Double fours.
“That’s doubles two times in a row. One more time and you go to Jail,” I say. She lands on one of the green properties. “North Carolina Avenue. No one owns it. Do you want to buy it?”
She shrugs. She is a shell of my usual Monopoly partner, both of our minds elsewhere. But while I’m putting on a brave face (maybe it’s the vodka and Valium), she’s just warming a chair. I look across at her. As always, I put a pillow on her seat so she can see above the tabletop, but tonight she looks smaller to me. Maybe she was always that small—I don’t think she’s ever weighed more than seventeen pounds—but her presence in my life has always been outsized.
“Do you not want to play? We don’t have to play.” She sniffs at her pile of money. When she bows her head I can see the octopus, so I look away. I’ve decided not to engage it, to look at it, to talk to it, to even acknowledge it, until our vet appointment on Monday.
We’ll see how long that lasts.
“Tell me again about my mother.” This is something Lily likes to hear from time to time. It used to bother me, her curiosity about where she came from. I guess maybe I was feeling some remorse about tearing her away from her dachshund family when she was only twelve weeks old, away from her mother and father and brother and sisters who later came to be called Harry and Kelly and Rita. But now it’s a story I like to tell. It’s a story about beginnings, and heritage, and our place in the greater world.
“Your mother’s name was Ebony Flyer, but people called her Witchie-Poo. Your father’s name was Caesar, after a great Roman general. I only met your mother once, on the day that you and I were introduced.”
“My mother’s name was Witchie-Poo?”
“It was a beautiful day, the first week of May. Spring. I drove hours into the country to this old white farmhouse with clapboard siding and peeling paint, my heart in my throat the whole way. I was so nervous! I wanted you to like me. The place sat a ways back from the road and the lawn was almost yellow; we hadn’t had much rain that spring, which was good for you and bad for just about everyone else.”
“I hate the rain.”
“Yes, you and every other dog. Anyhow, there was a little wire pen on the front lawn and inside were you and Harry and Kelly and Rita tumbling all over one another like noodles in a pot of boiling water. It was hard to even tell where one of you ended and the next one began, you were just a pile of paws and tails, so the lady who lived there picked you up and set you gently on the grass. The four of you ambled and tumbled and stumbled and bumbled, and I stood there thinking, How on earth am I ever going to choose?”
“But you did. You chose me!” Lily picks up a little red wooden hotel and chews it enough to put a few teeth marks on it before spitting it out onto a railroad. Normally this is not behavior I would allow, but she does it quite gently, sort of nonchalantly.
“No. No, that’s not true, exactly,” I say, and she looks up at me, startled.
Like any good adoptive parent, I have always fed her that line of horseshit: A mommy and daddy who have a baby get stuck with whatever baby they get. But adoptive parents choose their baby, and so they love them that much more. Of course, in most cases, it’s blatantly untrue. Adoptive parents are lucky to get the call whenever and wherever they do, and so they get the baby they get just the same as parents who actually give birth.
“No?” Lily sounds offended.
“No,” I repeat, because it’s the truth. Then I pause for dramatic effect. “You, in fact, chose me.”
And she did. While Harry and Kelly and Rita carried on in a game that involved rolling and somersaulting, Lily broke free from the group and wandered over to where I was standing talking to the lady who bred them.
“I was thinking of keeping the boy one myself, unless you have particular use for him. He’s high-spirited, but I think he can be trained to show.”
I hadn’t given much thought to whether I wanted a boy or a girl. Not wanting to appear sexist and get on the wrong side of the woman who had the sole say in whether I’d be taking one of her puppies home, I said, “No, I’d be glad to choose from among the girls.”
I studied the pups, looking for the girls, and was at a loss to tell which one was male. I would have to pick each one up and make a subtle determination; worse than appearing sexist would be to come off as a pervert.
It was then that I noticed the puppy who became Lily gnawing on my shoelace. She clamped down and put herself in reverse until the lace had been gently untied.
“Hello, you adorable . . .” I crouched down and made my inspection. “Girl.”
“That’s the runt, that one there,” the lady replied, just this side of dismissively.
I picked up the runt and she snuggled under my chin, tail wagging like the pendulum of the smallest, most fragile grandfather clock.
“I’m Edward. People call me Ted,” I whispered into her ear before lowering my own ear to the top of her head. I heard her speak for the first time.
THIS! IS! MY! HOME! NOW!
And so it was.
“I choose this one,” I told the lady.
“You can have your pick of any one. The male, even, if you really want. I’m not sure this one will show all that well.”
“All the same, I’m
