Buddy

by Brian McGrory

  “Him?” my father said, surprised, when I pointed to the skinny, gangly mutt.

  “He’s the one,” I said. My father swallowed hard, signed a form, and we were off, me and this reticent dog sharing the backseat for the short ride home.

  It was the Saturday of Easter weekend, which meant I could spend that entire first day doing nothing but tending to my new dog. It was pure bliss, or at least mostly bliss. Sure, he might have been a little aloof, even skittish, but those things would pass. He’d get comfortable. He’d accept what I was offering. It would be everything I imagined, and more.

  Sunday came, and we had to leave for Easter dinner at my aunt’s. It broke my heart to leave him, even if he didn’t really seem to care. The return home couldn’t come soon enough, and I was the first to rush from the car into the house, and it was there and then that I saw my world, my future, in tatters in front of me.

  My mother was the next one to come inside. “Oh my God,” she said, oddly calm in her delivery. My father came next. I could actually see his jaw drop. My sister Colleen just kind of snickered and slipped off to her room.

  The dog, my dog, had somehow opened the cabinet door to the trash barrel under the sink. I knew he was smart. He’d dragged the barrel across the kitchen and into the breezeway, where he had knocked it over onto the blue rug. There he had proceeded to eat whatever was edible, and tried to eat what was not. The result was a room strewn with half-consumed trash, bile, vomit, and feces. For good measure, the dog had also ripped a gigantic hole in the rug.

  My mother simply began crying. My father began picking up. The dog cowered in a corner, even though no one was saying anything to him. The next day, over my muted objections, he was gone, back to the pound. My parents worked hard. Money was never plentiful. Time was always valuable. I understood why he had to go, even if I didn’t like it.

  We never talked about another dog again, but in that silence, my desire only grew more intense.

  Animals and kids generally like me. Maybe I’m supposed to say something different. Maybe I’m supposed to act coy about it. But it’s been the way of my life.

  My oldest sister, Carole, had her first child when I was in high school, an utterly delightful kid named Matthew whom I took under my wing when he was just a few weeks old. By the time he was a toddler, I was tossing him in the backseat of my beat-up Toyota Corolla and merrily lugging him all over town—on errands, to pickup basketball games, just hanging out with friends. When he was ten years old or so and I was in my twenties writing for a newspaper in New Haven, Connecticut, he came down and visited me for a weekend and I bought him a set of golf clubs with money I didn’t actually have, starting him on a lifelong pursuit.

  My first trip to my ex-wife’s grandmother’s house in Pennsylvania, there was a cousin there with a particularly problematic son. “A nightmare” is how one relative described him. He threw constant fits featuring shouts and tears. During one of those loud sessions, when the tired, frustrated mother simply shut him in a room away from everyone else, I slipped in and asked what was wrong.

  “Nobody ever listens to me,” he said.

  I doubted that; he didn’t really give anyone any choice. But I said, “I am.”

  He looked surprised, as if he didn’t know what to do, until I suggested that we read. I pulled out a book called The Berenstain Bears, and as I read the words aloud, I quizzed him on the pictures.

  “El—e—phant,” he was saying slowly when his shocked mother opened the door and saw the two of us sitting together on the floor.

  Then there are animals. I pretend not to like cats, but as a boy growing up in the proudly working-class suburb of Weymouth just south of Boston, my parents wouldn’t let me have another dog, so cats were what I had. I had one tiger cat, Kitty, who used to follow me to school many days, hang around outside biding time, then follow me back home. Calico, my all-time favorite, disappeared for months, only to return quite a bit chubbier than she’d been before she left. We all assumed that she had been in the company of a kindly person with a heavy hand on the Meow Mix, but that notion was put to rest on the early summer morning when she laid down beneath the bushes next to our sun-splashed patio and delivered nine kittens, each a soaking wet ball of fur. Then, one after another, she took the kittens by the scruff in her mouth, waited at the side door for me to open it, and purposefully walked through our small Colonial, up the front stairs, into my room, and under my bed, where she deposited her offspring before heading outside for another. She kept them there until she couldn’t care for them anymore, which is when she gave me a look that said, “Get these things out of my life.”

  Then there was the first golden retriever I ever had, even if he was never actually mine. My first job at the Globe was on the South Shore of Boston, in a small suburban bureau about thirty minutes from downtown. I loved it, even as I spent all of my energy working as hard as I possibly could to get promoted to the city room. I loved seeing my name in the paper I’d grown up reading. I loved covering the area of the state that was part of my soul. I loved fulfilling what was pretty much my only career ambition, to write for the Globe, even as I wanted to go higher and higher up the writing chain. The first Sunday morning I had a story in print, my parents woke up early, turned the pages to find my byline, and cried.

  I also loved the fact there was a store called the Docktor Pet Center about two minutes from the office in the Hanover Mall, where I’d head every lunchtime to look through the plate-glass window at the dogs in their depressing cages looking back at me. When I wasn’t trying to be a big-time writer in the main newsroom, I was dreaming of walking a dog of my very own around my fair city.

  One dog in particular caught my attention, first and foremost because of his breed—golden retriever—and second because he didn’t seem to be going anyplace fast for reasons I couldn’t comprehend. The dog was absurdly handsome, with dark, reddish, slightly curly fur and an expressive face that stared out the grates of the cage, begging me to take him home. I showed up day after day to see him, communing through the glass, until one afternoon the manager of the store asked if I’d like to play with him.

  “Love to,” I said, more than a little startled. “But I just want to warn you, I can’t have a dog now. It’s in my lease. I don’t have the time—”

  I would have still been there stammering out excuses, but he cut me off and said, “No worries, just play with him for a bit. You’ll be doing us a favor. Poor guy has been stuck in there a lot longer than he’s supposed to.”

  The nice man led me into what was called the “Love Room,” a small square with linoleum floors, bare walls, a small dog bed, and a couple of folding chairs. It felt more like the visitation room at a medium-security prison. “I’ll be right back,” he said.

  I stood, inexplicably nervous, waiting. A moment later he popped back in with the puppy dangling over one arm and placed him gently on the floor. It was like meeting someone famous whom you had seen only in pictures or the pages of newspapers or magazines. You knew what they looked like, but you didn’t know what they were really like, and when they came to life right in front of you, it was a jolt. I had stood outside the glass six, maybe eight, possibly ten different times just gazing at this wonderful creature. I had spent that time imagining life with me and this dog, the walks we would take in the mornings, the evenings that we would spend on some vast and empty field, the time we would while away together, the people we would see, the places we would be, always him and I, together. But I’d always had the glass separating us, just as I always had reality keeping my dreams at bay, and now here we were, able to reach out and touch each other.

  “You perfect little boy!” I said, as soon as the manager retreated to the main part of the store.

  That perfect little boy wasted no time. He could have acted aloof. He could have gone and lay down on the bed, thinking to himself, Finally, a comfortable place to sleep outside of the goddamned metal grates of that punitive cage. What he did, though, was urgen
tly scamper to me, jump determinedly up onto my leg, and make every possible effort to climb into my lap.

  I lifted him up, laughing. Apparently he was having similar thoughts looking at me as I did looking at him. Once on my lap, he burrowed his face into my chest. He kept burrowing and burrowing, as if he were trying to reach my heart, until there was no place else to go, and then he went completely slack. He was heavier than I had imagined, and stronger. The manager came in with a stuffed dog toy, which he tossed on the floor. I whispered into his ear, “What’s that?” and he popped his head out, saw the toy, and retrieved it. We played for half an hour or so, him fetching, then resting on my lap, until I had to get back to my job.

  We did that almost every day for the next few weeks, my time with my sort of dog. He’d be staring toward the door, seemingly looking for me, when I walked in, pawing at his cage the moment he saw me. I’d almost be running to get into the little room for my twenty minutes of dog Zen. We did this as he outgrew his small puppy cage and had to be moved to the larger cages normally reserved for the shepherds and Saint Bernards. We did it on Saturdays, when I’d make a special ride to the suburbs to see him. We did it until the day I walked in and my curly, red-furred friend wasn’t in his usual spot.

  I walked up and down the aisles, slowly, trying to be calm, peering into all the other cages, wondering if they had just moved him to clean his spot, but no. I poked my head into the empty puppy room to see if they had put him there ahead of my arrival, but again, no. I stood there staring blankly at my reflection in the glass, convincing myself to be happy that my dog had probably been bought by some kind owner with a big yard and a happy family but not exactly thrilled that I’d never gotten the chance to say good-bye. All around me, I suddenly noticed the harsh sounds of the pet store—exotic birds squawking, the water in the fish tanks gurgling, dogs barking. I was standing there when the manager approached with a grim look.

  “Someone bought the golden?” I asked, trying to sound upbeat. I wasn’t sure of the answer I wanted to get back.

  He shook his head, his expression still flat. “He’s in a crate in the back. He’s been diagnosed with a skin condition called seborrhea. We’re not going to be able to sell him, so we’re sending him back to the breeder.”

  Breeder? First of all, that was a joke. Anyone and everyone knows that pet store dogs come from rancid mills in the Midwest, where there was pretty much a 100 percent chance that they would kill the dog within the hour he arrived, if, in fact, they were even sending him there.

  “What do you want for him?” I asked. My heart started beating faster as the question came forth.

  “If you want him, just take him,” he said. Before I could say anything else, he was already walking toward the back of the store, as if he had been waiting for my visit. He returned with the fat, happy puppy in both arms, grabbed a leash off a wall rack, and handed them both to me.

  “Good luck,” he said in a way that indicated he knew something I didn’t. I clipped the leash to the dog’s collar, and we walked out of the store into a hot June Friday. It occurred to me, from the way his snout went high into the air, taking in every possible smell in the parking lot, to the way his feet barely touched the ground as he clomped along like a Clydesdale horse, that it was the first time in his entire life that he had been in the great outdoors.

  I took him straight back to the office, where I needed to finish a story on deadline, and he sprawled out beside me on the soft blue carpet, seemingly in disbelief over his sudden good fortune. I took him in the car to Pennsylvania that night to visit the woman who would later become my first wife. I took him up all five floors to my studio apartment, him pausing on the landing to give me a look that said, “This is nuts.”

  Then I worked the phones. I rang up friends, acquaintances, anyone I knew, and told them I had an amazing dog that needed a great home. Spread the word: a $600 dog for free.

  Almost immediately, I got a call back with interest from two married reporters from another newspaper with a bunch of sons who had been begging and pleading with them for a dog. I took my unnamed puppy down to their house, a nice place a block from the ocean with a fenced-in yard, and they fell instantly in like—so much so that they wanted him right there and then. I asked for a few moments to say good-bye.

  “You’re going to love it here, you good boy,” I whispered to him as the parents and kids probably looked on from the window. He seemed to sense that something was strange and locked his eyes on mine.

  “And if you ever need anything from me—anything—I’ll be here in a snap. Just bark.”

  Which is exactly what he did as I walked out the gate, the mother gripping his collar with every ounce of strength she had. He barked. He cried. He lunged. He couldn’t believe what was happening, and as I looked back, neither could I.

  Two weeks later, I got a call from the mother. I sensed a tinge of desperation in her voice as she invited me to come and visit “Tito,” the name they had apparently given him. “I think he really misses you,” she said.

  I got there that afternoon. The boys were playing Wiffle ball in the yard. Tito was on a chain stuck to a tree, just out of reach of the game, lying down in the dirt, bored out of his brain. When he saw me, he charged in my direction until the chain snapped him violently back. When I took him down to the nearby beach, nobody really seemed to mind.

  This scene repeated itself just about weekly, until I got another call from the mother months later. She didn’t sound desperate this time but hesitant. “We’re going to have to bring Tito to the pound,” she said. “We just don’t have time for him with the kids.”

  “I’ll be right down,” I said. And not for the first time, it was me and Tito, together, on a moment’s notice. It wasn’t the family’s fault. They just didn’t know what they were getting into, and in my more honest moments, I had to admit that young Tito, with his single-minded devotion to me, may not have been the easiest dog on the planet.

  And devoted he was. He ignored the world to focus on me. He liked nothing more than to walk beside me down a city street. At the beach, if another dog approached, he’d chase him away in a flurry of barks and growls. He would allow nothing to get between us. So this time, I was a little more selective with offers and careful with placement. A friend of a cousin in Newport, Rhode Island, was in the market. I took him down. It was encouraging. Their house was beautiful, with a rolling lawn and a shop on-site that was the family’s scuba gear business. The family said they would install an invisible fence. They said the dog would have free rein. They said there would be someone there virtually every moment of every day, including their six-year-old son, who had been begging for a dog. I left him there after another long hug and the same whispered promise: just bark and I’ll be back. This time he didn’t. I think he may have been too shocked.

  Weeks later, I got another call, and when I heard the new owner on the other end of the line, I girded for more bad news. “You’ve changed our lives,” the wife said. “We love him in a way we never knew we could.” The next summer, I was driving through Newport and my car naturally found itself on their street, in front of their house. There was Tito, renamed Chips, sprawled out on the crest of the lawn, watching the world around him. I stopped. He stared. I walked. His tail thumped. I got to within ten yards, and he exploded in my direction, blinking, whining, flinging himself at me. We played for half an hour, and when I left, he couldn’t have seemed more content to stay. He lived another twelve years, a wonderful life with wonderful people.

  While Chips was still alive, I moved apartments in Boston. I married. My job became more stable. Then I got Harry, the single nicest warm-blooded creature I will ever know. All of which is a long way of saying that I’ve always gotten along famously with dogs. I’ve done great with cats and even do all right with kids. There wasn’t a reason in this world to believe that this wouldn’t, couldn’t, and shouldn’t continue.

  11

  In retrospect, perhaps I took it for grante
d that Pam’s kids and I would quickly settle into a fun, familiar relationship, one of easy jokes and advice or just a little bit of sanctuary from the stresses of modern day childhood. I pictured them accompanying me on errands, driving around in the cart when I played golf, happy to go to the movies or for ice cream or just to the coffee shop, the atmosphere around us always light and free. I didn’t want to be their father. They had one of those already, a very good and involved one. I wanted to play a role that, twenty years from now, they’d look back at and thank their lucky stars that they’d had.

  And why wouldn’t it become this? History said it would, given what I had with nephews and friends’ kids and the animals—especially Harry. A good relationship with Pam’s kids seemed more destiny than uncertainty. Add the fact that they were terrific kids, outgoing, scary smart, opinioned, adorable—they were no wallflowers with constantly runny noses just looking to bide their time.

  But a funny thing happened on the way to stepparent-hood: reality. Take, for instance, Memorial Day weekend. I’ve always loved Memorial Day for what it’s come to represent, which is, ironically, beginnings, the first true weekend of the blissful summer season, warmer days, longer nights, hot dogs on the grill, the cold water of a hose cleaning sand off the bottoms of your feet. I suggested to Pam weeks ahead of time that we load the kids and the dogs into the car and spend the upcoming Memorial Day weekend at my little house on the southern coast of Maine. It sits a mile or so from a wide, soft-sand beach with calm water and minnows and many darting crabs, perfect for little girls exactly that age.