Happily Ever Esther

by Steve Jenkins

  After nine long days in the hospital, bringing Esther home was such a relief. We knew she would need a few weeks of taking it easy before she’d be fully back to her regular routine. We were just happy she was home, and I was more than ready to sleep in my bed, instead of on pine shavings.

  What Derek and I didn’t expect were all the little behavioral changes that started creeping up almost immediately upon her return. Her personality was much softer. Those little anger flashes and the bratty attitude, particularly toward Derek, had subsided. She was much calmer and sweeter than she had been. She started sitting up in bed during the day and would hang her head while simultaneously making little honking noises. She had done that before on occasion, usually during Shark Week (which is what we call her period), and we had a whole routine when that happened: Either Derek or I would stop what we were doing and go over and sit beside her. That was usually all she wanted. Once you were there, she would lie back down while you sat with her for a few minutes. Then you could get up and go back to what you were doing. Now, however, she was hanging her head and making the noises much more frequently. And as soon as you got up to go, she’d get up too. She wanted somebody beside her at all times, and the dogs weren’t good enough. It had to be one of us.

  She even started coming into the bedroom at night, giving us flashbacks to our time in Georgetown and the “piggy parades.” We’d hear her coming down the hallway and know she was heading straight for our bed. We’d quickly get our dog Shelby out of the way and brace for Esther’s arrival, at which point she’d storm right onto the bed. The funniest part was that she always climbed up on Derek’s side. (Well, funny for me, less funny for Derek.) She’d grunt as she approached, but she didn’t slow down one bit as she lumbered onto the mattress, pushing Derek out so she could lie down with me. This happened every night for two weeks, until we finally accepted defeat. We moved upstairs to the guest room, surrendering the master bedroom to Esther.

  This coincided with our finally starting to do some renovations on the house, particularly to what was now Esther’s bedroom. The original wallpaper was right out of the eighties: a white background with a raised floral pattern and metallic accents in pink and silver. Once, it might have been quite fashionable, but that time was a few decades ago, before we were even born. Acid-washed jeans and overalls apparently were fashionable back then as well, but that didn’t mean we wanted them in our home.

  The paper was also starting to peel—almost the entire sheet in certain places. We had used box tape as a temporary fix to hold it in place until we got around to renovating. Needless to say, the room looked superchic—even more so once we removed some of the bedroom furniture, which had been strategically placed to hide some rougher-looking sections of the wall. And did I mention the beige broadloom? I’m sure you can imagine what it looked like after a few months of muddy puppy paws and pig hooves. Like most of the house (or virtually any house, if I’m being honest), it really wasn’t designed for an unconventional family such as ours. We just didn’t know where to start. It was like trying to figure out triage after a disaster: everything looked like it needed to be fixed immediately.

  Actually, we had lived with this décor for a year—we’d just dealt with it. Sure, it was unsightly, but whatever. We’d had so many other priorities to handle. I’m kind of amazed we let it go as long as we did. And now, Esther had been in the bedroom for two weeks and the princess already had a cosmetic crew to glam it up!

  Until Esther moved in, we didn’t photograph that room—or at least share the photos on our social media—very often. If we did, we tried to present it as nicely as possible, like how someone who takes a lot of selfies for Instagram seems to take shots from only the most flattering angle. (Is there really only one side to your face? What are you, the Phantom of the Opera?) I’d take photos of the room from only certain angles, to avoid showing a damaged portion of the wall or how our mattress sat right on the floor, as if we were in our first apartment and couldn’t afford a bed frame. (Actually, we put the mattress on the floor so Esther could get up there easily without hurting herself.)

  But people on the internet can be really judgmental, so I tried not to show anything that would let somebody say, “See, she’s a pig. She belongs in a barn.” I also never wanted to give the impression she was dirty or unmanageable. At this point, hundreds of thousands of people were looking into our house on a weekly basis through our posts on the internet, and I didn’t want them thinking we lived in squalor, or that Esther was destroying the house. We were trying to improve people’s perception of pigs, and essentially living in a pigpen wasn’t going to help us do that. We already had done quite a lot to clean things up cosmetically in the main rooms of the house, but our bedroom had remained fairly private, to a certain degree. If it was to become Esther’s bedroom and she’d be spending more time in there, I had no choice but to make it Facebook-friendly by giving it a face-lift.

  We saved a panel of the hideous wallpaper to cut and frame. One of Esther’s fans actually suggested selling pieces of the wallpaper, but we thought that was a bit strange. Who wants a piece of their bedroom hanging in other people’s homes? And who wants a piece of someone else’s wallpaper? I know they all thought of it as “Esther’s bedroom,” but even Esther made it clear how much she disliked that paper. At the end of the day, that was our bedroom. That paper had seen me naked. I didn’t want it hanging in somebody else’s house.

  One day, while all the rearranging and redecorating was going on, I got a phone call from a longtime family friend named Wendy. She and her husband had always taken advantage of me, like when I was a teenager and I’d get a frantic call because Wendy hadn’t arranged a babysitter, and guess who needed to fill in? On the rare occasion I said I wasn’t available, Wendy would go straight to my mom to lay on a guilt trip, and, three more guesses who ended up rearranging his life to accommodate them. It got even worse once I got into real estate. They were the kind of people who expected everyone to bend over backward for them but who would push you aside in a flash if something came along that was more beneficial to them—no matter who was hurt in the process. The last time we had worked together, I ended up reducing my commission by over half to help them get the house they wanted. My belief at the time was that I could sell their current house and make up the money on that end. Everybody thinks real estate agents make tons of money, but by the time we pay our board fees, office fees, insurance, advertising, taxes, and on and on… giving someone a 50 percent commission discount basically leaves you with nothing.

  I’d given them that huge reduction only because of the arrangement we had made regarding the sale of their house. But as we’ve seen before, I tend to be a bit too trusting of people. I trusted their word, but not a week later, I found out they had sold their house with another agent. I was furious, having been through hell and back to get them the new house, only to be totally screwed by these people at their first opportunity.

  Anyway, I hadn’t heard from them since that debacle. Even my mom had started to distance herself from their family after witnessing how selfish they’d become. Now I was busy with the sanctuary and the renovations. When my phone rang and I saw that it was Wendy, I was actually looking forward to being able to tell her I wasn’t working as a Realtor anymore. That wasn’t entirely true; I still worked for friends and family. But I sure as hell didn’t need to put myself through the hassle of working with clients like Wendy and her husband now.

  When I answered, Wendy was her typical sunny self: “It’s so good to speak with you. Congratulations on the farm; we’d love to see it.” The usual stuff. We chatted for a minute or two about nothing in particular, and then she casually brought up the real reason for her call: “Oh, by the way, we’ve got this rabbit; can you take it?”

  There it was.

  I knew there must be a reason she was calling, because in the many years I’d known Wendy, not once did I receive a “Hey, how are you?” kind of phone call. She always had an ulterior mo
tive, and in this case, she had a rabbit to rid herself of.

  “It’s living in my garage,” she said. “We got it for the kids, but they don’t care. I’m the only one who loves it.”

  She threw out every excuse under the sun in a matter of seconds.

  I was doing my best to explain that we didn’t have a facility yet to take in rabbits. We had only a few hutches, and that was where Derek’s rabbits from his former magic act were staying. There were plans to build a space for rabbits eventually, but we hadn’t gotten there yet. We had this awesome space right behind the barn earmarked for what we would call Bunny Town. It had existing stone walls on three sides, and the ground was rocky with big trees that provided plenty of shade. It would be ideal for rabbits. They love to dig, so having rocky ground was perfect, because it would help prevent them from digging out under the fences. We were going to put all the individual hutches within this fenced-in area and bring in topsoil so we could plant grass for them to graze on.

  But those were plans for the future. At the moment when Wendy was calling, the whole space was still filled with garbage. There was even a mattress with a tree growing through it (don’t ask) and, of course, plenty of broken glass.

  I was in the middle of a sentence, trying to explain this to Wendy, when suddenly her husband, Walter, came on the phone and said, “Hey, Stevie boy! I hear you’re taking the rabbit! That’s great, we’ll see you soon!” and hung up.

  He didn’t even give me time to answer, probably sensing that my conversation with Wendy wasn’t going too well. They needed to get rid of the rabbit, and they didn’t care how it happened. I stood there with the phone still in my hand for a moment as I replayed that last part and the fact that, apparently, we were about to get a rabbit dumped on us.

  My first thought was to go tell Derek, but he already hated Wendy and Walter due to the history we shared together, so I knew it wouldn’t be pretty. But part of me thought, There’s no way she’s that thoughtless. I figured she would have smacked Walter in the arm when he hung up. She would have told him they weren’t showing up with a rabbit based on the conversation we’d just had, one in which I never even agreed to take the rabbit—or even had a chance to respond.

  Turns out I was right: They didn’t show up. They made one of their friends do it.

  You see, the only reason Wendy even thought to call me was because of a blanket drive for the sanctuary that happened to be organized by a friend of hers. She didn’t make the connection at first, until this lady arrived to pick up Wendy’s contribution of blankets. They got to chatting, and that’s when Wendy realized I was the one who had the sanctuary. Wendy saw an opportunity to add a little something to her donation. She presented it to this poor lady as if it were all arranged, as though we were eagerly awaiting the arrival of this adorable little bunny rabbit. The liar.

  Derek and I saw Wendy’s friend pull up; it had been only a few hours since Wendy’s phone call. Knowing the woman was arriving with a load of blankets, we both went out to meet her. But she obviously saw us coming, and before we even got to the gate, she leaned out the window of her minivan and cheerfully exclaimed, “I’m here with your new bunny!”

  Derek laughed, assuming she was joking. He made some smart-ass retort like “Awesome, I hope you brought lots of bunnies. And I hope they’re washed and folded, because the big ones are a real pain to get into our little washing machine.” It was a comedy of errors, because they both thought the other was in on the joke. But I immediately started to put the pieces together and knew she was dead serious about the bunny. I proceeded to walk—very quickly I might add—toward the barn, while Derek closed the gate and came up behind us. Wendy’s friend was already out of the car and at the passenger door by the time we caught up with her.

  “Hi, I’m Sandra,” she said as we approached. “And this is Tulip.”

  She lifted a little cat carrier off the seat, a huge smile flashing on her face. She was so excited to be delivering Tulip to her new home, and she had no idea we weren’t expecting this new resident. Hell, Derek didn’t even know about the phone call a couple of hours earlier, let alone that the phone call had ended with the possibility of a rabbit’s coming to live with us. I spoke up right away.

  “Oh, this is the rabbit. Perfect.”

  I was hoping to avoid an awkward confrontation between Derek and Sandra, because it wasn’t Sandra’s fault in the least, but it was too late. Derek, rightfully, launched into question mode: “When did this happen? Why didn’t I know about this?”

  Luckily, Derek’s wrath was directed entirely toward me, but it was still awkward for Sandra. She stood there like a deer in the headlights, not really sure what to do with herself… or Tulip.

  While this particular situation was rather unusual, the phenomenon itself was nothing new. Sanctuaries regularly deal with animals being abandoned at their doors. We’d been warned to prepare ourselves for the day we’d walk outside and find an extra horse just hanging out in our yard. Horses are commonly abandoned, because they can be so expensive to care for. You know the old idiom “eats like a horse.” Like most idioms, it exists for a reason.

  In addition to all the food, there’s medical care, which is virtually extortionate when dealing with horses. It’s like comparing a birthday cake and a wedding cake. You can get a slab cake at your local bakery for $20, but if you tell the baker it will be a wedding cake, all of a sudden it’s $120. That’s kind of how vet care for large animals works. Surgery on a pig? Not too big of a deal, depending on the seriousness of the matter, of course. Surgery on a horse? There’s a chance you’ll need to remortgage your house.

  Surprise arrivals at farm sanctuaries aren’t limited to farm animals. Even dogs and cats are regularly found tied to gates or in carriers left at the end of driveways. Obviously this can be a huge problem for a struggling facility.

  When an animal arrives at a sanctuary, many things need to happen. First, the animal gets quarantined to make sure it isn’t sick and won’t pass on some illness to the animals already living at the farm. You need to feed the animal and provide it with its own stall or pasture space until it can be integrated with the other animals. All of this costs time and money—and sometimes, more importantly, space. It immediately diminishes your ability to help another animal that needs you.

  Emergencies often come up where there’s an animal in immediate peril, but if you’re struggling already and dealing with an abandoned horse that arrived the day before, there’s nothing you can do. Taking in that additional animal could put your entire farm at risk. The bank doesn’t care if your big heart and your even bigger vet bill mean you can’t pay the mortgage this month. Some places are literally one animal away from not being able to pay their bills, and very few have cash in the bank at the end of the year. These sanctuaries are calculating where every dollar goes, while trying their best to be prepared for the never-ending surprise expenses that come along with caring for animals.

  So when people abandon an animal in this way, they’re saddling their responsibilities on others, all because they can’t be bothered to do the right thing. Taking an animal into your family is a lifelong commitment, so there really shouldn’t be very many instances of people needing to get rid of the animal. That’s just selfishness.

  When we hear “We’re moving and we can’t take him/her with us,” we’re like, Okay, maybe you’d dump the in-laws, but you’d never leave your children behind. Animals are children to me, so I just can’t wrap my head around that excuse. Thank goodness Derek handles all the intake requests for our sanctuary, because some of the emails he shows me make my head want to explode.

  Occasionally situations arise in which there really is no alternative, such as terminal illness or financial hardships that put your family—both humans and animals—at risk. I get that. Sometimes it really is better for the animal if people give it up. But 99 percent of the time, it’s just people being shitty.

  So Derek was upset at Tulip’s arrival. Poor Sandra had
no idea her special present from Wendy was only half-expected (at best) by me and a complete shock to Derek, and she left quickly to escape the awkwardness. Once she was gone, things only got more tense.

  Derek was furious, assuming I was totally in on the plan to bring a bunny home. While I’d had an idea a rabbit might show up, I wasn’t sure, and I certainly didn’t expect it to show up within an hour of Walter’s abruptly hanging up on me. Sure, I’ve screwed up before by not keeping Derek in the loop on everything, but this time, I hadn’t had a chance to do the right thing! I’d assumed Wendy would call me back to nail down the details. (Of course, now I know never to give Wendy the benefit of the doubt.)

  I explained the phone-call situation to Derek, but I’m pretty sure he still thought I was more complicit in the Tulip situation than I actually was. In the past, when Derek had listened to me vent about Wendy and Walter, I’d always defended her. So he thought this was just another example of my being a pushover. It took a lot of convincing to get him to believe I was as taken aback as he was.

  Ultimately, it turned out to be less of an imposition than it originally seemed. It wasn’t as if Sandra had just dropped off a herd of cows; one rabbit wasn’t going to bankrupt our farm. However, I realized I needed to be more firm when discussing important farm matters with people, because they don’t impact only me; they affect Derek just as much, and depending on the situation, a bit of confusion could create major problems for the sanctuary itself.

  But that’s hard. I’m a softy. Flat-out saying no has always been hard for me. Most of the time, I’ll inconvenience myself no end before I’ll inconvenience someone else—and yes, that includes even someone who’s been as, um, selfish at times as Wendy. Sometimes you just need to be a big boy and firmly say no, and that’s what I should have done with Wendy. I’m still working on developing that skill. But again, this was just a rabbit—our first experience with what was essentially an abandoned animal, and we knew it wouldn’t be our last.