Pug Hill - Alison Pace [105]
“Look over there, Hope, look at the rabbit running across the field,” Dad says. I watch as a rabbit disappears from view, and Betsy charges after it. I wonder if the things I think sometimes when I think about my family are simply the “look over there, Hope, look at the rabbit running across the field,” way of thinking we are dysfunctional.
“Betsy! Come back here!” Dad calls out to her. She doesn’t listen. I look over at my dad; he’s such a great dad. I think of what a good father he’s been, what a nice childhood he gave us. I don’t think he could have done anything better, I really don’t.
“No, Dad,” I say, “I don’t think we’re a dysfunctional family,” and we both watch as Betsy comes back up over the dune.
“And Dad?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
“I don’t think Darcy’s going to join a commune. I really don’t.”
He looks over and smiles at me. “That’s good to know, sweetheart.”
Captain is walking up closer to us now. I can see his eyes better now, and his expression, the jauntiness to his step, which seems in this moment to be only slightly lopsided. As I watch him approach in a way that is so clearly as joyful as it is labored, I feel like I don’t need language for it anymore. I don’t need to switch up words and change them around, substituting ones that are funnier, less scary, in order to be able to believe he’s not in any pain, or at least not too much. All I have to do to be able to believe that is all I’ve ever had to do to believe in things or make sense of a lot of things. All I have to do is just look into a dog’s eyes. The eyes of a Saint Bernard, an English mastiff, a shar-pei, a Jack Russell terrier, a French bulldog, a corgi, a pug. A lot of the time I think all you have to do is look into any dog’s eyes, and there’ll you’ll find honesty; there, I think so much of the time, you’ll find the truth.
Captain’s journey across the field has, at last, come to an end. He sits at my father’s feet and looks up at him with so much happiness, his eyes so filled with love. And I know there are those people, those people who will tell you that dogs don’t have our kind of emotions, don’t share what we call feelings, and all I can say about those people, even if you happen to be one of them, is that really, they are insane.
Dad gives Captain one of his special sugar-free bones and Captain plods a few feet away from us to enjoy his bone in what I can only guess he has decided is a bit more privacy. Captain looks back over at us as he chews his bone, throwing his head back in the air.
Half an hour later, we load all the dogs back into the car, and head back up the hill, where we’ll finish the routine, the part of the routine I’m familiar with because Mom wrote it all down, and made charts and lists to follow. She did everything except make a PowerPoint presentation entitled “How to Feed the Dogs and Give Captain His Medicine.”
Once we’re home again, we’ll get out the three different kibbles, the special diabetic kibble for Captain, the regular kind for Betsy, and the RD (restricted diet) for Annabelle. We’ll give Betsy some of the Lil’ Cesar’s that she loves so much, and we’ll give a half of a slice of fat-free American cheese to Annabelle. Captain will get a fried egg, and his cream cheese packets with his different medicines, and his eye drops, and once he’s done eating, his insulin shot.
They say that girls grow up and they marry men who are just like their fathers. And my question to “them” is this: how do you find someone who does things like this? How do you find someone who gets up early in the morning to drag his obese, sedentary dog twice around the block? How do you find someone who lets his neurotic, jealousy-ridden dog come, too, so that she doesn’t get yet another complex from being left at home? How do you find someone who will then load three dogs into the car so that the oldest dog, the one so literally on his last legs, can enjoy just a few more hours spent on the field he loves, right next to the beach? Really, how?
I turn around in my seat for a moment and I look at the dogs. Captain is rocking back and forth