The Dust of 100 Dogs - A. S. King [22]
“What do you think you’ll find out in a month?”
“I guess whatever you’re willing to tell me.” He smiled.
I left the office and walked to the corner to catch the late bus home. As I stared at the busy people in their passing cars, I realized his questions had churned up everything I didn’t want to look at.
My mother wanted to save me—from what? From bad decisions, from turning into a loser, from trying drugs—from what? All that was bullshit. My mother wasn’t trying to save me from anything. She was saving herself. She was trying to utilize my potential so she could leech off me for the rest of her life. The shrink didn’t know that yet, but right then I made a vow to tell him what sort of blackmail I’d been living with, ever since I’d been crowned the Adams’ genius at age six.
I would tell him about my mother’s problems, her needs, her secrets. I would show him the letter on ivory paper in my brother’s writing and tell him of her nights at the kitchen table with her whiskey bottle. If he wanted to find the root of my problem, he would find it in my mother’s greedy lap. As for me? I would no longer be a towrope to her promised land, and I would no longer accompany her on her journeys down memory lane. After years of trying to be my friend, Sadie Adams would finally get from me what all needy mothers dread—a frightfully independent teenage daughter. If she wanted any part of being on my boat from now on, she’d better change her pathetic little song—because I saw myself keelhauling her for the rest of my life if she didn’t.
DOG FACT #2
Never Lie in Your Master’s Bed
Puppies should learn independence from an early age. By giving your dog his own bed (territory), you are assuring that he knows his place. The howling ball of lonely fur when you turn off the lights for the night may be heartbreaking, but ignoring the cries will assure your dog’s emotional maturation.
I lived for six years on a Wisconsin farm belonging to Francine Wilkes, a widowed homemaker who had borne no children during her forty-year marriage. It was the early 1950s and Fran had more than most of her neighbors did at that time, once Harold’s life insurance payments came through. When she brought me home from a friend’s farm, I was seven weeks old and already knew the secret of howls and whimpers. That night she put me in a box next to the large, black, wood-burning stove in her kitchen and kissed me good night. Before she put her right foot on the bottom stair, I howled. I heard her climb two more steps and I let out a cry-combination-coughing fit to seem pathetic. She stopped. One high-pitched sob later, she was mine. From that night on, I slept in Fran’s lumpy feather bed, in the hollow where Harold had slept for forty years.
She fed me at the dining room table: freshly simmered ground meat (beef on Monday, Wednesday, Friday; chicken on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday; and on Sunday, a surprise) with cubes of white bread and milk for dessert. I got a warm, relaxing bath on Sundays followed by a two-hour grooming session and the usual evening routine. We would sit for hours by the open door of the stove and listen to radio programs. She loved the murder mysteries. I could feel her body tense up with suspense as I lay sprawled on her more-than-sturdy, corn-fed lap.
If I heard a noise at night I would wake and listen, but never get up to find out what was going on. Sometimes, if I found a good spot in an afternoon sunray, I wouldn’t even bark at visitors (which, in looking back, I feel guilty for). Fran Wilkes treated me like a child of her own—I owed her at least a warning bark.
I outlived Francine by one short week. I could have stuck it out longer, but I saw no point. On the day the hearse took her from the house, the neighbors led me from the front porch a mile down the dirt road to their place, the farm I’d been born on. I was closed into a cold shed by myself and given a dish of kitchen scraps. For a minute I sat, expecting the woman of the house to return with at least one blanket, but to my disappointment she seemed to forget