(A brief aside: I offered to pay the bill so Stanley could get his teeth done earlier, because Chris said otherwise he would have to put off getting it done for financial reasons. Yes, the appointment was expensive — $388. But how is it that the guy who makes six figures, owns a 4500 square foot house, bought a new car last year, has five computers, two TiVos, two flatscreen/widescreen TVs, and two or three gaming systems, can’t pay this bill? I’m in a freaking one-bedroom apartment with my shitty old car, no alimony, and a part-time job that may or may not end in a few weeks. Yes, I know it’s just stuff. I know I’m better off on my own. I know the divorce is done and over with, and it’s useless to bitch and moan about what I lost. But damn it, I’m human and selfish, miserable and lonely, and sometimes I have to bitch and moan, because sometimes I can’t help but just want my old life back, with all of its STUFF. And now I am done bitching and moaning, so back to my post, stuff-less.)

I had to wait about 15 minutes to pay the bill because a lot of people were waiting to check in and out, and there was only one person working at the front desk. And after I paid the bill, the vet tech at the front wasn’t sure about whether I could see Stanley.

I’d called the vet’s office earlier in the day to make sure I could visit Stan even though Chris would be picking him up later, and I’d run the idea by Chris, so when the vet tech started to say, “Well, we don’t usually let anyone go back to see — ” I cut him right off.

“Can you please bring him out to me, then?” I asked, trying to be polite. “I haven’t seen my dog in four months.” I gave him the Look. The Look which said, “Dude, I am trying to be polite, and I am trying not to cry here, but I can feel a little prickle starting in my eyes, which tells me that if I do not get to see my dog in the next few minutes, I am totally going to HAVE HYSTERICS RIGHT HERE IN YOUR OFFICE AND YOU SEE THAT BIG DOG IN THE CORNER WAITING TO BE SEEN? THAT BIG DOG IS GOING TO BE TREMBLING IN FEAR BY THE TIME I AM DONE.”

The vet tech was evidently familiar with the Look, and he said, after a pause, “Sure, I can bring him out.”

I sat down in the waiting area to do what everyone does there: wait.

The vet tech brought out Stanley in his crate and placed the crate on the bench beside me. I opened the crate door. Stan crept out and onto my lap.

Truthfully, I’m not even sure Stanley remembered me. He didn’t wildly wag his tail or attempt to lick my nose, or do any of the other behaviors he normally does to demonstrate that yes, he knows me, and yes, he is ecstatic to see me. But he didn’t try to bite me, so I suppose part of him recognized me, and admittedly, he’d just had ten (!!) teeth removed so he wasn’t really operating at full speed.

I didn’t feel as bad as I thought I would, when Stan didn’t freak out immediately upon seeing me. I wasn’t sure what I felt either. It’d been so long since I’d seen any of the dogs that I almost couldn’t remember how to hold or pet him. So there we sat: me on the bench, tentatively stroking Stanley’s head, and Stanley shivering on my lap.

After about fifteen minutes, I took Stanley outside so he could pee and poop. He didn’t seem too interested in hanging around outside, so we returned to the waiting room. He got back on my lap and I patted him while I read a copy of People Magazine.

Eventually Stanley stopped shivering, and curled up comfortably while I read, occasionally popping his head up to look at any new dogs that walked into the room. After I finished the magazine, I sat with Stanley a while longer and then took him outside on a quick walk around the vet’s office.

By now I’d sat with him for an hour and I had to get going, because I didn’t want to run into Chris picking Stan up. I put Stanley back into his crate and waited to catch the vet tech’s eye.

“I’m all set now,” I said.

A different vet tech came out to get Stanley’s crate, and that’s when my eyes started twitching and my throat closed up. I’d done well up until then, but now that I had to say goodbye, I was beginning to cry. So I whispered, “Thank you,” to the vet tech, because even in severe emotional distress, I still can’t help being polite, and I patted Stanley one last time through the bars of his crate door.

And then I walked outside and sat in my car, and cried.

Which is crazy, because 1) haven’t I had enough shit happen over the last year to weep about? and 2) none of this stuff I cry about at night has actually happened.

Some background: Stanley needs to go in for a dental cleaning soon. His teeth have been very bad for a while now, and when I last brought the dogs to the vet, she said Stanley needed to get them cleaned within 3-6 months. So he should have gone back in January, but since I don’t have the dogs, I don’t really have a say in this, although I did offer to pay for the cleaning when Chris mentioned he might have to put off getting it done for financial reasons.

The problem is that getting a timely dental is more important for Stan than the other dogs because the bacteria could go to his heart, and he already has a heart condition. But the procedure is more dangerous for him because of that same heart condition.

So tonight I’m lying here in bed, hoping to get sleepy soon, and reading a book by a vet at Angell, where Pedro died. And of course, a pet has just unexpectedly died in the book (yeah, vet books are bad for me to read before bed).

I came to my senses and put the book down, but I was too late. The downward spiral had already begun, and now I was thinking about Stanley dying during the dental, which hadn’t even been scheduled yet, and then the true horror hit me — I DON’T REMEMBER STANLEY’S DIAGNOSIS.

I remember it’s a heart condition, of course, and that the drugs that keep him alive cost roughly $100 a month. But the name of the actual heart condition escapes me.

Me. Who bought a special baby scale just to make sure no dog was losing too much weight, who saved every single vet receipt, who painstakingly created a trifold, double-sided vet record in Excel, complete with clip art, on which I could write notes about every vet visit each dog had and when they were due for shots or follow-up.

To further explain how meticulous I was about the dogs and their medical care, let me mention that when I knew my weekend in March might be my last one ever with them, I spent some time printing out blank copies of the dog records I had created, so I could give them to Chris.

Because even though I was pretty sure Chris was never going to use them, I had noticed that the current dog records were nearly filled, and the thought of the dogs not having anyone to keep track of their records was unbearable to me. And so I gave the blank records to Chris, along with copies of our taxes.

So to realize I couldn’t even remember what Stanley had been diagnosed with was horrible. That’s how much the dogs have been gone to me.

I did remember that one of Stan’s medications is a diuretic, so I googled diuretics. I figured out that Lasix was the name of the drug, so I googled Lasix and dogs, and then I found Stan’s diagnosis.

Because I wasn’t blogging much when Stan got ill, I don’t seem to have mentioned it in here, and I am ashamed of that. So now I’m putting it, officially, on the blog.

In November of 2008, Stan started having trouble breathing. We eventually found out he had congestive heart failure. We were told he had, at best, six months to live.

A few months before this, Chris and I had just purchased the condo. This was the fourth place we’d bought together, but the first time we’d been ready to ditch the college hand-me-downs and spend money on real furniture, and even curtains. For the first time, we were ready for a home, not just a place to temporarily crash until the next opportunity came along.

After we’d moved in and gotten settled, Chris turned to me one night and said, “Everything’s been going so well lately that I keep thinking something bad’s going to happen.”

And then Stan got sick.

Turns out Stanley was the lucky one. He is an outlier; a dog who survived so long and improved so much that the last time I brought him to his cardiologist, the cardiologist said he could no longer make any predictions about Stan’s expected death.

And somewhere in all of that, our marriage died instead.

Then I brushed my teeth before bed, and while I brushed, I thought about how I might have to start looking for a new apartment in another month or so. I love living here, but I need a place that gets more sun, and if I decide to go to grad school, I’d rather live closer to school. Because I’m the kind of person who gets stressed and worried very easily, I need to do everything I can to set myself up for success, and a short commute to school would help considerably with getting through the program while working.

So I thought about what else I needed in a future apartment, and then I wondered whether I could possibly find a place that would suit my dogs (fenced yard, no stairs, have so far found nothing in the area I want with these features even if I ignore everything else I want in an apartment) and then I suddenly began to cry because I realized, finally, that I am likely to never have my dogs back again, or any dogs, for that matter.

In order to have the dogs back, I either have to take them all, or deal with Chris and swap them back and forth. I don’t want to deal with Chris because I can’t foresee a time when I will be fine with what he did to me, when I will be able to accept that he gave up on me and on our life together without any kind of coherent explanation, when I will be able to look at him without feeling this burning rage against him. I hope this will change. Logically, I know it will. But for now, I can’t even see how it can.

And the truth is, as much as I thought of myself as a dog person, as much as I told myself I would never give up my dogs for any reason and would live in a cardboard box with them before doing so…the truth is, right now I cannot even take care of one dog by myself, so forget about three dogs.

So much of my life over the last decade was tied up in Chris and the dogs that now that I have been cut adrift, some days I can’t find myself at all. I was admittedly a pessimistic person even then, but I worked part-time and took care of the dogs and the house the rest of the time, and in this manner I stayed sane, I thought. I was frugal, more cautious than Chris when it came to spending our money, and the irony is that this same frugality is what made it difficult to argue for alimony, because I had no high standard of living to maintain.

In order to set myself up for success, I knew I couldn’t have the dogs in my life just yet. But I kept thinking someday I would get them back. And after I started realizing someday might never happen, I still held onto hope that maybe another day, another someday, I would get my own dog, when I had a more stable life and job.

This will not happen.

I started noticing a few weeks ago that I was no longer interested in dogs. This isn’t quite accurate. What I mean is that I still see every dog that walks by me, the same way I used to when I owned dogs. I note the dog’s behavior, what the dog is doing, whether it is a friendly dog, whether it is a pretty dog. And then I turn away.

I have no interest in petting the dog or greeting the dog in any way, because if I acknowledge another dog’s existence, I betray my own dogs.

And now I pet cats.

I don’t like cats. I am afraid of cats. I am very allergic to cats. And I pet them, because cats are not dogs, and I do not betray my dogs or myself by petting a cat.

The easiest explanation for our divorce is the standard one: He changed.

But I have changed too.

Grrr.

Here it is.

I figured that at least here, we were urban enough to be free of the ticks and wildlife-induced diarrhea that plagued us in Wayland, but before a week had passed in the new house, we had spotted suspicious pellets on our deck.

The pellets looked a lot like the deer/rabbit poop we’d seen in our Wayland yard, and then when I saw flies congregating on it, I knew for sure that it was one of my worst fears: Poop of Indeterminate Origin.

The Poop of Indeterminate Origin soon became the Poop of Determinate Origin when Chris spotted the lone animal in our yard that didn’t require us to regularly feed it: a squirrel.

For reasons known only to himself, Christopher has christened this squirrel, “Fat Tony.”

Fat Tony nimbly jumps from one fence post to another, occasionally pausing to chitter mockingly at the dogs below. This never fails to infuriate Mina, who races along our chicken wire fence, barking madly and leaping in the air. Stanley is usually right behind her, although there was one time when he actually caught up with Fat Tony. I hadn’t seen this momentous event for myself, so Chris told me about it later.

“And then what happened?” I gasped, envisioning a situation similar to the Great Rabbit Massacre of 2007.

Chris shrugged. “Stanley didn’t know what to do with him once he’d caught him.” And so Fat Tony easily escaped, to return another day to taunt the dogs.

Paco has never had to depend on himself to find food, so although he allows himself to be peer-pressured into joining the barking, he soon stops and wanders aimlessly away. Paco knows only that these animals in our yard are apparently supposed to be fun to chase and/or eat, according to the other dogs, but he has never quite seen the point of all that running unless there was someone waiting at the end of it all to cook, slice, and serve the animal to him.

On days that Fat Tony doesn’t deign to show up himself, he will often leave his calling card on our deck. Instead of a large clump of tiny pellets of poo like the deer and rabbits left for us, Fat Tony appears to have a slower constitution. In other words, one or two pellets will appear at one side of the deck, and another pellet will show up ten feet away and around the corner at the other end of the deck. Cunningly, Fat Tony will secrete his poo pellet in the crack between two deck boards so that we humans cannot spot it, but Miss Mina Beana can.

It took me and Chris two weeks to start filling our refrigerator, but only a few days for Mina to find her own local, organic, sustainably farmed food source. We have Whole Foods; she has squirrel poop.

They gave her some IV fluids, and sent us home with some kind of canine equivalent of Imodium that needed to be given for about a week.

About a week and a half later, I came home from work to a smell so hideous that I wanted to vomit. Apparently Paco had now succumbed to the diarrhea. I called our regular vet, and the vet tech/receptionist who answered the phone tried to convince us that the problem was related to their food.

“It’s that premium kibble,” she said. “It doesn’t have preservatives in it.”

I was deeply suspicious of this answer, since we’d been feeding the same bag of food since Mina got sick, and yet the dogs were getting sick at different times. So I brought Paco to the vet, where we got the same medication for diarrhea that the ER had given Mina. They found nothing physically wrong with him, other than his weight, which was still too high after two years of getting half the food of the other dogs.

When I told Chris that Paco still needed to lose another pound and a half, Chris was optimistic.

“Maybe the diarrhea will speed up the weight loss,” he said hopefully.

Two weeks later, just as Paco was nearly over his diarrhea, Stanley began having diarrhea. By now we were getting used to this, and I immediately put him on boiled chicken and rice, and off we went to the vet. He was apparently in great shape, just like the other dogs.

“It could be something they ate,” the vet said. “Or worms or parasites. Have they eaten anything unusual, gotten into any trash?”

“No,” I said. “Although we do have a rabbit that comes into the yard a lot, and…”

“Yes, they could have picked something up from the rabbit,” the vet said.

“So then they could get re-infected?” I asked. Horrified, I was now envisioning our house drowning in a sea of diarrhea . “The cycle will start all over again?”

“Well, it could,” he admitted, with the casual attitude of one who didn’t have three diarrhea-stricken dogs in a house that was about to be sold.

“If they start coming down with the diarrhea again, we’ll just worm them all,” he said.

And sure enough, Mina began to have diarrhea again while Stanley was still taking medication for his diarrhea. We were supposed to be out of our house within a few days, so we dosed everyone with the pills from the vet and kept an eye out for the rabbit.

I wasn’t happy about the dogs and their diarrhea, but I still couldn’t help but have a grudging admiration for the rabbit. It had taken her a year or two, but she’d finally gotten her revenge for the babies she’d had to abandon when Stanley dug them up.

For normal people with normal dogs, a walk is an event to celebrate; an occasion to be marked by joyous barking. For our family, we go on walks because that is what people with dogs do, and not because any of us particularly enjoy it. Mina hates her harness, Stanley is afraid of his collar, and Paco simply does not walk. And Chris and I have to walk so far apart that we might as well be on separate walks.

Chris is usually in front with Mina. Although she will stand frozen when we put her harness on her in the house, she becomes an entirely different animal once we get outside. Suddenly she is a speedwalker; legs moving rapidly and hips swinging from side to side. And if she sees a squirrel? Flo-Jo, baby.

Sometimes Chris lets her off-leash so she can chase a squirrel. She has never been able to catch one, but we prefer not to crush her dreams. Once she loses sight of the squirrel, she circles nearby trees and stares expectantly up into the branches until Chris convinces her that she has successfully made the squirrel disappear and can resume speedwalking.

Then we have Stanley, who keeps a consistent pace and distance exactly halfway between me and Chris when I’m holding his leash. Because Paco almost always trails behind me and will stop at the slightest tug on the leash, I end up falling more behind Chris as the walk continues, and Stanley walks further ahead of me in an effort to catch up with Chris.

Paco was so slow today that I had to give Stanley’s leash to Chris so that my arm wouldn’t be stretched out with Stan walking so far ahead of me. While Chris and the two dogs gradually lengthened the distance between us, I started talking smaller and smaller steps in an effort to avoid getting so far ahead of Paco that he would stop moving altogether.

“It’s more tiring to walk this slowly than at a regular pace,” I complained, during one of the few moments when we caught up with Chris because Mina and Stanley were busily marking every available blade of grass.

“Well, he doesn’t like walking,” Chris said. “He does this every time.”

“But he’s usually not this slow. I mean, this is REALLY slow. Do you think there’s something wrong with him?”

“There’s nothing wrong with him! He’s just lazy,” Chris said.

I kept worrying. One of Pedro’s symptoms when he first got sick was that he would sit down during walks and refuse to continue walking. We hadn’t known anything was wrong, and I had pulled him with the leash to get him to walk. Then I found out he was suffering muscle weakness, and then he was dead. Since then, I had refused to pull on any dog’s leash.

Paco had tested negative for Pedro’s disease, so I knew he wasn’t walking slowly because of the same problem, but maybe there was something else wrong with him. Maybe the diet he’d been on for two years had been too strict and now he was faint with hunger and unable to walk. Maybe the winter had weakened his legs. Maybe he had some kind of tapeworm.

We turned onto our street. If there are no dogs visible, we sometimes take Paco off his leash and run with him to our house. This is the only time during a walk when Paco gets ahead of the other dogs because he knows that he’s heading home.

“Try running with him,” Chris said.

I took Paco’s leash off and tried to get him to run, but he still slowed to a walk after a short attempt at running.

Once we were all gathered in front of our house, Chris and I checked the dogs for ticks.

“Take off his harness,” I said to Chris, as he looked over Paco. “It’ll be easier to check.”

Chris began to remove the harness, and then stopped suddenly.

“How did you do this, woman?” he bellowed.

“Do what?”

Chris showed me Paco’s harness. One loop of it was wrapped firmly and tightly around his leg. We couldn’t even pull it off easily because of how tight it was on. Every step must have pulled fiercely at his leg.

“You stuck the neck hole around his leg,” Chris said, working on the harness.

“So where did I stick his neck?” I wondered.

“No, I mean you stuck the neck AND the leg into the same hole.”

My first thought was horror, that I had subjected Paco to this pain and blamed him for his slowness. My second thought was pride — the DIET HAD WORKED! He was so thin now that his neck AND leg could fit into the neck hole!!!!!!!!!!!!

Of course, I felt so guilty that I gave him lots of treats once we made it into the house. Subconsciously, I may have been trying to fatten him up so that I wouldn’t make this mistake ever again.

Today, Oprah will have a story on puppy mills.

If anyone can get the average person aware of what it takes to get that puppy into the pet store, Oprah can.

You go, girl, indeed.

Even our latest dog trainer, who has been helping us with Stanley, figured out pretty quickly who the boss was in our household. On her second visit, the dog trainer was advising us on how to keep Stanley from hiding in the garage when he suspects we are leaving the house.

“Call him to the kitchen after you take him out,” she said, “and give him a treat. Make him sit first.”

She eyed Paco, who was jumping hysterically at her ankles and clearly intent on wrestling her pant leg to the death. “It wouldn’t hurt to have this one sit, also,” she said.

She turned to Mina, who was squeaking happily and doing her best to encourage the trainer to pet her.

“Just give her a treat,” she said, “for, well, showing up.”

We were glad to have the dog trainer’s approval on this, because our pre-trainer technique had already been to tell the boys to sit or do a down, and then look at Mina and say, “You…um, you be cute,” and toss treats to everyone.

As you can tell, Mina has trained us well. The newest trick we have learned for her amusement involves her favorite activity: going outside. Theoretically she goes outside to pee and/or poop, but in actuality she goes outside to look for errant squirrels and to eat rabbit poop. As these are both incredibly exciting activities, she will often alert us to the necessity of a trip outside by barking incessantly until one of us gets up and lets them outside.

The yard where the dogs do their business is accessed via two different doors. During the day when we’re often in the kitchen on the upper level, we let the dogs out through the French doors which lead out to a deck. The dogs can run down the deck stairs and do whatever they like in the yard while we watch them through a kitchen window or from the deck.

At night, though, we’re usually watching TV when the Bean demands to go out, so we use the garage door to get to the yard. The garage door is on the opposite side of the house from the deck, so we just watch the dogs from the garage door until they are ready to come back inside.

For whatever reason of her own, Mina has recently decided that she prefers to enter the house through the French doors on the deck. Upon taking all the dogs out through the garage door, we would inevitably find Mina waiting, immobile, by the French doors when it was time to come back inside.

After numerous and futile attempts to get her to come back inside through the garage door, we soon learned that the only way to get Mina back in the house was to bring the boys in through the garage door, go up the stairs to the kitchen, and open the French doors for her.

On a few occasions when we’ve had to put something away or fetch something on our way from the garage to the kitchen, we have forgotten to open the French doors for Mina. This means that after a while, she will walk right up to the French doors, stare unblinkingly at us through the doors and bark once, peremptorily. One bark is all it usually takes, because she has trained us well.

Tonight after dinner I let the dogs out through the garage door. They wandered back and forth in the yard, bestowing liquid gifts upon certain rocks and bushes, and then the boys were ready to come back inside. I called for Mina, but naturally, she didn’t respond. I peered up at the deck and could just barely make out a tiny dark shape waiting by the French doors.

“Dumb Bean,” I muttered.

I ran inside the house. Because there are coyotes in our neighborhood who would just love a little chihuahua appetizer, I don’t like to leave the dogs outside by themselves for long, if at all. So I raced up the stairs to the kitchen as quickly as I could, accompanied by Stanley and Paco who were barking ferociously and were clearly under the impression that something exciting and perhaps even scary was happening. Was the mailman at the door?

I turned on the deck light and slid open the door. “Mina?” I called. Usually she waits right by the doors, but I couldn’t see her at all. Oh my god, were the coyotes that fast? And why couldn’t they go after the rabbits who kept pooping in our yard and leaving the tidbits for the Bean to snack on?

I walked out onto the deck and examined the back yard. Very faintly, I could see Bean’s tiny body standing in front of the garage door.

I didn’t have outdoor shoes on, and I wasn’t about to brave our poo-filled (rabbit or otherwise) yard in the dark to fetch the Bean.

“She is such a weirdo,” I told the boys, who joyously chased me as I ran back down the stairs.

I opened the garage door.

No Bean. This was ridiculous.

I looked toward the deck again and…yes, that looked like a Bean-shaped splotch standing patiently by the French doors. Did she have a Star Trek transporter, or how was she moving so quickly and silently?

“For god’s sake, STAY THERE!” I ordered her, and slammed the garage door shut again. The dogs and I ran up the stairs and by now I was getting pretty tired. The boys had no idea what all the fuss was about, but apparently barking wildly was suitable for all situations, because they wouldn’t shut up.

I flung open the French doors, and the Bean trotted casually in.

“What took you so long?” she seemed to be saying. “I thought you’d never decide what door you wanted to use.”

As soon as Chris had left for work, Stanley sat outside the bedroom and scraped the door and howled. So far, all was proceeding as usual.

However, I soon heard a noise that sounded like Stanley was peeling strips of paint off the door. This was not normal, so I got out of bed and flung the door open.

Stanley immediately ran into the bedroom while I leaned down and checked the door. The door looked fine.

But now Stanley was in the center of the bedroom, staring at me, and I knew there was no way to get him out of the room so that I could go back to sleep.

I decided that the only way to get him out was for me to leave the room. So I did.

Stanley followed me downstairs, where I said hello to Paco who was curled up in a bed by a heat vent. Then I turned around and ran as fast as I could back up the stairs.

Even at full speed, I made it to my bedroom door only a second before Stanley, and I slammed the door triumphantly in his face. Then I jumped into bed, pulled the covers over me, and… realized I was completely wide awake.

Stanley: 2,346
Jane: 0