Through Thick and Thin (16 page)

“Hi,” she says cautiously. “Can I ask what DCNY stands for?”

“Yes, of course, it stands for Dachshund Club of New York.”

“Oh,” she says and a lightbulb goes on over her head,
Yes, of course he’s a dachshund, I should have known.
Yet, as she takes another look at him (look at those ears, those eyes) the lightbulb sputters. Should she have known, really? It’s not as if it’s
so
obvious. She isn’t sure he is in fact the type of dog a person would look at and say,
Oh, dachshund!
“So, is he a dachshund?”

The women exchange glances. The taller woman inhales in a way that could be called dramatic, and looks Meredith squarely in the eye.

“He’s part wirehaired dachshund. Mini wirehaired dachshund. We
think.
”

For a moment, Meredith lingers on all the emphasis placed on
think,
but not for long. Before she realizes she has even moved, she is back, directly outside the makeshift pen, looking into those deep, ever-expressive eyes and inquiring, “Are you a mini-mini wirehaired dachshund?” in a voice she doesn’t recognize. It is such a higher voice than her own, it is so much sweeter; it’s the voice of a much nicer person than Meredith.
Oh,
she thinks,
his eyes.

The shorter one has something to say. “We think he has quite a lot of terrier in him, too. It’s important that you know that. Because he’s got some of the temperament of a terrier.” Meredith nods; she’s aware she is twirling on her hair.

“Norwich terrier, we’d say,” adds the taller one, who seems to prefer to speak in the plural, and then as if she somehow knows that Meredith has thus far been referring to them in her mind as the taller one and the shorter one, she extends her hand and adds, quite officially, in a way that almost doesn’t sound as if it was said too late, “I’m Ellen, and this is Barb.”

“Hi, Ellen, Barb, nice to meet you.”

The shorter one (that’s Barb) she has something to say again. “Interested?” she asks softly, coyly, almost as if it’s a calculated attempt at subtlety and finesse, “In adopting him?” She hadn’t thought of actually being interested in him, so much as just being inexplicably drawn to him. But therein lies the very boiled-down essence of interest, doesn’t it? The sauce of interest, perfectly reduced.

“It’s a really nice thing to do; you’ll be saving a life,” Ellen adds, as if it were even needed, as if along with subtlety and finesse, threats of impending dachshund-terrier doom were crucial to sealing the deal. Meredith pauses for a moment, takes stock of the situation, and thinks, really thinks, of this little tiny creature. He’s actually not
so
little. You probably wouldn’t carry him in a bag. She’s not even sure the dachshund part is mini, to tell you the truth, but who is she to argue? Yet looking at him, there’s something about his body, his face, his concerned expression that makes a person not normally inclined to using such words as
little
, as
tiny
, suddenly feel quite unable
not
to say them.
Little tiny baby dog.
She thinks how she could be saving his life, and how, like the taller one, Ellen, said, that’s a really nice thing to do. She thinks maybe when it comes down to it, she doesn’t do that many nice things. Maybe she could start. Maybe she could reinvent herself.

“Um,” she begins, “what exactly happened to him? Why is he here?” No matter how caught up in infatuation, in dog love, she may be at this moment, a person so programmed to planning everything out, days, months, years in advance, gets a bit overwhelmed in the face of such spontaneity. Hers is the mind that right about now gets a picture in it of a mad, rampaging mini dachshund, a rabid Norwich terrier.

“We believe,” Ellen explains, “that his people became estranged and could no longer care for him.”

“I see,” Meredith says, and she does, and even in the midst of all this, she can’t help lingering, the way she sometimes lingers on a certain word.
Estranged.
That’s what she is, too. She and Stephanie were already estranged, even before Stephanie said it, even before she deemed the time to be nigh for them to take a break. They were already estranged, and they just didn’t know it.

“The people who had him?” Meredith asks, just to be sure she heard right, wondering if it happened slowly, if it snuck up on them without their even realizing it. “They’re estranged?”

“Uh, yes, but it’s not as if they’ve been in contact. The dog has actually been with us for a while, so there isn’t an option of his returning to his former home. If you’re interested, you wouldn’t have to worry about that, that his previous people would want him back.” And she hadn’t actually been worried about that, though she can’t imagine how anyone, regardless of whether or not they were estranged, could give up this dog. It happens, you have to roll with it, don’t give up your dog because of it.
What is wrong with people?
Meredith wonders. It’s a question she’s had to ask much more often lately.

She looks again into his eyes; they are still fixed on her. The way he’s looking at her, it’s not frantic, it’s not wild and crazy or like that dog on TV constantly freaking out over Snausages or some such packaged doggie snack. He’s not saying,
Oh my God, person, get me the hell out of here now!
He’s so much calmer than that, so much wiser than that, he’s just sort of looking at her. She’s pretty close to certain that the way he’s looking at her right now, it’s very wise, it’s very sagelike, it’s not as if he’s looking for assurance of rescue, it’s so much more as if he’s in receipt of that already. It’s as if he is saying with his beautiful brown soulful eyes,
It’s all okay, it’s all going to be fine. Really.

“We think there might be some Norwich terrier—that’s a terrier,” Barb adds on.

“Yes, you mentioned that,” Meredith says.

“That or, you know, it could be a Scotty dog—that’s a Scottish terrier, if you’re not familiar with the term
Scotty dog.
”

“Uh-huh.” She nods. She is familiar with the term
Scotty dog
as she imagines most people are, but she won’t point that out; she doesn’t want to be discourteous, because these people have, she realizes as an unfamiliar warmth spreads through her chest, something she wants.

“And we think there may be some corgi. Welsh Pembroke corgi,” Ellen adds. She then looks toward Barb, and the two women nod at each other with what looks so much like expectancy in their eyes. Meredith thinks she sees Barb mouth,
might as well,
to Ellen, but she can’t be sure.

“There could be some Chihuahua, but that’s really just hearsay.”
Hearsay? Heard what? Said who?
Meredith thinks as she somehow manages to snap back to some sort of reality, to tear herself away from those
eyes.

“Okay, so let me get this straight, he’s a wirehaired dachshund—”

“Mini,” Barb says. Meredith decides Barb is on thin ice. How quickly people seem to find a way to get there.

“Right,” Meredith agrees as nicely as she can, “A
mini
wirehaired dachshund-Norwich perhaps Scottish terrier, but definitely some sort of terrier-corgi-Chihuahua mix?”

“Welsh Pembroke corgi,” says Barb.

“Right,” says Meredith.

“Yes,” says Ellen, and there’s a pause, a pause of some significance, and Meredith can’t help wondering,
Could there actually be more?
How far back do people actually go with mixed breed rescue dog lineage? She wouldn’t have thought very far at all. But then she wouldn’t have thought this was a conversation she’d ever be involved in, so maybe who’s to say anything about expectations and where they do or do not lead? “But it’s—it’s a matter of some debate.”

Clearly.

“We think you could be safe in saying a mini wirehaired dachshund-Norwich terrier mix,” Ellen clarifies. “We think you’d be safe saying that.”

We think you’d be safe,
is all that Meredith hears.
We think you’d be safe,
that is all Meredith thinks when she looks at him, into those eyes. And so they don’t really know what he is, exactly. If you think about it, a lot of people don’t know who they are, exactly.

“Okay,” she says, “I’d like to be with him,” and then corrects, “Uh, I mean, I’d like to adopt him.”

“That’s wonderful,” both women say in unison, and smile, and then, “The adoption fee is three hundred dollars.”

“Oh, adoption fee?”

“Yes, it helps support the organization,” they say, their smiles wide.

“Oh, right, okay. I just don’t think I have that much cash on me. Do I have my checkbook?” she says to no one in particular, to her bag it would seem, as she begins to root around within it. When her search unearths no checkbook, she looks up at the mini wirehaired dachshund-Norwich terrier mix, and a dreadful thought occurs to her. What if when she leaves to the go to the cash machine, someone else comes and sees him? What happens then? Because even if they say they’ll hold him, they might not. Because you know you can’t always count on things being held, on things being there when you come back for them. You just can’t.

She looks from him to the Chase machine in the lobby of the Apthorp right there on the opposite corner. She looks away from the Chase machine, back at him, and it’s a feeling she may or may not be familiar with, she really can’t tell, but she thinks there is no way she can leave him. And you know how loneliness knows Patrick Park’s name? She wonders if maybe despair knows hers.

“Can I take him with me? Across the street to the bank machine? And then I’ll come back with the cash?”

“We take debit cards,” Ellen tells her brightly.

“Oh, do you?!” Meredith exclaims, “Oh, do you, wow! Oh, great, oh that’s really, really great,” she says, and there it is again, that voice, the one that’s so much nicer, the one she’s now heard twice. She happily hands over her debit card, and she thinks of the Chase commercials, how there’s one where a young woman, just arrived in the city, gets a new job and a checking account and soon after, a bulldog. She thinks how recently she’s seen posters for Chase ATMs with a man walking a Jack Russell terrier, and this dog, her dog, is part terrier, that’s important to remember, and she thinks she always knew there was a reason she was quite content (especially for someone who doesn’t spend a lot of time in a state that could fall under the general umbrella of content) banking at Chase.

Ellen runs her card through their old-fashioned credit card contraption, the kind that rubs some carbon paper over the card in a quick swipe. Click, click. She listens to it going back and forth instantly over her credit card and as they hand her the three-paged carbon slip, she signs her name, pausing for a moment before she does, to make sure a cursive version of someone else’s name doesn’t appear out of the pen accidentally. That happens sometimes. The despair—she’s sure that’s what it was—isn’t part of her anymore. It flows out of her body, exiting gracefully through her fingertips, the tips of her toes; she thinks for a second that she can feel it, sparking like electricity, leaving once and for all, out of the top of her tingling head.

“We’re so glad you came along,” Barb says and Meredith nods, agreeing wholeheartedly.

“We have felt he was one of the most underrated dogs at our shelter,” Ellen adds, and Meredith has to keep herself from saying that perhaps that could be because they didn’t exactly give him the hard sell and rather really only harped on the fact that he was a terrier, saying
terrier
in the way you might say
marauding demon of death.
That could have contributed to his being, as they say, underrated. And then she thinks of Stephanie.

“What do you think you’ll call him?”

And she doesn’t really hear because her mind is back in Washington, D.C., back in high school, and Stephanie is monopolizing the VCR to watch
The Cutting Edge
a third time and then a fourth. And it was this thing with Stephanie, and it will still come up more than you would think; it has been so many times that she’s heard Stephanie declare that DB Sweeney is the most underrated actor of his generation.

“I’m sorry, what?”

“What do you think you’ll call him?” Barb asks a second time.

“Oh, right, yes. I know what I’m going to call him. I’m going to call him DB Sweeney.”

They smile at her a bit blankly; they nod. They put a leash on DB Sweeney. Barb reaches in and picks him up, and hands him to Meredith, and she smiles. They give her a five-pound bag of Iams kibble and tell her that Iams is the best by far and that she shouldn’t consider changing brands but if she must indeed consider such a thing, she must only mix in 10 percent of the new offending and poorly chosen food at a time. They provide her with a purple and black stuffed shoe that squeaks and appears to be covered in carpet lint. It has their scent on it she is told, he likes it, so he should have it with him while he adjusts, and Meredith’s voice changes again and she becomes the nicer Meredith and she looks at the dog,
her
dog, at DB Sweeney and she asks him, “Do you like your shoe? Do you?” She thanks each of the women again, twice, gathers her things in one hand and DB’s leash in another, and together, they turn to go.