When I get close enough to flick the soil from his nose, the pup bounds up, tail seemingly wagging his entire body, licking me sloppily while he dances. How happy! What do you know? Lost and hungry but hardly down and out. I throw my arms around him, lose my balance and fall back, banging my rear on the concrete as he eyes me and lets out another loud sneeze. When I give him a chaste peck on his ample snout, he pulls back shyly, as if unprepared for such advances.
I bring ice water for the pup, hoping that he will drink and be on his way. Actually, I want him to stay. It strikes me that this is something that could happen. I could have a dog. Why not? Even I could have a dog. Yet I command myself not to encourage him. A drink in this weather is a necessity, the obligation of any humane person, but to go further is not fair and I am no teaser. This is not going to happen. I am not here forever. I cannot take him on. I don’t want a commitment. When I head back into the house, he woofs. I start to turn back, but will not let myself.
Today, Betty is not peppy; her tongue is dry and her speech is slightly slurred. “You’re just an old sleepyhead,” I say. “Did you rest last night? Did you do okay?”
“I did okay,” she says, as I pour water and get her one of the bendable straws she favors. “I dreamed your father bought three thousand dollars’ worth of cats.” Cats are our least favorite animal. In the old days, driving to kindergarten, I always thought my mother sped up if she saw one crossing the road.
As I cook, I tell Betty of the warnings on the news of a “Porkalypse” or “Bacongeddon” because of the drought. “No corn, no pigs,” she says. “I’ll eat an Eggo when that time comes. Suits me.”
After breakfast, Betty hunkers down in her gown on the couch in the midst of a pile of newspapers and books by Nicholas Sparks and Anna Quindlen, anything we can get in large print. When she finds a book she likes, she reads it again and again, but will never admit she has actually enjoyed it. “It was all right,” she says. “Better than most of that stuff you get. Better than that Rachel Maddow. She goes on television looking like she is about to play baseball.”
Sometimes, out of nowhere, I can see the little girl my mother once was in her eyes. She is funny and sweet, bossy and mischievous. “Tell that woman,” she says when Carol leaves the room, “that I don’t want Brussels sprouts and that I want strawberries on my ice cream every time.” She bangs her fork down on the table. She fusses if she does not want to do something: “Stop bugging me about everything,” she commands when I hold out her medicine capsules. “I am too busy,” she adds, peeking around her book to see what I am going to do. “Don’t boss me, mister,” she exclaims, as she pitches Pride and Prejudice, which I have recommended, across the couch. “This is like what some old schoolmarm would give out.” She does not like television. “I pay for hundreds of channels and it’s all trash,” she declares. “There is a channel where all they do is sell knives!”
The morning passes—with the occasional growl or yelp from outside. Our moods rise and fall, though at different times. Betty and I are conflicting lines of music, but sometimes come together in a moving or explosive way. I am, if the truth were known, more volatile. Monitored by graph, my emotions would resemble a chart of a frenetic third world economy.
On the phone, a friend, Benjamin, whose novel I am working on, tells me that his mother’s name is actually Betty, but at age fifty she changed it to Daphne. My Betty does not seem to get the humor. “Be still,” she says and turns away.
Outside, I hear the occasional whining noise: already—tears, emotional manipulation, guilt. I can’t take it. I have enough problems. I need a Global Prayer Warrior. When I go out with some leftover breakfast sausage for the dog—a bad move, I know—my friend is tearing around one of the neighbors’ yards, that maniacal tail still making its fast, swooshing loops. I whistle and his ears shoot up. He rushes toward me, almost walking on his hind legs before he falls forward. Leaping up on my chest, he devours the sausage with a single chomp, and starts to lick my face as if I am a leftover he cannot quite identify. In seconds he is attempting to drag a bag of antidepressants out of my pocket. My kind of pooch.
He is young and full of life—attributes I am not normally crazy about—but there is a tenderness, a vulnerability, especially when his ears fall back. I find myself once more scooping him up in my arms, feeling his paws on my shoulder, his moist nose on my ear. Love hits me. I don’t like it. I don’t want it. This flirtation cannot go anywhere. I am a flight risk.