Why My Third Husband Will Be A Dog (24 page)

You may remember that I’m in Home Improvement Frenzy. Aluminum siding is coming off, cedar shakes are going on. Working at my house today are stonemasons, roofers, and carpenters, but none of them is single.

It gets worse.

Yesterday morning after it rained hard, a stonemason hurried in to tell me that my levee was broken. He was upset. So was I. I didn’t know I had a levee. I didn’t even know what a levee was. All I knew about levees was that somebody drove his Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.

“How bad is a broken levee?” I asked.

“Very bad.” He told me that when my levee broke, my springhouse got flooded, and because I have a well, that probably meant I had no running water.

“Really?” I crossed to the faucet and turned it on, but only a tiny stream of water came out. “Uh oh.”

“You need an excavator.”

You can imagine how this news delighted me. I was already fixing everything that could be fixed on the house, and I had been so worried that I would be limited in the amount of money I could spend on home repair. I didn’t realize that I could spend money fixing the ground, too.

Yay!

My ground was broken, and suddenly the possibilities were limitless. I could spend and spend and spend, especially if the next thing to break was the sky. I could hire carpenters to build a wooden frame and support heaven itself. And after I had repaired the earth and the sky, I could move on to the sea.

I hear the tides need holding back.

So, to come back to the point, I learned that a levee is a mound of dirt that holds water in a channel, to control the runoff. If you live in the suburbs, you know about runoff. Runoff belongs with words like
aggravated assault
and
tax increase.
Runoff can make even sane citizens take up clubs, and if you start a conversation with a suburban type on the subject, be ready to settle in for the duration. Ranting will be involved, fists shaken, and development decried. Also revenuers, then gov’mint in general.

I had to get my runoff under control, and fast. One of my contractors knew a guy who knew an excavator, so the excavator came and gave me an estimate to repair the levee. It would cost $10,000.

Ouchie.

I gazed at my broken levee, wondering if I could get a shovel and do it myself. As far as I could tell, a side of a hill had washed away and the dirt had to be dug out and piled back up again. It wasn’t rocket science. I could make a gutter, like in a bowling alley. Or like the moat around a sandcastle, at the beach. I mean, how hard could it be?

But assistant Laura reminded me that I have a job and told me to get another estimate.

“Do I have to?” I asked her.

“Of course.”

Now here’s another thing. I don’t usually get a lot of
estimates. I don’t have time, and basically, I trust people. I know that labor costs money and so do materials. Everybody’s entitled to make a living, and I have found that people are fair and honest.

“Get real,” Laura said, so I listened to her, as I do in all things. I called a second excavator, who came over and gave me a second estimate. His cost?

$1000.

To review: two excavators, one estimate at $10,000 and one at $1000. For the same job.

You can imagine how delighted I was to hear this news, which showed me another way to spend even more and more and more money. As much as I was spending to fix my house, I could be spending ten times as much with no extra effort. All I had to do was hire the right contractors.

I called Laura and told her. “Can you believe it?”

“Yes.”

“Now what do I do?”

“Get another estimate. You need three.”

“Yes, master.”

I hung, up, excited. Maybe I could get an estimate for $100,000. I wanted a top quality levee. A prestige levee. One that you’d need a Mercedes to drive to. And it would never, ever run dry.

So I went online looking for a third excavator, letting my imagination run free. Outside my window, I noticed that the clouds were looking a little gray. Dingy. They needed a fresh coat of white paint. The cost would be in the prep. Power-washing, burning, caulking, priming. It would cost a fortune to paint the clouds.

I’m on it, people.

I just lived an episode of
Emergency Vet
. Tune in.

The star is Lucy, my old golden retriever, who is still rockin’ after thirteen years. Her eyes, brown as bittersweet chocolate, remain bright, though her step has slowed and she scuffs around on dust-mop paws. Her fur, which used to be a thick russet color, never grew back after a shave last summer, so her coat sprouts in crazy patches, like onion grass.

Lucy’s a Bad Hair Dog.

Our story opens when I notice that Lucy has a wound on her chest. It’s hidden by matted chest hair, and it’s yucky, a medical term you may know.

So I take her to our vet who biopsies the yuckiness and it turns out to be skin cancer, though an X-ray shows that it hasn’t spread. This qualifies as good news, except that during the week after the yuckiness, Lucy ages in fast-forward. She walks so slowly she’s almost in reverse and sleeps so deeply I hold my breath until I see hers. By Wednesday, I worry that this is The End. By Friday, Lucy cannot stand up without help, and I take her to the vet.

I’m sure this is The End.

But my vet is the greatest in the world, and he thinks it may be a spinal degenerative condition. He puts her on steroids and
tells me to worry only if there’s a downturn. He thinks it’s not The End, and I love him for that. I believe him until the next morning, when Lucy’s front legs fail, too.

Your basic downturn.

She breathes more heavily, blinks all the time, and seems disoriented. I have seen dying before, and it looks just like this.

Complicating the plot is that daughter Francesca is in California on spring break, and she is devoted to this dog. If this is The End, she has a right to know. So I call her, and she gets on a series of planes, spending almost fifteen hours in the air to get home in time to say good-bye. When I meet her at the airport on Monday afternoon, estrogen flows freely.

On Monday evening, we take the dog back to the vet, who examines her while I give the headline. Francesca fills in the details, about how the dog’s face is so different, which is new since our last visit. I hadn’t noticed it at all; I was too focused on Lucy’s other problems. That she wasn’t so cute anymore didn’t matter.

“Interesting,” the vet says, poking around, and as Francesca goes on, I’m hearing a child talk about her dearest pet. She loves everything about this dog, and if there is such a thing as a novelist’s keen eye for detail, she has it. I don’t. To me, Lucy is a red dog who needs Rogaine.

Francesca is saying to the vet, “She’s a beautiful dog. She doesn’t look like this. Something’s wrong with her face.”

“Like what?” asks the vet, whom I sense is humoring her. I marvel at how kind people are, when it counts.

Francesca continues, “Her smile doesn’t pull back that way. See how her lips are tense? Like they’re frozen?”

The vet looks up. “Please excuse me a minute.” Then she leaves the room and returns five minutes later with a book that she sets down on the examining table. She points to a picture
on the open page, and it shows a black dog, smiling exactly like Lucy.

“That’s what she looks like!” Francesca says, and the vet nods.

“It’s called
risus sardonicus
, which is Latin for sardonic smile. Your dog has lockjaw. Tetanus. That’s why her back legs are failing. The smile tipped me off.”

I look over, amazed. “Dogs get tetanus? How?” I’m thinking of rusty nails.

“They do but it’s incredibly rare. I’ve never seen a case. They get it from an open wound.”

I’m remembering the yuckiness, prior. “So now what happens?”

“You need to see a specialist.”

So the next morning we’re at a specialist, who qualifies as the nicest doggie neurologist in the country, because he takes one look at our wacky hairless dog and says, “Hello, gorgeous.”

You know what I checked. Of course, he’s married.

He confirms that Lucy has tetanus, which is so rare that he wants to take a video of it. He tells us that antibiotics will cure her. That not only is she going to live, her paralysis will arrest and she’ll be able to walk again in a month.

We are smiling. So is Lucy, albeit sardonically.