CHAPTER II. 

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.

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I was old enough. You entrusted her to me. I was instructed to give her medication every morning. 

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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.

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When you came home awhile later, you said, “This is for taking care of Pugsy.”

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It was a first generation iPod touch. Brand new.

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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.” 

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