Sleeps with Dogs

by Lindsey Grant

  That night and every night, I strapped Buster into a hunter green fleece-lined harness and hauled him up the stairs to the master bedroom, his limbs flailing and his toenails scrabbling helplessly for purchase. The idea was that I’d hoist him vertically, taking enough weight off his aged joints that he could go through the motions of mounting the steps. Only after we’d made it to the second floor, both panting—and, I imagined, equally relieved that the ordeal was over—would Blondie bound up the stairs to join us.

  In the kennel, I frequently had to retrieve or deposit large dogs—some in excess of fifty pounds—to and from their fluorescently lit cubbies for walks or playtime with an interested customer. We ran an adoption program for local shelter dogs, and many of these were full-grown and slightly overweight, like Chester the resident Shar-Pei. He was adorable, but hoisting him or any of the other bigger dogs from the cage, and always holding tight to keep them from bolting for the exits until I could get them leashed, was a struggle. The squirmy dogs, so excited to be released from their claustrophobic enclosures, left me with back twinges that lasted for days.

  But that was nothing compared to heaving the dead weight of an overweight arthritic Lab up a flight of stairs. Waiting for me in the bedroom, though, was a Sleep Number bed: the perfect place to collapse after my exertions. One side was extra firm, the other moderately so. I had written down the respective numbers on a bit of paper to be sure I could restore the mattress to its original settings at the end of my stay. Until then, I was bound and determined to find my personal number. I had been working my way through the thirties and was feeling almost close to perfect at thirty-nine.

  Buster slept between the dressers, his toenails scratching erratically against the hardwood floor as he dreamed. Blondie’s spot was right next to the bed, her satisfied-sounding exhalations the last thing I heard as I drifted to sleep.

  After following up on all of my applications and accepting that the vet tech path was not to be, I started looking for openings at local pet supply stores. If I couldn’t be the vet tech waiting room lady, I certainly had the chops to wash dogs and offer their owners advice on accessories.

  True, working the sales floor at the pet store peddling merchandise—and pets, of course—had never been my strong suit. The pet counselors worked on commission, and they were ruthless, using every trick in the book to make a sale. This meant pitching all manner of questionably useful accessories (The pooper-scooper with ergonomically angled claw! Frilly underwear and pads for when your bitch is in estrus!) and upselling customers on industrial-sized bags of dog food, cat litter, aquarium pebbles, and so on. It also meant that many an $800 dog went home with the wrong family. And many of those dogs got returned within a week or a month when the first-time owner realized what they’d gotten themselves into.

  We had one customer who kept his Siberian husky in the cab of his big rig while he drove around the country. I have never seen a more neurotic animal, or one more badly in need of exercise. The overwrought dog couldn’t come into the store, which he and his owner visited anytime they were in the area, without chaos erupting. Within moments of the dog rearing his way through the cheerfully jangling door, displays were upended, toys and treats scattered across the industrial carpet, ferrets terrorized, the top layer of pig ears in the bin test-licked, and all other customers with or without their pets in tow hastened to the exit.

  I didn’t have the ambition to wheel and deal like the others, convincing new or expecting parents that a Lab puppy was a good choice, or that the twice-as-expensive memory foam dog bed was that much better than the regular and reasonably priced one. I was far more comfortable trimming toenails and chatting with customers about the consistency of their dog’s barf than trying to convince them they needed a $150 tartan cushion to go with those nail clippers. Hence my permanent position back in the kennel with the animals.

  Though working at PetSmart, Petco, Pet Food Express, or any other area chain felt like a big step down from being a vet tech, in both pay and prestige, I still preferred the access to the cute and furry that the job would provide over being, say, a barista or finding a desk job. I’d so much rather spend my days interacting with animals and their accessories than serving coffee to undercaffeinated customers or staring at a computer screen.

  On my last day with Blondie and Buster, I was still without a job, or even a likely prospect. I was grateful that I at least had a place to stay, as Annie had invited me to use their spare attic bedroom indefinitely. We had worked out an agreement in which I would help ferry her boys to and from school, kung fu, tutoring, and so on, as well as do some light shopping and cooking in exchange for room and board. They rarely used their old Volvo, a car they’d been meaning to trade in for months, and essentially handed over the keys. Even with the question of employment still looming, at least I could check “roof over my head,” and, for the time being at least, “set of wheels,” off the list of required components for my West-Coast attempt at adulthood.

  I compiled photos I’d taken of Blondie and Buster into a collage with dialogue bubbles declaring how much they’d missed their owners, and how much fun they’d had with me in the meantime. I left it propped on the kitchen island against Buster’s economy-sized pill bottles.

  It was only after the neighbors returned that I learned Blondie and Buster had regular dog walkers, a husband and wife team who lived a few streets over. They didn’t offer overnight pet care, and they were looking to contract with someone who could provide this service for their clients, just as I’d been doing for the past couple of weeks.

  I can see, in retrospect, why I was such an appealing solution to their problem. I showed up for my interview at Tom and Patty’s house, a classic northern California bungalow with an adobe-shingled roof and fruit trees dominating the postage stamp of a front lawn, wearing Crocs and my favorite Big Smith overalls. When they opened the door, I greeted their two massive German shepherds first, kneeling before them to receive their exploratory sniffs and licks.

  Tom and Patty later confided that this instinct on my part, greeting the dogs first, was more important to them than anything else I did or said in the hour-long interview that followed. In that meeting, conducted on their Southwestern-patterned couches in the dimly lit living room, I learned about their decade-old business, founded after they quit the rat race of corporate America to pursue their passion for animals. They shared with me the basic requirements of setting up shop as a professional pet-care provider, which, as small business ownership goes, had fairly low overhead. They primed me on which services were in high demand and the going rates for each, and where I might fit into this rapidly growing industry. Apparently, while plenty of pet-care providers would do end-of-the-day visits to tuck their clients’ dogs and cats in, next to no one stayed the night. It was this highly sought service that would be my niche: the sleepover.

  Of course, I would supplement these overnight stays with daily walks, helping lighten the load of Tom and Patty’s packed client roster by picking up those neighborhood walks and drop-in pet-sitting visits they couldn’t get to. Tom specialized in the group off-leash walks, so it was primarily Patty’s portion of the daily walks I’d help with. I was not interested in—or rather, I was completely daunted by—the prospect of managing five or so off-leash dogs at once. They agreed that, as a beginner, I was better suited for the leashed walks with one or two dogs at a time. They’d have primary contact with their clients and would manage the billing; I’d do the work, taking home a contractor’s percentage of what the client paid.

  Beyond the business license, liability insurance, and a small inventory of basic supplies, I would need a few clients of my own. For tax reasons—to distinguish my role from that of an employee—my individually established business needed to have an altogether independent client list. This took a touch of extra explaining, as I was a comparative literature major to their combined double MBAs. The immediate takeaway, though, was that subcontracting meant that I could jump right in to
working with them while figuring out my own marketing strategy and ramping up my business in parallel.

  I had my marching orders, and an all-new plan.

  Beyond my sheer delight at the prospect of spending my days, and many nights as well, in the company of so many different, affection-seeking animals, I was also enthusiastic about the business side of things. I’d always loved playing secretary, hoarding various types of ledgers and notepads. I got an adding machine for my eighth birthday and loved nothing more than accompanying my mom to Office Depot. Where most kids threw fits over candy or Barbie dolls, I’d beg for inane office supplies like carbon copies or the pink “While you were out” pads. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why my mom wouldn’t let me play with her checkbook.

  That I’d need to make business cards, track my mileage and gas expenses, file all work-related receipts for tax purposes, and submit invoices at month’s end all sounded like too much fun.

  In the very beginning, I only had one client I could call my own. He was Chase, a four-month-old cockapoo, which is a terrible name for a cocker spaniel/poodle mix. Chase’s family lived in the neighborhood and knew Annie’s boys through school. While Chase was undeniably adorable, with the giant heart-melting black eyes of a puppy and floppy brindle fur that was silky soft, he also had razor-sharp puppy teeth that he used early and often on the kids. According to the owners, he loved nothing more than a hand or an ankle to gnaw on—the younger, the better. His tendency to bite and chew extended to electrical cords, shoes, rugs, and anything else that came within reasonable range of his insatiable little mouth. Understandably worried about an accidentally electrocuted pup, and with the rate at which they were going through Band-Aids, they needed help training that puppy instinct to chomp, maim, and destroy right out of him. They were also very interested in the idea that I could leash train him and help teach him some of the more basic commands: come, stay, sit, no.

  Because Chase was still brand-new to the leash, our walks were short. I did my best to teach him to heel and was careful not to pull back on the leash as he strained his way forward down the sidewalk. A firm believer in positive reinforcement, I came armed with ample edible rewards to dissuade him from asphyxiating himself on the other end of the leash. He was still so little, it was easier to simply scoop him up and address him face-to-face. But not especially effective.

  The thirty-minute visit was filled out with backyard time, where Chase alternately attacked the fallen oranges from the citrus tree and nipped at my shoes. I threw a tennis ball as big as his tiny head from the safety of my perch on the picnic bench, my feet tucked up and out of range.

  He was excellent at the chasing and biting part of fetch, but less so at returning his prize. I had to risk my fingertips as I wrested the ball away from him. If his sharp little teeth hurt that much when I played with him, there must have been some tears from the kids.

  I was relieved to see some progress with the positive enforcement training, especially with the “sit” and “leave it” commands. While I held a treat aloft, he’d settle on his haunches, the ball momentarily abandoned at his feet. Head cocked, he followed the morsel with his bright black eyes.

  Unfortunately for me, when I praised him and offered him the snack, he chomped down on the treat and my fingertip together. At least I was able to sneak the ball away from him with my other hand.

  After my visit with Chase, I continued on to clients of Tom and Patty’s in the neighborhood. Thus far, they were all daytime walks or pet-sitting visits, as I had yet to start any overnight stays. I was grateful for the intro course of regular walks and house visits before what I felt was the advanced level of spend-the-nights, relishing the new rhythm of my days with the assortment of dogs I saw.

  Next on the list was a favorite of mine. Pearl was a golden retriever and poodle mix, a golden doodle, just like my Biscuit was. Of course, back then, Biscuit was just a mutt with the smarts of the poodle and the loyalty of the retriever. Breeders have since caught on to the exceptional blend of qualities, and this mix has become a boutique breed with a hefty price tag attached. Where our dog was free, offloaded on our delighted family by a grateful neighbor whose retriever got knocked up by a local poodle, I am sure that Pearl cost a couple hundred bucks and was the result of a planned coupling.

  Pearl looked so much like Biscuit, long-legged and fluffy, her curly cream-colored fur hanging down in her big brown eyes. While she retained the notorious gentle and sociable nature of the mix, she didn’t quite live up to the reputation of golden doodles for being exceptionally smart and thus highly trainable. She struck me as being on the slower end of the spectrum when it came to intelligence, though she more than made up for this with her inherent sweetness.

  And, though I’d never met them, her owners displayed some evidence of that, too. I could not figure out why they got a dog when they did. And this dog, too, needful as she was for interaction with and stimulation from her owners. Pearl stayed crated all day in the dining room and then had to wear a cone around her neck because she gnawed on herself, which they never took the time to train out of her when she was a puppy. At two, she needed exercise and contact—lots of both—and it hurt my heart to see her cooped up in that crate all day, every day. The chewing was probably just as much a symptom of boredom as anything else.

  “Hi, cutes,” I called to her as I entered, propping the Plexiglas door with my foot as I worked my key out of the old lock. I was quickly finding commonalities between the houses in the area, one being that the locks were old and the doors even older. Many of the houses were split-levels, renovations and updates seemed infrequent, and there didn’t appear to be much turnover. A For Sale sign was a rare sight indeed. People came and settled along the wide tree-lined boulevards, raised their families, and there they stayed for decades to come with seemingly little need for upgrades.

  This family seemed to fit that pattern. From what I’d gathered, they had a little boy—blond curls and smiles from the pictures on the mantle—and there was another on the way, based on the furniture reorganization going on upstairs. I only went up that narrow staircase when I needed to use the bathroom. I tried to avoid that, though, because the toilet ran, and once I almost broke off the door handle from the inside. Getting stuck in a client’s bathroom would surely be bad for business.

  Pearl’s crate was in the open living room/dining room to the right of the front door, but it was situated behind the dining room table, so I couldn’t see her until I was almost upon her. As was her usual, she sat facing the crate door, the cone half obscuring her adorable face. Her expressive eyes were barely visible behind her untrimmed doggy bangs. She wagged her tail, a thump thump thump on the base of her crate that was one of the most comforting sounds in the world to me.

  But I had to be ready. The minute I sprang the latch on her crate, she’d be out and past me faster than I could ever get used to—I’d been clipped by that cone more times than I cared to recall. She got so excited about her release that she often peed a little on the floor before she made it out the back door to the yard.

  I was slowly learning some tricks, though. It appeared that I was trainable, too. But, like Pearl, maybe not exceptionally so.

  “Be right back,” I said to her.

  She whined a little as I dashed down the stairs from the kitchen, through the playroom, and to the back door, which I unlocked and opened in preparation for her mad dash.

  It was a good move, too, because the minute Pearl made it beyond the threshold, she squatted. She wasn’t even on the grass when she let loose a stream on the paving stone right outside the back door. Not ideal, but far better than the playroom floor.

  When she finished, she shook her butt in what I read as delighted relief and then trotted over to me, trying to lick my hand and instead mauling my thigh with the hard edge of her cone. I removed it for our visit so that we could have some productive ball time, and I spent a good while scratching her neck where the collar had been.

  Fo
r the next thirty minutes, we threw the tennis ball and I taught her about sitting and waiting for the ball toss. It took her longer than most dogs to get the hang of it, but by the end, she was returning to me with the ball in her mouth, if not yet dropping it at my feet. After replacing the e-collar, and before returning her to the crate, I was sure to give her a prolonged full body scratch—an apology of sorts for subjecting her once more to the cone of shame and then locking her up. That was a mean one-two combination. She moaned a little, a low guttural sound that Biscuit used to make during belly rubs. Doggie ecstasy. She tried to lick my hands and legs in gratitude but just further bruised me with hard plastic. Pants were probably a good idea for my visits with her, in spite of the warm Indian summer sun that made me sweat and her pant.

  My first overnight gig was in less than a week. The assignment was a five-night sojourn with two dogs and seven exotic birds. In the meantime, I’d secured my business license and liability insurance and had filed my DBA with the local paper. I’d also joined an association of pet sitters and dog walkers. They were in need of a secretary to take down the minutes at the monthly meetings, so I’d offered my services there as well. I had business cards, a new email address, and an established scale of rates for my various services. But I had little idea of how to prepare myself for such a complicated client as this, with so many different breeds of birds, each with specific dietary and environmental needs. I had limited experience with birds of any kind as it was, much less with the large talking variety. Ready or not, though, I was poised to become a professional purveyor of the pet slumber party.

  Journal entry: Tuesday, 8:00 AM

  Looks like all that note-taking during episodes of Head of the Class and all those sick days spent playing secretary are finally going to pay off! I can now officially add Secretary, capital S, to my title—the kind that sits on a board, though, not behind a desk. I’ll be taking down and presenting the minutes at each meeting of the local pet-sitters’ association, and I get to include official-sounding things like, “Respectfully submitted.” Just like Kinsey Millhone! Dream realized. My pencils are sharpened and my new notebook is ready for tonight’s meeting. Maybe I should get a clipboard, too?