Sleeps with Dogs

by Lindsey Grant

  Intrigued as I was, my recent run-ins with sad bachelor clients had me feeling rather more than circumspect about single guys. True, this guy, Patrick, wasn’t a divorcée—at least that I knew of. By dint of pure coincidence, he worked at the same tech company that Ian did, but in a different field. There was no evidence to suggest that he was anything but normal, and maybe even exceptional, but neither could I banish the thoughts of sticky dishes and unwrapped condoms and malingering animals that sprung unbidden to my mind when I thought about pursuing him. I resolved to put him out of my mind, even though he lived around the corner from my friend’s apartment and I was seeing him regularly as a result.

  The troubles with Drew didn’t start until months after the roommate moved in. Late one morning, on a day that should have been like any other, I opened the front door to the smell of pot, so strong it seemed to thicken the air I was breathing. Drew’s roommate smoked frequently enough that I wasn’t unaccustomed to walking in to the scent of weed, but this was something altogether different.

  Baxter was passed out just inside the doorframe of Drew’s room, and I wondered if it was from a contact high. No one seemed to be home, but I popped up the stairs for a peek into the living room just to see if the smell was coming from boy wonder and his five-foot bong. There were two giant Rubbermaid bins stacked in the middle of the living room, the kind of containers you keep Christmas or Halloween decorations in. Or that’s what I’d use them for. I had a strong suspicion that these were not filled with strings of lights or inflatable zombies. And I was alone in the house with them.

  I hustled Baxter out of the house and onto the trail, sucking in the fresh air in an effort to clear my head. My clothes were going to reek, too, if I wasn’t careful. I wondered if I should have wiped my fingerprints from the doorknob. Or just left the house altogether and foregone the walk? I looked down at Baxter, who seemed none the worse for his fragrant morning.

  My phone rang moments after Baxter and I started walking away from the house. It was Drew, canceling the walk.

  “I am already here,” I said, opting for truth.

  There was a silence on the line.

  “Ah … Well! I trust you can be discreet, then. About whatever you … might’ve seen.”

  “Right. No problem.”

  “All right, then. Well, thanks! Kiss Baxter for me.” He said this last bit in his special Baxter voice.

  I hung up the phone, wondering if it was weird that I thought an apology was in order. Maybe a, “Don’t worry—there aren’t going to be cops surrounding the place when you get back from your walk with Baxter,” or “Nobody’s going to try to hijack the thousands of dollars’ worth of illegal drugs sitting on my living room floor while you’re there with my dog.” If I’d expected it, I sure didn’t get it. And when I returned Baxter, I essentially pushed him through the door and locked up behind me, hightailing it to my car like it was base in a high-stakes game of chase.

  I wasn’t some kind of puritan when it came to pot; I knew that marijuana was common enough in the area and that plenty of clients, and colleagues, for that matter, regularly partook. This was Berkeley, after all. A colleague of mine had called me one night, trying to ask me if I could cover a walk for her but having a hard time articulating her request. She finally confessed that she was high out of her mind because she had snuck a cookie at a clients’ house—they’d been sitting out on a plate in the kitchen—never suspecting it was a “special” cookie. She’d done her best to get through the rest of her day but was kind of freaking the fuck out trying to get all the dogs home from her final group walk.

  Neither would I try to pretend that I hadn’t smoked my own share of weed. I’d gone to college. But I needed Drew to know that it wasn’t cool to assume I was okay with what had happened. I couldn’t be in his house, alone, if some shit went down. So, crying inside at the loss of wages, I sent Drew a letter two days later resigning as Baxter’s dog walker.

  What I received in response to my letter was a sincere apology, a humble request for me to resume my visits, and the promise that this would never, ever happen again. I didn’t totally believe him, but I was grateful for the lip service and elated to keep Baxter on as a regular walk. By sending Drew my resignation, I felt I’d done due diligence in preserving my unimpeachable reputation among my peers, and no one would judge me too harshly for taking Drew and his ancient dog back.

  For a short while, everything really was okay. Drew commissioned me to take Bax to the self-serve doggy wash down by the bay. I loaded him into a cubicle custom-built for pet baths, shampoo provided, and scrubbed him down, which he seemed to love. He kept looking over his shoulder at me like, “Hey, isn’t this fun?” I was almost as wet as he was and smelled just as much like a wet dog, but it was fun, like a field trip.

  As it turned out, I was extra glad to have that bonding opportunity with Baxter.

  I was driving into San Francisco for my first official date with Patrick when I picked up a message from Drew. Baxter needed to go to the vet, and he wondered if I could take him. I couldn’t tell from the voice mail whether Bax’s need was urgent, or if this was a longer-term “at some point” request, like the bath had been. I was cresting the hill on Geary, about to descend toward Japantown and my date-to-be’s apartment beyond. I decided to be safe and wait until I’d parked to call back. The proximity of that neighborhood to both the Fillmore and Pac Heights made finding an open and legal place to park extraordinarily difficult, but patience and luck won out, and I eventually scored a spot just around the corner from Patrick’s apartment.

  Drew picked up on the first ring.

  “Hey, so can you take him?”

  “Um … I’m in the city right now. What’s going on?”

  “Okay, well he’s been acting weird all day and he needs to go now. Can you come back?”

  “Weird how?”

  “I dunno, he isn’t getting up or moving much, and his eyes look funny.”

  That sounded like Baxter. I had to guess his usual immobility and the rheumy glaze to his eyes was extra accentuated because that description pretty much covered his usual MO.

  “Listen, I am really sorry. I can’t make it back this minute, but I could take him in tomorrow when I come in the morning.”

  “No, it has to be now. I gotta go.”

  I didn’t know in the moment whether to feel bad that I wasn’t sacrificing my first date to rush back to the East Bay and Baxter’s side, or pissed that Drew was being such a dick. I tried to take a deep breath and simply write off Drew’s rudeness on the phone as worry for Bax. Which I hoped very sincerely was unfounded. He was, after all, an old, old man in dog years.

  Feeling worried for Baxter, my anxiety altogether supplanting the butterflies I’d had over the very exciting and imminent first date with someone I really liked, I tried to put it out of my mind.

  The next morning, I was on my way back over the Bay Bridge from San Francisco because my date with Patrick—the kind and funny and generous and miraculously single and not at all an egotistical womanizer, as I’d feared—had gone that well, when I picked up another message from Drew. Baxter had died in the night, at the vet after all, though he didn’t say how Baxter had gotten there. I couldn’t help but feel that there was a tone of recrimination in Drew’s voice, as though my inability to take him to the vet equaled an unwillingness to save his life. A life which, I was sad to learn, wasn’t salvageable.

  I continued to walk Matilda for the remainder of the week and then submitted my final invoice to Drew for services rendered, bath included. And he never paid. Despite numerous phone calls and emails, a check for the $150 he owed never appeared in my mailbox. I felt petty worrying over that amount of money, especially in the wake of Baxter’s death, which he was surely torn up over. I was, too. But that sum, however small, made an enormous difference in my ability to pay my own bills. Then there was the principle of it, which I tried not to dwell on. I contemplated taking him to small claims court and then quick
ly abandoned the notion; it wasn’t worth the hassle and the bad juju and would probably cost me more than he owed in the first place.

  Besides, I was distinctly not litigious. I lived in fear of being sued—or audited, or even scolded—and had recently been threatened with legal action for the first time. She was a potential client; no contract had as yet been signed. She owned two French bulldogs, and I’d met with her to go over what services she was in need of, and to familiarize myself with the dogs I’d potentially be sitting for. It was a tricky job—just pet-sitting, no overnights, but two visits a day, and she lived thirty minutes away. A classic case of the time and fuel canceling out any profit, but a sacrifice I was making more and more just to stay afloat.

  Within minutes of our meeting, I knew this was not going to work out. Her specificities for the dogs were so many and so insane—from the temperature of their drinking water to the temperature of the house, the length of time they could be exercised and how vigorously, their body temperature when they finished, and the foods that I fed them, the quantities for each, and in what order—which telegraphed to me in big, flashing, neon letters that somewhere in there I was going to screw something up. Never mind the fact that every room in the house, from the hall to the living room to the kitchen to the dining area, was baby gated to manage which room they remained in when. Depending on the time of day and the activity at hand, she moved them through from one space to the next like steers being herded from pen to pen. The owner attributed the exacting nature of their care to health issues, claiming they had severe asthma and, if they got remotely overheated, they’d keel over and die.

  I could already foresee their almost certain death at my hands, and I wanted no part in it. When I told her I couldn’t take the job after all, she threatened legal action, as they’d already booked their tickets and were relying upon me to be there for the dogs in their absence. I consulted with my colleagues to see if she had a foot to stand on, terrified that either way, I was going to be facing a lawsuit—this way, for an unfulfilled obligation and the cost of plane tickets purchased, or, if I took the job, for unwittingly overheating her French bulldogs to death. That neither of us had signed any form of care contract entirely exonerated me, and she ended up employing another pet sitter after all. Whoever they were, I worried for them.

  I didn’t share any of this with Patrick. To my great surprise, he was interested in and impressed by my self-employment and the unusual way I spent my days (and many nights). Were it up to him, I wouldn’t do overnights at all, since—devilishly—he declared that if anyone was sleeping with me, it should be him and not a dog. But he respected my work and thought it was extraordinary. (Though he also fully supported my decision to go out on the date with him rather than escorting Baxter to the vet.) I wondered at how he’d been on the market, unclaimed, for so long before he met me, and how I’d been the one to change his status from “single” to “in a relationship.” But I also knew better than to stick my head too far into the horse’s mouth looking for answers.

  I didn’t have the heart to say anything that might change his rosy view of my job; it felt too good to be admired. He didn’t need to know how much that $150 meant to me, how afraid I was of clients like the French bulldog lady, how easily one mistake or one more lost client could take me from self-employed to unemployed. He’d find out soon enough that this job—fun and kooky as it sounded, and often felt even to me—wasn’t all good times, cute pets, and intrepid entrepreneurialism. Sometimes it was just hard.

  To: “Mom”, “Dad”

  Subject: Lindsey Versus the World: Episode 3

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  YYYYYYah! Whack. Ker-plow! (This is the sound of superhero me using my good sense and catlike reflexes to battle back against the humiliation of being cowed by the she-bear of life.)

  Success #1: I have obtained functioning, legitimate Internet in the apartment and can stop sitting in the car outside the Internet café to use email! (While superheroes are super, they also need technology.)

  Success #2: The client whose Bernese mountain dog ate my glasses is going to reimburse me for their replacement after all! Technically they don’t have to, since I had “full understanding” that the dog eats anything and everything in sight (underwear, remotes, magazines, napkins), but they decided to be awesome instead of evil.

  Success #3: I took y’all’s advice and have started looking into grad school. Yesterday, as I was lunching on the samples at Andronico’s, I thought about what you said—about realizing my full potential. Maybe if I aim beyond eating free cheese cubes and day-old bread, I’ll break the glass ceiling and be able to buy a baguette of my own …

  Lindsey the Conquerer

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Forty Days

  I was having a hard time getting out of bed. Having lived in the Atlanta area up until two years prior, I was used to the weather patterns of the southeast. On the edge of the old-growth forest where my family lived, I could sit on the screened-in porch and wait for the coming storm. The sharp earthy smell of ozone permeated the air as the tall trees began to bend and moan in the wind. Those storms were usually wild and exciting, leaving a blanket of broken branches and leaves across the lawn. Within an hour the storm would pass, the thunder rolling on, the cardinals and chickadees and tufted titmice coming out to forage in the new landscape.

  In Berkeley, however, I quickly learned not to hope for any thunder and lightning. Here, rain was just rain. Whether it soaked or misted, it tended to come straight down without spectacle. It had been coming down nonstop now for almost a month.

  Such uninterrupted rain was unusual in the East Bay. That’s what everyone said, at least. Having lived there for such a relatively short time, I had little historical knowledge of regional weather trends to compare this wet spell to. Initially, the soft spraying sound of the rain in the bottlebrush outside my bedroom window was comforting; I happily burrowed further into my bed, relishing the knowledge that it was wet out there but I was dry and warm inside. Over a month later, I was still waking up to the patter of water on bough and branch, on the dumpster beneath my window, on cement. I knew that I’d be out in it soon enough, just as soaked as everything else in spite of my rain gear.

  That morning especially, I could not bring myself to peel back the layers of blankets—flannel sheet, down comforter, and mossy green thrift-store quilt—to put my feet flat on the wood floor and start the day. I dreaded the moment I had to don my perpetually damp rain gear with its earthy fungal smell. I felt pretty sure I was starting to smell that way, too, even when I was showered and wearing warm, dry clothes.

  The exposed brick wall in my bedroom gave the space a cavernous feel even in the best of weather, but, with the constant rain, I felt the moisture all the time, no matter how many blankets I slept beneath, or how warm my pajamas were. I’d already tried to move the bed away from that brick wall with its wide window, but there was nowhere else to put it. The bite of the saturated air seeped through the poorly sealed window and onto my head while I slept. When I woke up, the cold was inside the bed as well. Even an inch away from where I lay, the sheets were chilly. What a waste of bed, not to be able to spread out on the wide mattress. What that bed really needed was another warm body, and I was grateful that that was increasingly a prospect these days.

  I’d been seeing Patrick more and more, usually at his San Francisco apartment, as he worked long hours and got home late. The additional commute by BART to Berkeley to see me put him at my place around the time I usually went to sleep. Better to just meet him there on his turf when he got home and have a few alert hours with him before I turned into a pumpkin. I was extra exhausted at the end of these dreary, drenched days. Still, the reward of seeing him at the end of the slog was incomparable, the best and only carrot to lead me out into the never-ending rain once more.

  Patrick had been over to my apartment a few times, usually on weekends, when the time-consuming commute was less of an issue. He claimed that he preferred
my place to his. He often said dear things like that, having no idea the effect it had on me—that he should like Ian’s and my humble, dark little apartment, furnished almost entirely in thrift-store finds or sidewalk salvages. For the first few months that Ian and I lived there, Ian had slept on a mattress we’d collected from outside a house in Hayward, thanks to a post in Craigslist’s Free Stuff section. Eventually, the smell and its dubious provenance—and then his new, well-paying job—prompted him to buy a new, unsullied one from Ikea.

  For my part, I was still sleeping on the generous queen mattress donated by Annie when I’d moved to Berkeley. It was used, having been stored in their basement for guests to sleep on in the den, but it was wonderfully comfortable and didn’t smell one bit.

  Growing up, I’d always slept on a twin mattress. At nearly six feet tall by the time I was fifteen, I felt like a hot dog in a bun sleeping in that narrow bed. So here, on this luxuriously large mattress, it pissed me off that I was rooted to the spot, held captive within the small imprint of body heat. Stupid Berkeley apartments with one ancient, fire-hazard radiator, situated nowhere near the bedrooms.

  While I lay there trying to muster the will to get up, get up, get up, I ran over my list of dogs for the day. With Baxter so recently out of the picture and no new regularly scheduled walk taking his place, I was on the hunt for additional work. Whether it came from drop-in visits for folks who were traveling or a second job that had nothing to do with animals at all, I was ready to take anything I could find.

  I’d had some success picking up some extra pet-sitting gigs, and these thirty-minute drop-in visits for out-of-towners’ cats and fish and assorted other low-maintenance companions helped me tremendously in my monthly quest toward meeting the bottom line. But they didn’t offer the stability of daily walks, week after week, for clients that needed frequent and ongoing service. Income I could rely upon month after month after month, barring disaster.