CHAPTER II.
2008
You had to leave your precious dog — an ancient black pug with bug eyes and a sausage body — with us for a week. I was six, and accustomed to you pulling up with her — she had a queenly set-up in the passenger seat of your dually, and you never went anywhere without her. She was ugly as sin.
I was old enough. You entrusted her to me. I was instructed to give her medication every morning.
With my towering father — a Black Belt who never stopped giggling — ambling beside me, I would go out the garage door (smell of gasoline, faint spring humidity, bikes and Razor scooters dumped everywhere) and down the steep paved driveway to the chainlink fence. I would call until your dog — Pugsy, that was her name — tottered up with her rasping pant. I’d peel the thin plastic off a rubbery piece of American cheese and squish her pill into it, and drop it over the fence. That was all.
When you came home awhile later, you said, “This is for taking care of Pugsy.”
It was a first generation iPod touch. Brand new.
My slight, small mother — pretty and sun darkened, light as a bird — stood there in her ancient, soiled pink Crocs on the water-rotted floor, shook her head and said, “When he’s up, he’s up.”
Tim with Pugsy, around 2014, and Tim with Pugsy many years prior.