by Allie Larkin
I took another chug of my drink. Even though it was light on the Kool-Aid, it was starting to taste like cough syrup. As soon as I got it down, it started to come back up. I tasted it in the back of my mouth, and ran to the bathroom.
I heaved and heaved. Toilet water splashed up in my face. My hair got in the way and ended up covered in purple puke. Finally, I felt like I came to the end of everything that was left in me. I spit into the toilet and started crying.
I cried about everything from way back when Diane told my mom I couldn’t have a dog, to Peter and the wedding and the check, my mom dying, the photo booth picture, and the Slovakian pervert. I cried because I really had no one. There was no one on my side. No one rooting for me above everyone else. There wasn’t even anyone rooting for me to come in second place. There was no one to hold my hair back, or wipe my forehead with a wet washcloth. All I had was me, and it wasn’t enough.
I curled up on the smelly bath mat and cried until I couldn’t squeeze tears out of my eyes anymore. Then I just lay there and clenched my teeth, listening to my breath whistle through my nose until I fell asleep.
I woke up on the bath mat, smelling like wet towel mildew and vomit. I leaned up on my elbow. My heart was beating in my forehead and my stomach lurched forward again. I pulled myself up to the toilet and heaved, but nothing came up. My stomach felt like an empty tube of toothpaste squeezed against the side of the sink to get the very last bit out. My eyes were so puffy that I could barely keep them open.
I stumbled downstairs, started a pot of coffee, and downed some aspirin. The living room was a mess. An empty ice cream carton leaked sticky chocolate goo all over the coffee table. My laptop was open on the couch. The TV was on, blaring an infomercial for some carpet sweeper that could pick up lug nuts.
I couldn’t remember much more from the night before, other than coming home and making myself a drink. I went back into the kitchen to grab a wad of paper towels to wipe up the ice cream. All of a sudden, I had a horrible thought and my heartbeat spiked: What if I’d called Diane and told her off? What if I’d called Janie and confessed or called Peter and told him I loved him?
It wouldn’t be the first time I’d drunk-dialed. In college, I had a horrible habit of calling my mom to tell her embarrassing details of my life while under the influence. And like a good mother, she never let me live it down. “Hi, drunkie,” she’d say when I called the next day, hungover, oblivious to my prior indiscretions, “I hear you flashed your RA last night.” She never got mad. She always chalked it up to normal college behavior, something she knew nothing about. I wished she’d put the fear of God in me and made me join a convent where they were so straight that they substituted grape juice for communion wine, or at the very least, I wish she’d trained me to never make phone calls while intoxicated.
I scrambled around looking for my cell phone and held my breath while I checked my recent calls.
Nothing. No calls. I let the air out of my lungs slowly, feeling the blood return to my extremities. Then I realized that drunk e-mailing could be just as dangerous.
I sat on the couch yelling, “Come on, come on, come on!” while my laptop wheezed its way out of sleep mode. “Sent mail. Sent mail,” I hissed through my teeth, waiting for the site to load. I typed in my user name and password, but before I even hit the SIGN IN button, I had a sudden flashback: sitting on the couch with my laptop, clicking REFRESH over and over and over again, waiting for a purchase confirmation. What did I purchase? Did I break down and buy that absurdly expensive laptop I’d been eying for months? My heart pounded while I waited for my stupid slow Internet access to take me to my e-mail. And then there it was, an e-mail with the subject line Potvrdit’ pes. It all started coming back to me. The fuzzy black puppy. Rin Tin Tin. German Shepherd. Burning hay bales. A deep voice with a heavy accent. I pasted the subject line into Google translate. Confirm Dog.
“Fuck!” I yelled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I bought a puppy. I bought a puppy off a fucking website like some kind of moron who doesn’t even understand that you don’t buy a freaking living being off the Internet.
I translated the e- mail sentence by sentence. The dog would be at the Rochester International Airport on a flight from Bratislava arriving at two thirty in the morning on Thursday. At the end of the receipt it said, Master-card , and then one hundred and forty thousand koruny. I looked up an online exchange rate calculator and held my breath, feeling my pulse pounding in my temples. I entered the numbers, hit GO, and closed my eyes before I could see the results.
It’s probably not that bad, I told myself. I remembered a girl from college who adopted a dog from the local animal shelter when she got her own apartment. It cost her two hundred and fifty dollars. Add to that shipping costs, and it would maybe double. I mean, how much could it cost to ship a teeny-tiny puppy? Five hundred dollars, I could handle, I told myself. I’d eat ramen noodles for dinner. I’d pay it off over a few months. Or I’d take on an extra freelance job or two. I’d barely feel the pinch.
I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and looked at the screen. It said I’d spent six thousand and one dollars on a dog.
I ran back to the bathroom to throw up again.
When I was done, I got in the shower and winced as the hot water magnified my stench. Stomach acid, grape Kool-Aid, and mildew wafted around in the shower steam until I reached for the shampoo and started washing it all away. The hot and cold dials squeaked loudly as I turned the water off. The slapping sound of my bare feet hitting the tile floor echoed, and it was so quiet that I could hear the hum of the refrigerator from all the way downstairs, like a constant reminder that there was no one else here to make noise. I’d felt lonely before the wedding and the check, but I hadn’t realized how far it could go, or how quiet it could get.
I could have called the kennel in Slovakia to cancel my order, or called the credit card company to see if they could stop the payment, but I didn’t. I wanted to have someone on my team, even if that someone was only a dog. I wanted that kind of constant companionship and intense loyalty. I wanted someone to sleep at the foot of my bed, and keep me company while I was working. And it’s not like my dog was going to be bigger than a child actor when he showed up. I was getting a tiny puppy. I could handle that.
Chapter Seven
I slept off my hangover through the weekend and by Monday, all I could do was think about my puppy. I didn���t know anything about owning a dog, so I went to the library and pored over books on dog intelligence, an “idiots” guide specifically for German Shepherd owners, and a book about being a pack leader. One book was about how to be your dog’s best friend. It was written in the seventies by a bunch of monks who bred German Shepherds at some monastery in the Catskills. It smelled kind of musty, like a basement in an old house, and the pages were water-stained and dogeared, but the black-and-white pictures of German Shepherds playing with the monks kept me reading. The book talked about letting your dog share every aspect of your life, sleeping on your floor at night, lying down at your feet while you ate dinner.
I read that a German Shepherd is capable of understanding as many words as a three- year-old child if challenged appropriately. When I got home from the library, I ordered more books on training and discovered a line of puppy toys designed to encourage creative play. The beginning of the week was a blur of credit card orders and trips to the pet store to get supplies. It helped me get my mind off of Peter. Or in the very least, it gave me something productive to do when I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter.
What was Peter doing, coming to see me on his wedding night? What had he been about to say when I cut him off? I imagined it over and over again.
In my mind, Peter says, “Van- Savannah, I-” but this time, I don’t cut him off. Peter says, “Savannah, I love you. I’ve always loved you and I can’t hide it anymore. I need to be with you.” Only it doesn’t sound like some bad movie, it sounds amazing, because Peter is saying it and he means it and he puts his arms around
me and kisses me and we make love on my old bed in the carriage house. Later, when Janie finds out, she’s not upset, because she’s secretly in love with the heir to some great shipping fortune, who looks like a Greek god and has a name like Balthazar or Adonis, and the four of us end up being dear friends and we have these amazing dinners on Janie’s patio overlooking the Aegean Sea at sunset. We laugh about how we almost got everything so horribly wrong and toast to getting it right with globe-shaped glasses of red wine. We eat crusty bread dipped in olive oil, and Peter wraps his arm around my sun-kissed shoulder. “What was I thinking?” he says, gesturing to Janie, and we all laugh, because it’s so obvious that what Pete and I have is true love, and Janie’s happy too.
When I’d snap out of it, and my face didn’t feel flushed from getting too much sun, and all there was outside was cold and gray and I was still alone, and Peter was still off in Europe with Janie, I’d make another run to the pet store to buy Nylabones or treats, and think about cuddling up with my puppy and watching movies, or taking him for long walks, because that was a dream that could actually come true.
On Wednesday night, I set up everything. I put food bowls on the kitchen floor on a little bone-shaped place mat, but then I worried about my puppy dropping food out of his bowl and eating off the dirty floor. I didn’t even own a mop, so I got down on my hands and knees with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels and scrubbed a floor that hadn’t been more than spot-cleaned in the two years since I moved in. I pulled out dried-up ziti from under the stove, and a baker’s dozen of dehydrated peas from under the refrigerator. The scary thing was that I hadn’t even eaten peas since I moved into the condo, so I’d actually pulled someone else’s dehydrated peas out from under my refrigerator. I scrubbed the toilet because dogs drink out of toilets, but I worried that he might drink some lingering cleaner, so I flushed fifty times. I hid candles and stashed shoes. I scooted around the house on my knees looking for sharp edges and objects that could obstruct airways. Before I knew it, it was two in the morning, and it was time to go get my puppy.
It’s weird to claim baggage when you haven’t flown anywhere. I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I felt like I should be holding up a sign saying LEONE or GERMAN SHEPHERD or something.
When I got to the baggage claim section, there was an enormous green plastic crate on the floor in the corner.
I walked over and peeked in the crate. It was dark. There were shadows of a dog shape-sharp ears and a snout the length of my forearm-but I couldn’t see much until a pink tongue the size of a strip steak dropped out of nowhere. Geez, that’s weird, I thought. Someone else is picking up a dog too.
I backed away from the crate and walked over to the freight pickup window, slapping my driver’s license down on the counter.
“Ms. Leone, you’re here for the dog, aren’t you?” The clerk behind the counter was a nice-looking man with dark brown hair slicked back with copious amounts of hair grease. He had a brilliant white smile, orange-tanned skin, and dimples. The airport ID tag hanging around his neck read PETER MARINO and showed a picture of him giving the camera a sly smile, like he was posing for a magazine cover. He was a completely different kind of Peter. He wasn’t even a Pete. I bet his friends called him Petey.
“I’m here for the puppy,” I corrected.
“That is one big puppy, ma’am,” Petey said, pointing to the pink tongue in the gigantic crate. “Real sweet, though. Hasn’t barked once.” He shoved a paper across the counter at me. “Sign here,” he said, making a big sloppy X with his pen. My heart plunged into my toes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, taking the pen from him. My hand was shaking. “There’s got to be another crate. That big one, that’s someone else’s. I’m here for a puppy.” I held up my hands, about two feet apart, to show him how big I thought the puppy was supposed to be.
He laughed. “We’ve only got one dog, here, ma’am, and your name is on the crate.”
I could barely get my hand to work the pen. My signature was a long squiggly line. How was that beast in the big green crate my puppy?
Petey wasn’t paying attention to me, he was staring longingly at the crate. “Okay, he’s all yours.”
I wanted to tell him he could have the dog, and the closer I got to the crate, the more I wished I had. The crate came up to my hip bone, and the dog, from what I could see of him, took up most of it. The muscles of my heart were working hard and skipping beats. I had a tiny black puppy collar with little silver stars on it tucked in my purse along with a skinny black leash. It didn’t look like it would fit around this beast’s leg. I pictured myself leading a big black wolf through the airport with a collar on his leg.
Petey came out of a door labeled EMPLOYEESONLY. I tried to keep my eyes averted so he wouldn’t see the panic on my face.
“Miss?” He walked over to the crate and tapped on it. “Miss Leone? I’m on break. I can help you get him to your car if you want.”
“Oh. Uh.” I didn’t want to take up this poor man’s break, but there was no way I was getting the dog and the crate to my car alone. I looked up at him and nodded.
He snagged a big metal baggage cart and pulled the crate onto it, grunting loudly and straining himself until the veins in his neck popped out. I felt so guilty. I should have brought someone with me to help. But really, even if I’d been willing to openly admit that I gave my credit card number to a Slovakian website and prayed for a dog in return, I didn’t have anyone to help me.
We got out to the parking lot. Petey huffed and puffed and his breath made a cloud that circled his head and trailed behind him. I worried he might explode. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t know what to do. I walked fast next to him and put my hand on top of the crate like I was helping to steady it.
“Where’s your car?” he asked, grunting.
“Over there.” I pointed to my little silver Corolla.
Petey stopped and looked at me, then he threw back his head and laughed up at the sky, “Ha! Ha! Ha!” He vibrated. His sides heaved in and out under his thin shirt. “You think you’re going to get this guy in there?” he said. Tears welled up in his eyes from laughing so hard.
“Well, I thought he’d be- ” Tears welled up in my eyes too. “I thought he’d be smaller,” I said. I was laughing and crying at the same time. Tears ran down my face and dripped off my chin.
“Well, then we’ll just have to see what we can do here, right?” Petey pulled a tape measure out of his pocket and measured the crate and then the car door and then the crate again.
“He’s gonna have to come out.” He pushed the button on his tape measure and the tape snapped back in.
The beast stirred in his crate.
“What do you mean, come out?”
A car drove by us and the headlights shone into the crate. Teeth gleamed.
“Well, you gotta take him out of there sometime, lady. If you want me to help you, we’re gonna have to take him out now.”
Petey had me back the car out into the aisle. After a lot of maneuvering, he got the crate lined up pretty closely with my car door. From the front seat, I reached around and unlatched the crate door. The dog jumped onto the backseat. I hopped out of the front seat and slammed the door.
The dog was huge. The size of a person. He took up the whole backseat. All I could see was black. His fur was long, and so black it looked blue at the tips, even in the orange parking lot light. I was terrified.
“Whoa,” Petey said. “What kind of dog is that?”
“German Shepherd,” I said, running around the crate.
“That’s not a German Shepherd. He’s black. He has long hair.”
“He’s supposed to be a German Shepherd,” I said.
The dog stared at us with his mouth open. His biggest teeth were the length of my little finger. A long string of drool dripped from his tongue, landing on the car seat.
Petey grabbed the crate.
“I’m gonna pull away. You shut the door.”
Petey pulled the crate away, but I hesitated a split second and the dog’s head got in the way.
The dog pushed past us.
“Fuck!” I yelled. I didn’t know if I should run after him. I didn’t know if he’d bite me.
“Don’t panic!” Petey said. “You can’t panic.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“Let’s just see what he’s going to do.”
The dog was about twenty feet away from us, sniffing around a lamppost.
“No! You don’t understand! He’s- I paid- He’s-”
The dog lifted his leg and started peeing.
Petey chuckled. “When you gotta go . . .”
“What are we going to do? How are we going to get him in the car?”
“Calm down,” Petey said, wagging his finger at me. “You’re forgetting something very important.”
“What?”
“Dogs like riding in cars.” He pulled his bottom lip up, and raised his eyebrows like he’d just told me the great secret of the ages.
“That’s it? That’s all you’ve-”
The dog stopped peeing and put his leg down.
Petey made a clicking sound in the side of his mouth. “Come ’ere. Come ’ere, boy.” He leaned in and smacked the backseat.
The dog ran over at full speed and jumped on the seat. Petey slammed the door shut behind him.
“See,” Petey said. “Dogs like riding in cars.”
I didn’t think of Slovakia as a place that had cars. I pictured a little gnome man taking the dog to the airport in a hay cart pulled by a donkey, but the dog looked comfortable in my car. He sat on the seat and stared at us through the window, his breath fogging up the glass.
“He’s a good-looking dog, whatever kind he is.” Petey hit his palm on the roof of the car. “Okay, next order of business. You know you’re not going to get this crate in your car without breaking it down, right?” He went over to the crate and turned the locks along the side to release them.