Point of Mow Return

With a soft knock at the edge of the door I did not have, my boss came into my office about 1pm. Presumably I was trying to do some kind of work, but that's not really what I remember about this story.

I looked up from my desk. Raj shot me a silent nod.

"What's up?" I asked quizzically. The conversation could have gone any of a thousand ways. We were friendly, he was significantly younger than me and there are long swaths of time in the sales world where nothing happens, so he could just as easily have been bored and looking to shoot the shit as ask me about actual work.

His eyes narrowed. "So..." he began slowly.

I knew instantly I was not going to like whatever came next.

"...you lost a dog recently, didn't you?"

And there it was. My blood began its all-too-common transmutation into liquid magma. I blinked twice.

"Uh...yeah?" I responded incredulously. This motherfucker knew full well I lost a dog recently. I know he knew because I was an inconsolable wreck for about a week when it happened, missed out on deals because I could barely drive without collapsing into wracking sobs and risking my life on my daily, hour-long, fifty mile commute, on top of not giving a single living shit about people or cars or money or anything for those first few awful days.

"Yeah, " he repeated coolly. Silence hung in the air. "So, uh...you think you're about ready for another one?"

My left eyebrow began its ascent into the stratosphere. I could not believe what I was hearing.

"What? No fucking way, are you crazy?" I shook my head as though I had a rat in my teeth. "Nan and still haven't gotten over the last one. It's been..." I checked my watch. It was March 16th. "...a month! A month to the day, in fact!" Comical, the nerve.

Raj tried talking me down. "I know, I know, I get it, " he said with an outstretched hand, a gesture to make himself seem more human. "But here's the thing...Donna and I are in a bind. I got this dog a few days ago but he's not fitting in. He's bonded with my wife, wants to nuzzle her and sit on her lap all the time but with the baby in the house he's been getting jealous. The last two nights and this morning he actually snapped at Mira and with her being so small Donna's been freaking out that he's going to do real damage. At least just take a look at him?" He shot me a few photos.

I opened my mouth to give a full-throated protestation, hand wave him away, say no, fuck off, let me get back to work when Nan's face suddenly flashed through my mind. As devastated as I was to lose Jack, I wasn't alone. She was right there with me when he died, cried all through the night just like I did, turned the AC down to freezing before gently packing him in a blanket and driving his body to the vet in grim silence the following morning right alongside me. Jack was her dog, from a time before we had ever met, which was a huge part of why I couldn't make sense of how broken up I was when we lost him. As much as I hurt, and as many conversations as she and I had about how we couldn't possibly go through that battery of grief again any time soon, take at least two years or so before we even think about another dog, enjoy our time together with fewer responsibilities, etc. etc., I couldn't bring myself to make this decision without at least talking to her about it. Maybe she had a change of heart, maybe she had thoughts and feelings she hadn't shared with me because she knew how upset I was.

"So what are you really suggesting here?" I sighed.

Raj clapped his hands together with a smile. He knew he was making progress. "It's really simple. I will give you the rest of the day off if you drive out to my house and take the dog. Donna has made it clear in no uncertain terms that he has to go, today, or I cannot come home. I know you went through some shit with your last dog but I tried suggesting at least taking a few days to properly look for another owner, ask around the dealership, maybe try to find a nice family for him online and she was not having it. Yes, it sucks that I'm blindsiding you and I'm sorry but you're the only guy I know right this second that loves dogs, knows how to take care of dogs, and has the proper space and patience for a dog. If you don't take him he's going to go right back to the vet tech center and from there, who knows?" To punctuate the severity of the situation, Raj pulled out his phone and showed me the texts between him and his wife.

"I cannot keep living in fear," was the last text in the thread.

Living in fear, eh? I looked down at one of the photos.

My God.

I again fought every impulse to reject this situation out of hand. All joking aside there were a number of people's lives potentially impacted, not to mention the dog, who in my opinion deserved as much of a fair shot as anybody.

"What's his name?" I eventually asked.

"Mowgli. He's a cute little dog. We're just not in the position right now and if I don't do something ASAP I'm a dead man. Can you help me out?"

I took a deep breath. "Let me talk to Nan. I'm not promising you anything. If she says no, that's it."

Raj gave me an honest nod. "That's all I can ask." He left me alone to make the call.

When I broached the topic, Nan predictably responded almost exactly the same way I did. Not just no, but fuck no. Who gets rid of a dog after four days? Why is he asking us of all people, after what he knows we just went through? All the major hits. But when I fully explained everything, she similarly grew more considerate. Well I mean Donna does have a newborn baby, they've already got the cats, their house is a bit tight. Imagine it from her point of view, from Raj's, from the dog's. Even though it sounds silly, they are in a genuine pickle and we might be able to help.

"What kind of dog is it?" she finally asked.

"Yorkshire Terrier."

"Hmm." I could hear her turn it over in her mind. "That's actually one of the top breeds I would have considered if we ever got another dog."

I did not know this.

After a bit more discussion we came to the conclusion that at the very least we could foster the dog. We have the space, it would be way less stressful for him, and if he didn't fit in or grew morose we could take the time to find him a proper home instead of shooting him back to the vet tech school and rolling the dice with his life.

I hung up the phone and walked over to Raj's office.

"Okay," I said pensively. "We'll do it."

"Oh thank God." His relief was palpable. "You have no idea what this means to us."

If only he knew then what I know now.

I began the long drive to his house.

Raj, Donna and their daughter Mira lived in a modest house in a town called Zephyrhills. You are not expected to know anything about Zephyrhills if you do not live in Florida, and you can be forgiven for not knowing even if you did. It is a rural, sparsely populated area known largely for shitty water. {take photo of bottle, insert image}

This water sucks. Many will defend it. They are wrong.

In addition, Zephyrhills is where I worked one of the very first jobs I landed shortly after my arrival in Florida as an associate for a rental car company. It was an awful job that taught me more about my then-unknown appreciation for euthanizing the elderly than anything else. You do not know misery until you have been locked in the baleful gaze of a man in the twilight of his life screaming "FORTY! FORTY! FORTY!" while banging on a counter at exactly seven-zero-zero A.M. because he refuses to pay the going rate for a rental car, which (you might be surprised to learn) is ever the slightest bit higher than forty dollars. It's where I learned about snowbirds, the Village Inn, and customer service worse than anything I had ever experienced because the town is so remote that there is no competition. Don't want to do business over at Burpin' Tom's Collision and AC Repair because Tom had one too many Natty Ices and grabbed your wife's ass at last year's Strawberry Festival? Well you'd better reach for your dueling bottles of Pluck and Elbow Grease and get ready to bang some dents out of the ol' Tacoma yourself.

(This has almost no bearing on the rest of the story.

I just fucking hate Zephyrhills.)

I knocked on the door and, to her credit, when she answered Donna did indeed look as though she and her family had been blown ashore by a hurricane. Hair mussed, eyes bleary and weathered, baby clutched as tightly to her chest as should could manage without doing serious harm. She thanked me for coming on such short notice and let me into the house.

The first thing I noticed upon entering was that every room, door and walkway had been separated by some form of partition. Sometimes, puzzlingly, several. Child gate here, crib blocking that room there, door wedged open or closed over here. Nothing could move freely throughout any area of the home without the application of force or deft aerial maneuvering. The place had been transformed into some bizarre miniature Winchester Mansion designed to fool the senses and lead you into unsurety, walls, doors and obstacles of questionable efficacy creating arcane angles, going everywhere and nowhere all at once. Had she done this? Had her husband? Did they do research, read helpful tips posted online by an exorcist? In any case it was unsettling. It was like a funhouse, but not. It was a not-funhouse.

"So where is he?" I asked in a neighborly tone.

Donna gestured dismissively to a side room. "In there. All his stuff is in there too, the vet school sent a crate and some old toys. Take as much or as little of it as you want, whatever gets left behind is getting tossed. " She quickly turned away and started heading toward the kitchen; I was now having a conversation with the back of her head. "Listen, Manny...I'm really sorry, I wish I could help you get things loaded and moving but I haven't slept in days and it's time for Mira's feeding, you'll be okay on your own, right?"

"Sure," I said to the tangled mass of hair disappearing from my vision. "We'll be fine."

As if on cue, Donna vanished. Not her cats, though; both were perched, silent but alert, on a shelf not too far from where I was standing. Their eyes were locked on the door to the side room, looking through me as if to say, "you're really gonna go in there?" I knew this look. I once dated a woman who owned a scarily brilliant Border Collie, smartest dog I ever met, along with two cats. The rub was that her apartment was quite small and she worked long hours, leaving these tortured felines at the mercy of an unstoppable dervish of teeth and fur, boundless energy driving him to chase them in perpetuity, terror without end. They lived up high, Robin Hood's Merry Duo of the Trees, in places the dog couldn't quite reach but never able to fully relax. The floor truly was lava for those poor bastards.

All righty, I thought. Let's see what we're dealing with.

I opened the door and there he was, dead center in the middle of the room, staring right up at me, tail swaying. No barking. No nervousness. No urgency. It was as if he had been waiting for me.

"Oi," his eyes seemed to say. "Wot's all this, then?"

"I don't know, little guy," I thought, staring. "I'm as surprised by all this as you are."

Neither of us moved an inch. I heard a refrigerator open and close in the distance as my eyes scanned the room. The toys and amenities provided for this animal were unfit for a boa constrictor. It took some doing but I eventually got all of his stuff loaded into my compact car, which was by no means designed for a haul of this magnitude but I felt obligated to take everything for both Mowgli's sake and Donna's. Dunno what he likes and I definitely know the less stuff left in her house, the better. Clean break, one and done. After the car was packed we said our goodbyes and Donna went back to her slightly less stressful life of only having to worry about a tiny human wailing at all hours. It was a long drive back home and I had no idea how long it had been since he'd been let outside or how he'd react in the car so I decided to talk him for a walk in Raj's lifeless brand-new housing development. We were totally alone. No kids. No other dogs. No cookouts or music or bicyclists. Empty. The only reason to live here is because you got a great deal on a place and you're hoping it sort of grows into itself over the next ten to twenty years. I've been around long enough to know it could go either way. Tough bet.

"Man," I said to myself, kicking dirt across a barren lot. "This place sucks."

I looked into Mowgli's big, calm eyes. "Too right, mate," they seemed to say. We headed back to the car and the only twinge of sadness I remember from that day is when we walked up Donna's driveway and he tried to continue into the house. I held the leash fast to keep him from going further. He looked back at me with a look of mild confusion. "Right-o guv, I see you're new 'round these parts but me mum is straight 'frough the Roger Moore 'ere so...chop chop?" I wondered how he would feel when it dawned on him (if dogs get dawnings) that he would never come back to this place. How would I feel if it were me? What would it be like to emerge from what I thought was my home for a quick stroll just to turn around and find it was no longer, staring at a stranger in front of a locked door? I waited a beat, thinking maybe she was still just behind it, peeking through, waiting for him to finish his walk before coming out a final time for one last honest to goodness goodbye.

She was not.

Since his crate took up the entirety of my car's flattened rear seat I had to undertake the journey with Mowgli in the front passenger's. I had never done anything like this before. Though he did have a doggie seat belt, I still found myself securing him with my right hand for the majority of the trip, fearful he might slip and slide, or freak out, or I might have to stop suddenly. To my surprise he actually dozed off for a bit, which I saw as a good sign.

"Gonna catch a bo, be a good lad and wake me when we're done faffin' about in this jam-jar, right?" A model of patience and understanding. We got back to the house without incident.

The early days were only slightly unusual. The first thing Mowgli did upon entering the house was jump directly on our living room coffee table, which was a surprise. Jack was a fat loaf of bread with no legs. Jumping wasn't part of his vocabulary; now we're dealing with this little athlete. We told Mowgli to get down and not do it again. Like magic, he listened. He peed in the house just once, very little, and he did it on the bathmat in the guest bathroom. Totally forgivable, new house, new energy, new smells and he knew enough to go out of the way, exhibit some degree of shame.

Sleep was a bit of a challenge for him early on. He didn't like to be alone and didn't much care for the dark but who the hell would in his situation? He would whine and cry in the middle of the night, but softly, no barking or thrashing. Truthfully if not for my bone-deep paranoia and preternatural hearing, Nan and I could probably have slept through it and let him acclimate on his own. Still, we wanted him to be as comfortable as possible. We let him sleep with us once or twice before we started putting our worn t-shirts in his crate at bedtime. Bam, that did it. Never a peep again.

Then there were the walks. Fairly normal. Sometimes he'd gallop, sometimes meander or dig about. In the beginning he didn't think much of other dogs or humans along the way, preoccupied with testing the perimeter, seeing how far he could go, where we would take him. There was just the odd matter of him reflexively walking up every single driveway to every single door on our route. I found this strangely heartbreaking. Was this what he thought life was? Just a series of short jaunts with strangers through random doors? Had he so little of a concept of home? Mowgli was barely grown when we got him, about a year or so old and we don't know where he truly came from, if he was born in the vet school, rescued or left behind. First a loud building full of fawning young girls who nevertheless poked and prodded and left him alone in the dark. Then a tiny bat maze ruled by a squishy toothless nemesis, followed by a rattling contraption piloted by some lanky ghoul. Lately, a somewhat peaceful space. What next? That's what the walks seemed to represent. Is this it? Is it over? Goodbye forever?

I started to see a bit too much of myself in this dog.

It was probably three weeks or so before we got a visit from Tara, one of Nan's closest friends, and she and Mowgli got along like a house on fire. He would jump on her beer cooler, she would pick him up and give him scratches, smiles all around. She knew Jack much longer than I did and knew how difficult it was when we lost him. Clearly, she was as surprised as we were to encounter this little guy so shortly afterward. We went out to the pool, cracked some beers, put on some music. "So what's the plan?" Tara inquired as Mowgli licked her chin incessantly.

Nan shrugged. "The plan was to hang onto him for a bit, see how it feels, find him a proper place to live if he bugs out."

The sentence hung in the air as Round and Round played in the background.

"...has he been bugging out?"

Nan and I shared a look. I shook my head. "Uh...nope?" she conceded.

Tara's eyes flitted back and forth between us. "So...I guess...he's your dog then?" The obviousness of the question made us look like imbeciles.

"I, uh...I guess he is?" Nan replied with an air of bewilderment. I mean clearly yes, but this was the first time we had said it aloud, had someone to bear witness, to make it real somehow.

Tara smiled broadly. "I knew it as soon as I heard."

We all sat and watched her scratch under Mowgli's chin, his eyes slowly closing as he drifted further into blissful comfort.

"How long did they have him?" she asked.

"Four days," I said.

Tara looked up, seized with dramatic seriousness for the briefest moment before returning to her critical head-nuzzling itinerary.

"Fucking idiots."