John eventually finds “the one” at a rescue shelter down in Mocksville, about an hour from Greensboro. He is a ridiculous mix of corgi and collie and in his Internet pictures he looks like someone Photoshopped his huge, black, luck-dragon head onto his short, white body. His name is Azoo. John, the kids, my dad, and I all squish into the car and drive to the shelter on a school night after John and my dad get off work. The kids keep howling “Azoooooo!” Ellie is quivering in the backseat, still traumatized from Blue.
We are led into an unmarked warehouse carpeted with Astroturf and lined with secondhand church pews by a man named Tony who tells us to sit still and silently while he unloads dog crates from his pickup truck. Tony, close to seven feet tall with an unusual paramilitary/hippy vibe, appears to be more of a curator of dogs than shelter operator.
“I’ve brought three dogs here tonight,” he says, pacing in front of us on the Astroturf. “One is Azoo, who you requested. The other is Jordan—the collie mix you also expressed interest in. The third is an unknown. He’s brand-new to my farm and not on the website, but I thought I’d bring him along just in case. I will take them out one by one for you and Ellie to meet. I will ask you to keep your sons from making sudden movements until the dogs are at ease in the room.”
Ellie is curled up under the church pew, panting like a madwoman.
We love Azoo—he’s as fantastically patchwork in person as in his pictures—and Ellie loves Azoo and Azoo loves Ellie. But Azoo quivers and yips and hides between Tony’s legs whenever the kids come near. “I think Azoo might need a lower energy household,” says Tony.
Jordan enters the room like a racquetball—bouncing off the walls and the pews, into my dad’s lap, over the small barrier by the door. The kids can’t stop giggling. Ellie shakes in the corner, pees a little.
When the mystery dog comes out, I am sitting cross-legged on the floor with Benny in my lap. He sniffs us and promptly plops into our pile. Ellie comes over to give him a sniff, wags her tail. He’s so shaggy he looks like a Muppet—or like he’s wearing footie pajamas made to look like a dog costume. “I don’t know,” says Tony. “Something about this guy just speaks to me for you all.”
After cuddling him for fifteen minutes, I struggle to get off the floor—I’m in my last cycle of chemo and my body aches and my back has been bothering me on and off. My dad gives me a hand and the Muppet lies down on top of my feet. The kids nuzzle his belly. John and I exchange hopeful looks.
“I noticed your head,” says Tony, addressing me directly for the first time. “You look like my wife. Ovarian cancer. It’s been one hell of a year. Almost lost her a couple weeks ago.”
He tells me their dog is responsible for finding the cancer. “Wouldn’t stop sniffing this spot in her abdomen. One day, he almost attacked her there—leaping on her and punching her with his nose—and she ended up in the hospital. Sure enough, doctors found a tumor the size of a grapefruit.”
“Amazing,” I say. “Dogs sure know how to take care of us when we need it.”
“I think you all found the right one,” says Tony. The Muppet and Ellie are sniffing something together under one of the pews. We adopt him.
We discuss names that night on the drive home. I want to call him Montaigne.
“Let’s not be assholes,” says John. We settle on MacDuff.
15. Twilight Zone
One Saturday afternoon in fall, my dad pulls into our driveway on a red and black motorcycle. I’m standing in the yard and I don’t realize it’s him at first with his helmet on.
“I did it,” he says, taking the helmet off but making no move to get off the bike. He’s bought it from a retired cop out in the county. It’s a Honda Shadow, in beautiful shape, and it comes with gear—luggage and chaps and gloves and multiple helmets. I can tell right away this must have been a death pact with my mom: “Over my dead body,” she must have said. “Okay,” he must have agreed.
“Want a ride?” he asks.
I hoist myself onto the back and put my arms around his waist and we head straight north out of town, up past the old defunct Revolution Mill and toward the windier roads that snake through the northern reaches of Guilford County. I rest my helmeted head on his back and feel the sun warming my arms and legs. My body feels young and someone is burning leaves in their yard and the rumble of the engine means there is no need to talk. Grief, I think. Sometimes it is not dark or crazy. On the way back into town we pass the hospice building, where several weeks after my mom died my dad and I sat together in stiff upholstered chairs crying to a twentysomething-year-old grief counselor with a handshake like a silk scarf to whom we’d been referred after my mom’s death.
My dad told her he’d been binge watching old Twilight Zone episodes.
“Sometimes it’s a little much,” he said. “Like I can’t tell what’s real and what’s on TV.”
“I can totally see that,” I remember she said. “Maybe just don’t watch so many episodes at a time? But otherwise, it’s normal. That’s what I like to remind people. Everything you’re feeling is completely normal.”
16. Symmetry
Dr. Cavanaugh doesn’t want me to have breast reconstruction at all.
“That’s a survivor issue,” she tells me. “We’re not there yet. And I don’t want your immune system focused on anything except fighting cancer.”
It makes sense, but I really miss being symmetrical sometimes. I stuff my bra with a little breast-shaped hand-sewn cushion that Benny dubs the Pink Critter when he sees it sitting on my dresser.
Pink Critter is lumpy and prone to awkward bulging, though. And then one day MacDuff hops up on our bed illicitly, finds Pink Critter there, and devours it—just a few pieces of wet batting left in the hallway as evidence.
Benny is devastated: “Poor Critter! He was so soft and useful! I’ll never forgive that dog!”
John calls a dog trainer and I call Dr. Cavanaugh’s nurse to ask for a more permanent solution—maybe something MacDuff will be less inclined to eat. Dr. Cavanaugh writes me a prescription for a breast prosthetic and tells me to go talk to Alethia in the gift shop down on Level 0 of the cancer center.
*
Tita comes with me. We find Alethia not so much in the gift shop, but in a windowless room behind the gift shop—a room of her own stacked with boxes, file cabinets, racks of specialty bras of all shapes and sizes and materials, and drawers upon drawers of breast “forms.” All the bras have sewn-in pockets where you can insert a breast form on either or both sides.
Alethia greets us like she’s been expecting us for a lifetime, hugging us both to her own bosom—by far the most impressive breast-related item in the room.
“Welcome!” she says. “Let’s find you a breast!”