Sleeps with Dogs

by Lindsey Grant

  She still lived in Atlanta; the townhouse she and her husband bought was a mere mile from the house where she and I grew up. Our parents still lived there in Atlanta as well, though so many years later, the house little resembled the humble red brick ranch we’d moved into when I was three and she was seven. The pink-tiled bathroom where she decorated me like a paper doll was now remodeled with a sophisticated pedestal sink and olive green walls. We had played bath class in the old tub every Wednesday and Sunday night until she hit puberty. She was the teacher, instructing me on how to properly wash my hair or wind the wooden tugboat so it would reach the opposite end of the tub. Class was canceled only once in all those years, when I got upset with her for getting soap in my eyes and maliciously pooped in the tub.

  When I turned off the dryer and unplugged it, Foxy opened her eyes and smiled up at me, baring her snaggletooth. I pulled a dry shirt over her head, manipulating her legs through the powder blue sleeves one at a time. The front of the shirt fit across Foxy’s back, boasting Foxy Lady! in glittery gray and blue curlicues. At the kitchen door, I pressed my face against her dear head once more and pulled on my heavy jacket.

  “See you tomorrow, little girl,” I called as I locked the door and stepped back into my tattered boots.

  In an effort to patch up the hole in income left by Baxter’s passing, I’d taken over a twice-a-week walk for a colleague whose schedule, unlike mine, was full to overflowing. The dog was Princeton, a horrifically bourgeoisie name, but then it would be fair to say that he was born with a silver bone in his mouth. His owners lived in a veritable villa tucked deep in the Berkeley hills, and I was but one service provider on that estate crowded with contractors of all kinds. We were like so many worker bees maintaining a hive.

  When I arrived at the parking pad outside the main gate, I could see the gardener’s truck was also there, a telltale hose snaking down the curved staircase to the wide front lawn. I could only assume they were in the interior courtyard, as all the rain was more than sufficient to water the outdoor plants.

  Upon entering the foyer, I could see that the cleaning ladies were there as well, the rug rolled to the side and a mop bucket in the corner. I skirted the edge of the room to avoid messing up the freshly mopped floor and listened for the click of Princeton’s nails on the terra-cotta tiles.

  I gave a tentative whistle and a clap, hoping he wasn’t shut up in a room with the husband. Extremely young to be semiretired, he conducted what remaining financial business he dabbled in from home. The house was so vast that I rarely saw him and could easily lose the dog as well if he was cloistered behind any one of the massive wooden doors that lined each level.

  Princeton descended from the curved staircase before me, his silky shining fur flowing majestically. He was easily the most handsome golden retriever—or dog of any kind—I’d ever had the privilege of tending to. And he was a sweetheart to boot, the perfect pet specimen in every regard. At the base of the stairs, he greeted me with an enthusiastic lick to my hand and a full-body wag.

  “It’s raining again, buddy. I’m sorry.” To the owners’ credit, they neither required nor even requested that Princeton wear any kind of rain gear—no waterproof booties, fleecy harness, or puppy poncho—for our wetter walks. He was free to walk in the rain and get just as wet as Mother Nature intended.

  Our twice-weekly walk was comprised of a few laps around a big man-made lake at the nearby park. Much of the path was paved, but it could get quite hilly and treacherous in the heavily wooded portions, the soft paths churned to mud and ever-widening puddles. Depending on the intensity of the weather that day, we’d brave it, or else do extra runs of the cleaner concrete sections.

  Either way, Princeton was easy. He never resisted, always listened, and seemed utterly content whether he was dry and sun-warmed or soaked to the skin. He was such a classic golden: affable, loveable, and easygoing. It made me feel bad that, of late, I’d been the exact opposite, and a poor match for his happy disposition. Sometimes I just got so dispirited by the relentless rain and the same circular route that I’d just sit down on a bench, Princeton settling by my side without objection, letting me pet him and talk to him about how sick to death I was of being wet. For him, being inside at his owner’s feet all day, he was probably happy for the fresh air, whereas I’d have given a lot to spend an hour or so of my workday out of the elements in a warm, carpeted room.

  I’d tried so many times in so many different ways to reengage with my daily routines. To celebrate that I got to spend my days with dogs and cats and was not tasked with solving unsolvable problems. That I was my own boss, for all intents and purposes. That I got to move around all day long, getting plenty of exercise outside instead of sitting at a desk. If I couldn’t take my days moment-to-moment, embracing the process and the perks of my job, then better to disconnect from it altogether, zoning out until I was finished performing the many repetitive and endlessly wet tasks. Anything seemed better than feeling so dulled by the monotony and isolation of my hours. I chalked up the intensity of my apathy to all the rain—everyone in the area was talking about seasonal affective disorder—but it certainly didn’t help that I still wasn’t back on my antidepressant. Every month I tried to come up with the extra cash, and every month I fell short of the prescription cost.

  It never failed that, upon my return to the palace with Princeton, the cleaning ladies had moved from the foyer to the kitchen, where all of Princeton’s brushes and treats were stored. I tried to be unobtrusive as I ducked into the far cupboard for the supplies, taking them into a beautifully furnished den, where Princeton sprawled out on the floor for his grooming. I cleaned his paws, today resorting sheepishly to the use of hot soapy paper towels since my own unwashed towels would probably make him dirtier than he already was. Then I combed out the tangles in his fetlocks and gave the rest of his fur a good brushing.

  Before I left, I was careful to leave a note indicating that I’d come. This was a recent request from the owner, as they claimed they never knew when I’d come or whether I’d been there at all. I took slight offense to this, taking the request as a suggestion that I took advantage of their massive house and the many workers crawling the property to skip out on Princeton’s constitutionals. Good walk today, if a little wet! I wrote. I didn’t feel particularly inclined to embellish further; our walks were always exactly the same, and I was without the inspiration to dress it up. They had a perfect dog, and I was burned out. I wondered how a note to that effect would go over.

  My next appointment couldn’t have been more different from Princeton’s pristine and stately environs. If his home was heaven, these dogs were surely living in some version of hell.

  One of the dogs was an extremely aged Samoyed with such advanced arthritis and probably hip dysplasia that she literally got stuck where she was and couldn’t get up. She had flashes of mobility, but, when she locked up, she couldn’t help herself out of it. When I entered the backyard by way of a locked side gate, I found her more often than not lying in a mess of her own waste. I had to hose her undersides down before physically lifting her and moving her to a cleaner, dryer location. This was complicated by the other dog, a three-legged pit mix who was fiercely protective of his companion. He barked viciously at me, bounding around lopsidedly, until I’d cleaned her, moved her, and stepped well away.

  Every time I visited these dogs and negotiated their untenable living situation, I felt like we three were acting out a scene from a David Lynch script.

  If I didn’t have the prospect of seeing Patrick motivating me, pulling me through the hours and appointments, I am not sure how I’d have gotten through those wretched days of torrential rain and self-doubt. He in no way considered my job depressing but instead was fascinated that I got so wet in a day that my hands were pruney, laughing sincerely at stories about inconvenient poop and enraged three-legged dogs. He had grown up with pets of his own but had never before considered the depth of detail and devotion that went into caring for oth
er people’s. He listened with rapt attention when I related the events of my day, and, like my sister, made it possible for me to laugh at those things I might otherwise be inclined to cry over.

  His days were so different from mine, moving as he did between brightly lit and playfully decorated offices and conference rooms, climate-controlled buildings, and cafés and micro-kitchens overflowing with unlimited free food and drinks. He had that desk job in front of a computer that I had so dreaded when I started down the professional pet-care path. Now that didn’t sound half bad to me.

  As genuine as his interest in my work was, he didn’t view it as a means of defining me. He thought grad school was a super option and championed that pursuit as well. His positivity and belief that I could do whatever I wanted, be it bartending at a bowling alley or writing a book, was a salve for my dispirited soul, and my gratitude that I’d met him when I did knew no bounds.

  He seemed to represent everything I’d been missing—things I needed and hadn’t even realized. That weekend, he was taking me out to dinner in San Francisco, and not just for a burger or tacos. We were going to a rather fancy-looking pan-Asian restaurant that was a favorite of his. This was something he loved to do and that I’d rarely indulged in until then—sampling the finer food the city offered in abundance. These extravagances were delightfully tempered by our tradition of watching lowbrow TV on the couch at his apartment. We hadn’t missed an episode of The OC since we’d met. Though he was bilingual and incredibly well-traveled and well-read, I was gratified that he’d been just as happy to see Curious George in the theaters with me over the limited-run foreign film that was showing nearby.

  As I catalogued his seemingly endless interesting qualities and surprising attributes, I never took for granted that he also wasn’t possessed of four paws, fur, and an inability to communicate beyond barks, wags, and licks. In him I saw a glimmer of hope—a long-absent ray of sunshine and much-needed human companionship—beyond those dismal, underemployed days of rain and uncertainty.

  To: “Membership LISTSERV”

  Subject: Missing Dog—UPDATE

  Dear Colleagues,

  Update: Missing dog FOUND! Needs immediate re-homing or foster care. Tickles, a cat-and kid-friendly Tibetan terrier, needs a forever home ASAP. Long story. Please contact me if you or someone you know can take her.

  Many thanks,

  Lindsey Grant, Secretary

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Lost and Found

  I had a five-day-a-week walk that was a quick commute by freeway, the client paid promptly, and they rarely if ever canceled. Sure, their Christmas tip had been Starbucks peppermint hot chocolate, but their patronage was critical to keeping a roof over my head and the lights turned on.

  They lived in the Piedmont hills in a beautiful two-story Craftsman atop a long flight of flagstone steps. Frank and Diane were the prototypical rail-thin man and fleshier woman. Her struggle with weight was allegedly due to a terrible car accident that left her with irreparable back damage, a cane, and an array of painkillers. Frank had a medicated glaze to him that was probably due to some prescription of his own. They had a daughter, Mia, for whom the dog was likely meant to be a companion. I suspected it was she who had been allowed to name the dog.

  Tickles was a darling Tibetan terrier. She had inquisitive eyes, was quick to reward human company with a wag and a lick, and warmed to me immediately. With the wife’s back problems, regular dog walks (and apparently even getting up and down the stairs to the house) was becoming an impossibility, and the husband worked a full-time job outside of the house. Occasionally, he’d be home for one reason or another when I arrived, happening across him in the foyer or coming down the stairs looking rheumy-eyed and unsteady. I tried to be as brief and noncommittal with my greetings as possible and just get in and out and on my way with Tickles. His vacant stare gave me goose bumps.

  Tickles had a dog run in the back of the house, kind of a glorified gutter where she could eat, drink, piss, shit, and work on the peanut butter kong that was thrown to her every morning after the humans had their breakfast. It was no wonder that our walks were not only the high point of her days, but that on the street she was barely manageable. She was tiny but still arguably a menace to any other canine (or cat or squirrel-like creature) that crossed her path. It was my job to exercise her to the point of exhaustion while training her to behave on-leash and learn how to control her aggression in the presence of other animals. I found that, in the six months or so that I walked her, Monday through Friday, between the hours of eleven and two, I failed on all counts.

  I tried to teach her how to walk at a heel and not pull, and, when she caught a whiff of dog, to focus on me and maintain a sit, without flying into a whirling, snarling, slavering rage. It was somewhat comical to observe dogs three or eleven times her size reacting to her fits. Most of them were well mannered and responded with the canine equivalent of raised eyebrows and a discreet crossing-the-street avoidance. The owners often regarded me with some mixture of pity, distaste, or annoyance as though I had prompted her to act like such a maniac. “She’s not mine,” I wanted to call to them as they sauntered smugly away with their impeccably behaved companions. Cute as she was, her on-leash antics were downright embarrassing.

  In spite of her dreadful behavior on our walks, I really loved Tickles one-on-one, and she was one of those rare certainties in my job. Monday through Friday, steady money, a regular check at the end of every month. This could not be more appreciated. I needed that little dog. And, it seemed, she needed me too. The little girl wasn’t old enough to take her out alone, and it didn’t look like Tickles was going to get much attention or exercise on the parents’ time.

  In concert with Tickles’s regular visits, I’d been granted a brief reprieve from penny-pinching thanks to an extended pet-sitting gig for a cranky and extremely aged dachshund. It was a tricky job, requiring twice-daily visits at the very tippy top of one of Berkeley’s many hills, reachable only by a single twisty road. So remote was this house that it was the penultimate mailbox from the end of the road, where the concrete ended in some overgrowth and forced the driver to make a three-point turn and return the way he or she came.

  This was the very first job that I invited Patrick along for, an opportunity for him to experience my work in person. I was so excited to drive up into the hills with him, right along the Oakland/ Berkeley border, and take in the view from the top together. Up, up we went, on the curving roads fraught with hairpin turns and no guardrails, no street lamps, and barely enough room for cars going in the opposite direction to squeeze by. The houses we passed were mostly the type with the unassuming garage up top at street level, belying the sprawling houses set into the hillside below.

  The view of the bay and the city of San Francisco from the client’s front yard was unobstructed, the bridge looking like something from a child’s erector set, and all the houses in between were little spots of life and light on a canvas. It looked unreal from so high up and left me feeling exhilarated by the height and scope of the perspective. This euphoria was quickly extinguished, though, when I turned my attentions to the yard and house itself, and the dog lurking within.

  The front yard was a mystery to me, with wild, unrestrained plants, some dying and some overgrown into impenetrable thickets, accented by a rusting lawn chair or dulled, scratched garden globes. The front porch was cluttered with birdhouses, galoshes, assorted shovels, and countless cobwebby pots. It seemed to be perpetually gray and damp there. Despite the unblemished view from the edge of the property, the lot itself was heavily shaded by trees with low-hanging branches that made everything feel vaguely oppressive.

  When we arrived for that first visit together, Patrick was quiet as I opened the heavy front door. He knew this client only as the reason I’d stolen away so early on recent mornings. I’d lean over him and rub his back, telling him I had to go, and he always grunted in response, claiming later that he’d never heard me and woke up thinking I�
�d snuck out on him.

  The notion that I’d want to get away in favor of an old dachshund in an even older house made me smile inwardly. How desperately I hadn’t wanted to leave his side, even if it weren’t for this vicious little beast of an animal. I’d awake knowing that I was already late and she’d have made a mess somewhere in the house for me to clean up.

  But this being a weekend, Patrick could come meet the reason for my hasty early morning departures. He had a softness for dachshunds, having grown up with them. There was Princess, their first, followed thereafter by Princess Two. This is beyond me, calling successive dogs by the same name. We were so gutted by the death of Biscuit that we couldn’t bear to ever have another dog; we had to switch species entirely, moving on to our cat, Seal. (She was a biter, too—the only biter I ever loved.) To have a second dog, and one named Biscuit Two, would have been unthinkable.

  We entered. Sure enough, I could smell that she’d done it again. She was always hiding among the clutter when I arrived, in one of a few places: under the back corner of the massive oak table in the center of the room, or beneath the lamp table that I had to reach in order to have any light. I hoped every time, as I made my way carefully toward that lamp, that I didn’t step in a pile or a puddle of her mess, and I wondered for the umpteenth time why these people didn’t install a light switch—or at least plug in another lamp—next to the front door.

  I told Patrick to wait for me by the front door, and I got to the lamp without incident. I turned the switch, and Bitsy was revealed, snarling up at me. She was a sixteen-year-old dachshund, purebred, her show name something absurd like Countess Beatrice von Fluffington IX, which I heard once and dismissed straightaway. Her owner called her Bitsy for short, which worked for me.