by V. M. Burns
“You aren’t going to leave them outside, are you?”
She looked skeptical. “Well, I don’t want to cause trouble.”
“You’re not causing trouble. Bring them inside.”
She searched my face and then opened the door and called the dogs. They pranced out, and we all marched into the house.
“They’re very well-behaved. They’re both completely housebroken and, after an entire weekend of shows, they’re worn out and will eat and sleep for days.” She turned to me. “However, I’m not sure about the little one. She isn’t really a puppy. She’s probably about two years old, but I suspect she’s spent the majority of her short life locked in a crate, pushing out litter after litter.”
I frowned. “That’s horrible.”
“Unfortunately, not all breeders are responsible dog owners. For some, these cute little things are merely a commodity to be used to generate cash.” She scratched the dog’s head.
“So, if she’s two, then she’s fully grown?”
Dixie nodded. “She’s a toy poodle. Poodles come in three sizes: toy, miniature and standard.” She scratched the small fluff ball behind the ear. “This is a toy. Toys are the smallest and shouldn’t be more than ten inches from the withers.”
“The withers?” I asked.
She smiled. “From the shoulder to the ground. Dogs between ten and seventeen inches are miniatures. Anything over seventeen inches is a standard.” She pointed to the other two dogs, which had eaten a large bowl of dog food and were now lying on the floor fast asleep. “Those are standards.”
“Is that the only difference between the three?”
Dixie nodded. “Yes. The breed standard or the guidelines are the same for all three. The only difference is the size. Some other breeds are differentiated by color or coat, but for poodles, it’s the size.”
“So, what are you going to do with her? It is a her, isn’t it?” I held her up and looked underneath.
She nodded. “Yep. It’s a female, and I’m looking for a good home for her.” She narrowed her eyes and looked at me. “You wouldn’t know anyone who is looking for a companion, by any chance?”
At that moment, the fluff ball sighed and laid her head on my shoulder. From that moment on, I knew this was my dog.
We spent the rest of the night talking and thinking up names for the new addition to my family. Dixie suggested I name her something that had meaning to me. I had always been a big mystery fan, so I settled on a registered name of Queen of the Cozy, call name Agatha. Although I intended to call her Aggie.
* * * *
The next morning, I woke up to barking, screaming, growling, and a few whimpers. I rushed downstairs and found Albert backed up against the front door. The whimpers were coming from him. The two standard poodles, which had seemed so docile and a bit ridiculous with their colored hair wrappings and ridiculous cuts, were lunging toward him with teeth bared. They emitted a rumbling growl that sounded ferocious. The barking came from Aggie, who had a hold on Albert’s pants leg and was shaking it with all her might, as though she was going to rip him to shreds if he dared move.
Dixie had the standards’ collars and was straining to keep them from taking Albert out and yelling at him to stop moving and stay still.
“What’s going on here?” I hurried to Dixie’s side.
“This lunatic just waltzed in the house, unannounced, and Chyna and Leia were protecting their territory.”
“Their territory? This is my house!” Albert’s voice had a bit of a tremor, but his eyes looked terrified. “Those ferocious beasts should be put down. They’re dangerous.”
“Keep talking like that, buttercup, and I might just lose my grip on their collars.” Dixie relaxed her grip on Chyna, and she lunged to within inches of Albert, who tried to climb the wall.
I bent down and picked up Aggie. “Actually, you have no right to just waltz in here unannounced. You lost that right when you decided to move out.”
Albert looked as though he wanted to argue, but with three dogs and two angry women glaring at him, he smartly kept his mouth shut.
“You want me to call the police or just let the poodles finish him off?” Dixie asked.
I thought about it for a moment and then decided he wasn’t worth it. “We’d better not. I like these dogs too much and wouldn’t want them to get sick eating rancid human flesh.”
Albert scowled at me, and I held out Aggie, who barked and would have leapt out of my arms to attack him if I hadn’t tightened my grip.
Albert held up his hands in surrender and whined, “Okay. Call off the attack.”
Dixie looked at me for confirmation. Then she said. “Platz.”
Both big dogs immediately stopped growling and lunging and lay down quietly. Despite their nonthreatening postures, they continued to stare at Albert.
Dixie connected the dogs’ leashes and stood with her arms folded across her chest.
“Well?” I stroked my scrappy little ankle-biter and joined the staring contingency.
Albert looked wary. His gaze darted back and forth from Chyna to Leia and then to Dixie and me.
“What do you want, Albert?”
“I came by to remind you about the party?”
I frowned. “What party?”
“I knew you’d forget.” He took a step forward.
Chyna and Leia remained in their sphinx-like positions, but their lips curled and both began a low, rumbling growl, which caused Albert to freeze, foot in midair. He looked at me helplessly.
I turned to Dixie. “Maybe you should take the dogs outside.”
Dixie never turned her head or broke her stare. “You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
She picked up the leashes. “Fuss.” Which sounded like Foos.
The dogs stood up by her side.
Albert stepped aside and she opened the front door and they headed outside.
Before she left, she turned, walked over to Albert. and said in a low, steady voice, “I have a gun and I can shoot the hind legs off a possum in the dark at six hundred feet. So, you better watch yourself.” She turned to me. “Holler if you need me.”
I bit my lip to keep from laughing and nodded.
When she and the large poodles were gone, Albert breathed a sigh of relief. “That woman is crazy. She should be locked up, along with those vicious beasts she calls dogs.”
“What do you want? Why are you here?”
“I told you. I came to remind you about the party. Clearly, you’ve forgotten.” He rolled his eyes and gave a snide smile as if to say, You poor little fool.
In the past, I would have felt guilty for forgetting whatever it was I was being accused of forgetting and apologized. However, today I felt empowered. I held out Aggie, like Captain Kirk used the Tribbles to uncover the Klingon on Star Trek, and she didn’t disappoint. She barked and snapped, and Albert backed up and removed the smug, self-satisfied look from his face.
I pulled her back to my chest. “What party?”
“Tonight’s my grandmother’s ninety-fifth birthday. We’re hosting the party, remember?” He looked around the room. “Clearly, you forgot. There’s not even one decoration up. No balloons. Did you even cook?”
“You have got to be kidding me. Did you forget? You walked out. That’s not my grandmother. Why would you even think I’d host a birthday party for someone”—I held up a finger—“someone who isn’t related to me, someone I don’t like, and someone who can’t stand me?” I stared into his blank eyes.
He stared and then blinked. “So, you’re not planning to cook?”
“Ugh!” I marched into the kitchen. If I didn’t get away from him, I might be tempted to take Dixie’s gun and shoot him myself.
After a few moments, he followed me into the kitchen.
“If you have any sense of self-preservation
, you’ll go away and not talk to me until I’ve had some coffee.” I filled the water basin on the fancy individual-cup coffeemaker Albert had given me for our last anniversary. At the time, I was so angry that he felt a coffeemaker was the perfect gift to give to a woman who rarely drank coffee, for a twenty-fifth wedding anniversary present. However, after he walked out, I found myself drinking more coffee and wine than I had in the past twenty-five years. So, I got it out of the box. Now, every time I made coffee, it reminded me what an insensitive louse I married.
Albert watched me make coffee. When it was done, I sat down and drank the entire cup, got up, and made another. At one point, he looked as though he was going to speak, but one look into my eyes and he quickly closed his mouth and remained silent.
By the time I’d downed my second cup of coffee, my nerves were less frazzled and I was able to formulate sentences that didn’t question his parents’ marital status when he was born.
“I can only assume, by your presence here, you haven’t told your family we’re getting divorced, nor have you bothered to cancel the birthday party for tonight.”
He looked as though he was going to smirk, and I picked Aggie up and held her where he could see her. He promptly readjusted his countenance to a neutral state. He sighed. “No, I haven’t told my family about the divorce. I thought we could tell them later.”
I looked at my soon-to-be ex-husband, seeing him, perhaps for the first time, as the cowardly weasel that he was.
“We could tell them later? Why should we tell them anything? They aren’t my family. They’re your family. You should tell them yourself.”
He looked startled. “But everyone is expecting us to have the party here, like always.”
“Maybe you should let Bimbo host the party for you.”
He sighed. “It’s Bambi, and she’s never hosted a party before. Plus, my family doesn’t know about her.”
“Oh, really?”
“Pleeease. I need your help. This will be the last time.”
“What’s in it for me?”
He tilted his head to the side. “What do you mean?”
“What’s-in-it-for-me?” I moved my hands as if I were using sign language.
Albert merely stared.
I sighed. “Look, I’ll host your party tonight, but it’s going to cost you.”
“How much?”
“First, you return your key. You do not enter this house without permission until the day when it is transferred over to you and I move out.” I waited.
He nodded.
I held out my hand.
He looked for two seconds as though he wasn’t going to give me the key.
“I can always have the locks changed.”
He reached in his pocket and handed me his key.
“Second, you will return my access to our joint bank account.” I squinted. “And don’t even think about withdrawing the money from that account, because I was a CPA and I know how much should be in it.”
He reluctantly nodded.
I folded my arms across my chest and waited.
“Now?”
I nodded.
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed the bank.
“And put it on speaker.”
He glared but pressed the speaker button. When he finished, he ended the call and stared at me like a dog awaiting praise. He’d be waiting a long time.
“Thirdly, you agree to keep the children as your beneficiaries. You will NOT attempt to cut them out of their inheritance, even if you decide to marry that empty-headed nitwit.”
He frowned and stared at me so long I thought this would be the deal breaker, but he eventually agreed and nodded his consent to my terms.
“Good. Now you can go. I’ll take care of everything.”
He stuttered, but eventually shrugged, turned, and walked out.
After he left, Dixie and the poodles returned. “Is everything okay?”
I nodded. “Yes, but we have a party to plan.”
Dixie looked as though she thought I’d lost my mind.
“It’s Stephanie’s bisnonna’s birthday.”
“What the heck is a bisnonna?”
I smiled. “It’s Italian for great-grandmother. Nonna is grandmother, and bisnonna is great-grandmother.”
We left the poodles in the RV and went to the store. Under normal circumstances, I would have spent all day slaving over a hot stove to make a home-cooked meal for Albert and his family. However, these weren’t normal circumstances, and time wasn’t on my side.
I picked up the telephone and ordered food from my favorite Italian restaurant, Café Roma’s. Lasagna, chicken parmesan, Caesar salad, and garlic bread for a small army would be ready for pickup in three hours. I called Mama Adamo’s Bakery and had a large sheet cake with strawberry filling and Happy Birthday, Nonna written on top. I went to the deli and got fruit trays, vegetable trays, wieners, and dip, and my last trip was to the liquor store for several nice bottles of wine and a few nonalcoholic beverages for the children. By the time we finished shopping and got home, we had just enough time to get everything set up and ready to go before the guests arrived.
Stephanie took the train home and arrived just before the first guest. She served as hostess, while I ran upstairs to shower and dress, and Dixie grabbed her toiletries from the RV and got prettied up.
When I had showered and refreshed, I came down to the party. I grabbed a glass of wine from a tray near the living room and took a sip as I looked around. The majority of those present were Albert’s relatives. I was an only child, and my parents were both dead, so my family tree was pretty barren. Albert was one of three children. His parents were good Italian Catholics and had tried to do their part to procreate and replenish the earth, but his mother had been forced to stop after three children. At least that was what she said to me when I told her I had no intention of having more than two children after David was born.
Albert’s mother, Camilia Conti, was a petite woman with unnaturally black hair. She had fallen in love with Albert’s father, Darren Echosby, an American in the military, after World War II. He died mysteriously not long after they were married and was seldom spoken about. Her current husband, Lorenzo Conti, was a small, quiet man who seldom spoke but made up for it in drinking and smoking.
Dixie and Stephanie spotted me leaning against the wall and came and stood on either side of me. Stephanie put her arm around my waist and leaned close. “Mom, I don’t want you to freak out or anything, but…”
She inclined her head slightly to a corner of the room.
I followed the direction of her head and nearly choked when I saw the bimbo, dressed in a skintight, body-hugging dress that left nothing to the imagination, wrapped around Albert. I nearly dropped my glass and came very close to letting out a shriek and lunging for her. Had it not been for Dixie and Stephanie, I might have embarrassed myself by throttling the hussy in front of a room full of people.
“He brought that…floozy into our house?”
Dixie and Stephanie continued to whisper in my ear, all the while using their bodies to restrain me from murder.
“Honey, I know you have to be furious, but now is not the time to show it. That’s what he wants you to do.”
I downed the glass of wine my daughter handed me in one large gulp. Part of me wanted to cry, while another part wanted to beat the living daylights out of Albert and his tart, but I knew Stephanie and Dixie were right. Now wasn’t the time. Instead, I took a deep breath, held it for as long as I could, and released it. I tried to remember the breathing exercises from Lamaze decades ago, but frankly, the deep breathing hadn’t worked to distract me from the pain back then, and it wasn’t working now.
“I’m okay.”
I tried to put on a fake smile, but it must have come across as more of a grimace, because neither D
ixie nor Stephanie looked convinced.
“Mom, there’s more.”
I tried to wrap my head around the idea of what could be worse than my husband bringing his girlfriend into the home where we had raised our children in the middle of a gathering of his relatives. “Am I dying?”
“No, but—” Dixie never got to finish that sentence, because my mother-in-law walked up.
“I always had a feeling something was a bit off with you.” She shrugged. “When Alberto first told me, it took me a minute to adjust, but I say live and let live.” She grabbed me by the shoulders, pulled me close, and kissed me on each cheek. “Love is love, right?”
I stood ramrod-straight in a state of shock. Albert and I had been married for more than twenty-five years, and this was only the third time my mother-in-law, a normally very demonstrative woman, had hugged me. The other two times were at the births of each of my children.
When the shock wore off, I was dazed. “What just happened?”
“That’s what I was getting ready to tell you,” Dixie whispered.
I waited, but her courage must have failed. She looked at Stephanie. “Maybe you should tell her.”
“Tell me what?”
Stephanie grabbed another glass of wine and handed it to me. Then she took a deep breath. “Apparently Dad told everyone the reason you two are getting divorced is because you’re a lesbian.”
I stared at Stephanie and then Dixie.
“Don’t look at me. Apparently, I’m your ‘partner’.” Her lips twitched, and I could tell by the way her eyes twinkled she was a few seconds away from bursting out in laughter.
“Excuse me.” I waltzed around the large crowd of in-laws, neighbors, and friends, and cornered Albert. “Could I see you in the other room?” I didn’t wait for his reply, but turned and walked out of the room, marched upstairs to the master bedroom, and waited. A few moments later, Albert came in behind me, and I slammed the door. “Can you please explain to me why your mother thinks I’m a lesbian?”
A flush of red went up his neck. “You told me I had to tell my family about the divorce.”
I stared at him, waiting to hear how he planned to connect the dots to explain how his leaving me for another woman translated into me being gay.
