back with a dog. This is what happened: I walked into the produce section of the Winn-Dixie grocery store to pick out my two tomatoes and I almost bumped right into the store manager. He was standing there all red-faced, screaming and waving his arms around.
   “Who let a dog in here?” he kept on shouting. “Who let a dirty dog in here?”
   At first, I didn’t see a dog. There were just a lot of vegetables rolling around on the floor, tomatoes and onions and green peppers. And there was what seemed like a whole army of Winn-Dixie employees running around waving their arms just the same way the store manager was waving his.
   And then the dog came running around the corner. He was a big dog. And ugly. And he looked like he was having a real good time. His tongue was hanging out and he was wagging his tail. He skidded to a stop and smiled right at me. I had never before in my life seen a dog smile, but that is what he did. He pulled back his lips and showed me all his teeth. Then he wagged his tail so hard that he knocked some oranges off a display, and they went rolling everywhere, mixing in with the tomatoes and onions and green peppers.
   The manager screamed, “Somebody grab that dog!”
   The dog went running over to the manager, wagging his tail and smiling. He stood up on his hind legs. You could tell that all he wanted to do was get face to face with the manager and thank him for the good time he was having in the produce department, but somehow he ended up knocking the manager over. And the manager must have been having a bad day, because lying there on the floor, right in front of everybody, he started to cry. The dog leaned over him, real concerned, and licked his face.
   “Please,” said the manager. “Somebody call the pound.”
   “Wait a minute!” I hollered. “That’s my dog. Don’t call the pound.”
   All the Winn-Dixie employees turned around and looked at me, and I knew I had done something big. And maybe stupid, too. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t let that dog go to the pound.
   “Here, boy,” I said.
   The dog stopped licking the manager’s face and put his ears up in the air and looked at me, like he was trying to remember where he knew me from.
   “Here, boy,” I said again. And then I figured that the dog was probably just like everybody else in the world, that he would want to get called by a name, only I didn’t know what his name was, so I just said the first thing that came into my head. I said, “Here, Winn-Dixie.”
   And that dog came trotting over to me just like he had been doing it his whole life.
   The manager sat up and gave me a hard stare, like maybe I was making fun of him.
   “It’s his name,” I said. “Honest.”
   The manager said, “Don’t you know not to bring a dog into a grocery store?”
   “Yes sir,” I told him. “He got in by mistake. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
   “Come on, Winn-Dixie,” I said to the dog.
   I started walking and he followed along behind me as I went out of the produce department and down the cereal aisle and past all the cashiers and out the door.
   Once we were safe outside, I checked him over real careful and he didn’t look that good. He was big, but skinny; you could see his ribs. And there were bald patches all over him, places where he didn’t have any fur at all. Mostly, he looked like a big piece of old brown carpet that had been left out in the rain.
   “You’re a mess,” I told him. “I bet you don’t belong to anybody.”
   He smiled at me. He did that thing again, where he pulled back his lips and showed me his teeth. He smiled so big that it made him sneeze. It was like he was saying, “I know I’m a mess. Isn’t it funny?”
   It’s hard not to immediately fall in love with a dog who has a good sense of humor.
   “Come on,” I told him. “Let’s see what the preacher has to say about you.”
   And the two of us, me and Winn-Dixie, started walking home.