“There is a sophomore in this very building,” Annabelle went on, “whose dog has the same kind of yarn collar. Of course, his dog’s is blue because it’s a boy dog.”
“Dixon,” I said, and the breath left my body.
Annabelle laughed, misunderstanding. “Well, yes, that’s the boy’s name,” she said. “But his dog’s name is Andy…oh, hey, isn’t that funny! Ann and Andy, just like the dolls!”
I told her I’d be back, at least I think I said it, but then I was out of my chair, the apartment, the building.
We’d left so soon after his parents bought Andy from Pa, slinking away in the night like we’d done, that Dixon hadn’t known. He hadn’t known how much I’d grieved, how hard my heart had gotten. But he’d taken good care of my dog.
They were both healthy looking, open and unscarred. Andy barked once and then lunged, pulling the leash from Dixon’s hand. Dixon’s laugh rang out, and he said, “Hold on, boy; hold on, Andy!”
I dropped Ann’s leash and let her run, too.
When they greeted each other, all whipping tails and yelps and puppy cries of ooohwoo, the split in my heart healed, and the rock it had become turned soft and began, finally, to beat again.
I looked from my good dogs to Dixon’s kind and open face, his eyes big on me like he’d seen a ghost. Or maybe, it was that he’d finally spotted the one person he’d been looking for.
That coulda been it, too, I reckon.
~•~
I guess you know by now that I’m gonna break in for a word or two at the end of each story.
Carol Ann’s story made me determined to do right not just by Emily and Angie, but by the next little one on the way, too. I walked into that delivery room with a new perspective and a resolve like if the world went wonky, I had the power to tilt it back up and hold it in place for my little family.
Do you think she and Dixon got married? That woulda been a nice end to the story, wouldn’t it? But they didn’t. I hope that doesn’t spoil it for you. She and Dixon never even dated. Carol Ann told me that she and him were friends up until Dixon died at the age of sixty-seven of a heart attack. “Too young, too young,” she told me on the phone that day. At the time, that sounded pretty old to me, you know, I was only twenty-five myself, but now…lord have mercy on my soul, I’m well past that age at this telling.
Dixon’s wife had called her up to break the news to Carol Ann, and she and her husband had driven to the hospital where Dixon laid dead. “But peaceful-looking,” Carol Ann told me. “You know, Dixon was always like a brother to me. I never had any siblings; did I tell you that part?”
I told her as how she hadn’t said it right out plain, but that I’d understood. She was a right nice lady. Kind and peaceful, I guess you’d say. Even when she told me that Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy had died within a week of each other when she was twenty and Dixon twenty-two, she said it without hurt in her voice.
But I heard the brokenhearted little girl in the next thing she said. “Maybe they had to keep each other company and are still doing that even to this day,” she’d said, “You think that might be right?”
I’d told her I thought that was probably exactly right.
She told me a few more things: that she and Dixon and their spouses had been good friends, even living in the same neighborhood for a while; their respective children had all called the other couple aunt and uncle even though they weren’t blood; and the funniest part, that Dixon’s ma had finally apologized to Carol Ann, admitting to her while she was dying of cancer that she’d always regretted what she’d said to her husband that day, about Carol Ann being trash. She’d hated going out to that trailer park because it reminded her too much of the poor way she’d grown up herself. Reminders could make you right testy.
Carol Ann had told her she didn’t even remember it and to hush and have a sip of cool water.
Similar to what I told my wife that day in the delivery room, but without the part about telling her to hush–I was strong back then, like I said, but I didn’t have no death wish. A woman in labor has the strength of ten stout men, and I imagine she’da ripped my arm from the socket and beat me with it.
We went into that delivery room as Rabbit and Angie, but we came out as Rabbit, Angie, and Davey…Davey was my little lost brother’s name. It made me happy to feel like I had some small bit of him back through my son.
Emily, who was almost two by the time Davey was born, decided that he was hers and hers alone. She’d sit and just stare while he nursed but then fuss at her mamma to hand him over once he was ready to be burped. She even insisted on learning to change his diaper, and it was funny watching her change his when her own was crinkling and crankling and generally hampering her careful movements.
I showed her right off how to put a spare over his waterworks. You might remember a little story about that from the first book. If not, that’s okay, too–I’m still right embarrassed of it.
Everything smoothed out for us for a while. Davey was an easy baby, or so Angie said. He did seem like a content fellow and didn’t seem to fuss as much as Emily had at his age. That could just be because I was braver by then and less apt to overwhelm him as I’d been known to do with Emily.
One time, when she had had a cough, just a tiny one, I’d slept in her room just in case she needed me in the night. I was scared, you see. She seemed so little, so vulnerable and breakable. By the time Davey rolled around, I knew that babies weren’t made a balsa wood and fairy dust. Davey would be okay.
Especially with a big sister like Emily looking out for him.
Now, in this next story, the caller spent a long time leading up to the dog, so much so that I had started to wonder if there was a canine involved in his story at all. But I was glad afterwards that I’d just let him talk and not busted in with a commercial just to ask what in the world he thought my show was about–because his story really touched me. You could say it shaped some of how I decided to be as a father, myself.
Old Dogs, New Tricks
My grandchildren–and Ben–changed my life. Oh, I’m sure many’s the older gentleman or lady who feels that way when they set their eyes on the bloom of youth in a newborn’s face, but for me, it was something else entirely, and it didn’t come about until much later. Well after those children had grown out of their babyhoods, in fact.
I was happy enough for my son, Kenny, when he and Maggie, my daughter-in-law, had little Matilda, but I didn’t go overboard. I didn’t buy ridiculously large stuffed animals or shower them with crib sets and the latest kitchen gadget designed with the busy parent in mind. Maggie’s parents did all that; Kenny was sure to show me whatever wonderful new thing ‘Gram’ and ‘Grampy’ Michaels had brought on their last visit. Which was never too far in the past because they visited Kenny and Maggie a lot. It always amused me to hear Kenny refer to Bill Michaels as ‘Grampy’…it sounded like some sort of weird medical condition!
They were retired, though, and had the time to run over there for every burp and diaper change. I was still working and working hard. I didn’t even make it to the hospital when they had that first baby, but I did have flowers sent over. I didn’t get to see her for a week or so, as it turned out. With one thing and another, between work and my clubs (at that time I’d belonged to Kiwanis and a weekly poker game), the time kept slipping past.
Kenny was a little cold when I finally got over there on a Sunday afternoon, but Maggie thanked me for the flowers. She asked did I want to meet Matilda, and to be honest here, I wasn’t sure who she’d meant at first. My initial thought was that it was a friend of her mother’s because Maggie seemed to think it was her responsibility in life to get me remarried. (My wife had died when Kenny was eight, twenty years prior to Matilda’s birth. She’d been a wonderful woman, and I’d never felt the need to date. I knew I’d never find my Ellen ever again.)
So I gathered my thoughts, quickly enough, I hoped, that Maggie didn’t notice the lag, and said that I’d love to meet Matild
a. Kenny shot me a look when Maggie left the room, but I shrugged it off. I asked him how work was going. He said fine and that he would make tenure that year. I nodded, and that seemed to be all we had to say. I was glad when Maggie came back carrying a pink bundle.
Kenny is a teacher in a high school, and I don’t understand it. I never understood why he picked that as a profession when he could have been anything he wanted to be–he was very smart. He could have been a doctor, a surgeon, a lawyer like me.
But in his second year of college he threw it all away. Came home for the summer and told me that he’d decided to go after a teaching degree. And only a bachelor’s degree, at that. It occurred to me later that I should have tried to talk him out of it, but that was a bad summer for me, time-wise. I had a very large case that took all my days and weekends, and Kenny was at the movie theater where he worked nights. We didn’t talk much.
Before I knew it, he was graduating, and then he had moved out. He and Maggie had met in college and got married right after graduation. I was against it, but not enough to cause a rift, of course. I just wanted them to have a solid foundation, not rush into any financial obligations that would weigh them down. I suppose I had it in my mind that Kenny would need money to go back to school once he realized the mistake he had made with the teaching degree.
He and Maggie got jobs together in the same school. They rented a little house in the district. I knew that spending so much time together was going to put a strain on their marriage, and I kept Kenny’s room untouched, just in case. But they seemed to get along fine. They invited me for dinner once a week or so, but with my schedule, it was difficult to get over there. They were only about fifteen minutes away by car, but I had started golfing, and it took a lot of my spare time learning that game so late in life.
Eventually the invitations got fewer and further between, but that was a relief, in a way. I hated always saying no to their dinners; it really inconvenienced me.
So, six years later and here we were, Maggie lowering that pink bundle into my arms. I pushed back a little into the chair and put my hand up. “Hold on there,” I said with a laugh. “No one told me I’d have to hold the baby!” I tried to pass it off like a little joke, you know, but I was taken aback. I didn’t understand why these parents always want to throw their babies around like sacks of grain. They all seemed to think that the sun rose and set on their newborn and that everyone would feel the same about it.
But, to tell you the truth, I just didn’t.
I mean, yes, she was my grandchild, but I’m sure she looked pretty much like every other baby at that particular stage. Small. Pale and dotted with red patches. Too thin. They didn’t fill out until they were a month or so along. Even then they all looked alarmingly alike, to me. Why, this could have been anyone’s baby that Maggie was trying to force on me. Anyone’s at all.
Maggie laughed good-naturedly and retreated to the couch. Then she glanced a question at Kenny, and he kind of shrugged like, ‘Go on and do what you wanted; I won’t stop you.’ So she swallowed and said, “Dad…” And she had a kind of hesitant hitch to her voice. And no wonder. She’d never called me ‘dad’ before, rest assured. I raised my eyebrows, just a little surprised, you know. Then she seemed even more flustered. Maybe the baby had soiled its diaper–I don’t know–but when she went on, she used my first name again, as she’d always done in the past. It was a bit of a relief. No reason to go changing everyone’s form of address just because of one tiny addition to the family, right?
“Donald,” she said and shifted, lifting the baby closer to her bosom in a kind of regrouping way, “as you know, we’re going to call my daddy ‘Grampy’, but I was wondering…what should we call you?”
“Donald is fine,” I said, without thinking. She wanted to know what I wanted to be called now that I was a grandfather, I realized too late.
At first I felt a little embarrassed to have misunderstood. Her mouth fell open, and Kenny put his hand to his forehead and massaged his temples.
I sat back and crossed my arms over my chest. I became a little defiant at that point, to be honest. So I decided not to backtrack. “The child can call me ‘Donald’,” I said, clarifying. It sounded foolish when I said it right out like that, but I didn’t see how to get out of it.
Maggie took a small breath as if to say something but then thought better of it and just smiled. “Donald it is, then,” she said. “Will you stay for lunch, Donald? I made–”
“Oh, I can’t, no. I apologize,” I said and looked at my watch. “I have an appointment with the pro at the club. He’s very hard to get time with, and I’m working on this aspect of my swing that–” I stood and shook my head as though it was all too complicated to explain. “Well, it was wonderful to see you both,” I said and shook Kenny’s hand. I put a small peck on Maggie’s cheek. A small hint of her perfume caused me to pause, disoriented. Then I shook it off. “Let’s do this again soon.”
I was in my car and out the driveway before I realized I hadn’t actually looked at the baby.
In my bed that night, as I was trying to fall asleep, Maggie’s perfume came back to me. With a sudden sense of clarity, I realized it hadn’t been perfume; it had been that sleepy, milky, warm smell that my dear Ellen had had the whole first year of Kenny’s life. And for some reason I couldn’t put my finger on, that realization made me very, very sad.
* * *
I made a point of making more of a to-do over the baby the next time I was there (which happened to be two weeks or so later) because I didn’t want Maggie to think I was completely unfeeling where my grandchild was concerned. I even told Maggie that perhaps Matilda could refer to me as Granddad. I wouldn’t object to that, I told her, if she thought that seemed appropriate.
I even held Matilda on that visit and had told myself that–if they asked–I would stay for a meal. I felt I owed them that much.
Matilda was bigger than I expected, her head bobbling against my arm as she tried to lift it up. Maybe to see me better, who knows. Who knows what a two-month-old is thinking (I had miscalculated a little–it had been a little more than two weeks between visits).
Her eyes were that deep blue that all babies had. Her hair had come in more and stuck up all over her scalp like some kind of duck’s fluff–except it was black so maybe it was crow’s fluff. I didn’t say that to Maggie. New mothers can be very sensitive, you know, when it comes to how you refer to their babies. Plus, they are still emotional (the mothers, not the babies).
As I held Matilda, though, and she wriggled, her hands clenched in tiny fists, I thought, Why, this child is determined! Her eyes stayed on mine, and she didn’t blink, as though she was taking in everything, everything she could because she just might not have enough time for everything she wanted to accomplish.
For some reason, that made me a little sad, too.
I made a point of asking Kenny how his tenure deal was coming along, and he said, “Well, it’s not really a deal, you know. I get it automatically at ten years with the school.”
I know that, of course, I knew how tenure was structured, but I said, “So it’s not something you have to work for.”
I only meant that it was not like a promotion or a bonus, an incentive based on performance. I didn’t mean anything bad by it, but he frowned and looked away.
Maggie smoothed it over with some chit-chat about Grampy Michaels starting a college fund for Matilda. I listened politely but wondered if she wanted me to pitch into it in some way and felt uncomfortable–I don’t think family members should ever ask each other for money. Then she asked a question about estate law, and I realized she was just seeking my advice on structuring a will.
I told her that wasn’t my field and handed her Matilda back. She’d gotten very heavy by then, and my arms ached with the weight of holding her.
They didn’t ask me to stay that time.
I tried to get over there with some regularity, but that was a bad year for me. Bad in the sense that I ha
d very little time, very little extra time. I was a partner in the firm, and we’d had a handful of the younger lawyers jump ship and start their own firm. They didn’t compete with us; they were doing some kind of hippie, inner-city, disadvantaged persons collective or some such nonsense. No, the issue was not one of competition–rest assured our client lists would never overlap–it was simply one of too much work and not enough warm bodies.
Between that and other things, I ended up only visiting a handful of times–maybe less than a handful–in Matilda’s first year. And then Kenny told me that ‘they’ were pregnant again. I wasn’t sure what he meant at first, to be honest…I knew he was referring to Maggie, of course, but I didn’t know who else; I didn’t know who the ‘they’ were that were pregnant. I asked whether one of Maggie’s girlfriends or her sister were pregnant, also, and Kenny gave me one of his pained looks.
“Maggie and I are pregnant, Dad,” he said, his tone tight. Most likely from embarrassment, I assumed. Men didn’t get pregnant. That’s just more of that hippie progressive talk that Maggie most likely had forced him into. But no, because then he went on, “We’re having a child together, you get it? It’s our child; we are pregnant.” He jiggled the foot crossed over his knee and stared off. He sighed. “And…Maggie doesn’t have a sister. Or a brother. She’s an only child just like me.”
Well. Okay, I should have known that, I mean, I did know that, of course, but had just not remembered right away.
Sometimes I found Kenny difficult to talk to. He tended to be so defensive, and really, if you looked at it logically, he was unreasonable.
So then they had Alex, and by then, Matilda was two. They called her Tilly, and I went along, but I didn’t care for the shortening of her name. I didn’t see the reason behind it. But I was not one to interfere.
More Good Dogs: More Stories About Good Dogs and the People Who Love Them Page 3
