Chapter 28
Having Jaz be part of our life, Oliver and I both agreed, was a wonder, a joy, a blessing, and a privilege.
But sweet holy mother of absolute fuck were we glad when she finally told us she was spending the evening with a friend.
“She’ll be okay, right?” I asked Oliver, when it was too late to change anything, even if she wasn’t.
“She’ll be fine,” Oliver reassured me. “I’ve double-checked with Trish’s mother, and they really are going to her house to”—he searched for the right words for a moment—“I think just generally hang out.”
“Cool.”
“Of course now I think about it, Trish’s mother did sound rather a lot like Jasmine doing an old-woman voice.”
“Shit.” My heart actually, honestly-to-God, not-a-metaphor skipped a beat. “Should we… Oh, you’re taking the piss.”
“Of course I’m taking the piss.” Oliver put the last mug into the dishwasher and set it to an ecologically friendly cycle. “She’s having a normal evening with a friend, like teenagers do. It’s good. It’s a positive development.”
I looked down at Spud. “Hear that, boy? It’s just you, me, and Daddy Oliver this evening.”
Spud looked legitimately crushed. “Arooou?”
“Okay, don’t be like that.”
“Aroooou.”
“Oliver!”—I turned to my boyfriend—“Spud’s being a dick.”
“He’s not being a dick.” Oliver dropped into a half crouch, and Spud scampered over to him. “You’re not being a dick, are you, boy?”
“Ruff.”
“Traitor.”
Oliver stood back up and led Spud out of the kitchen. “He just misses Jasmine. Which is another good sign. It means she’s settling in well. Now come on, we should be going.”
We should. We should definitely have been going. This would be our first meal out in ages. I grabbed my coat and went to stand by the door like an overexcitable puppy.
Oliver, substantially less overexcitable and nowhere near as puppyish, attached Spud securely to his lead. “Do you have the bags?” he asked without looking up.
I said “Yes” instinctively, then “No” honestly. Then I went back to the kitchen, retrieved a couple of the other sort of doggie bags, came back and said, “Okay, actually yes. But Spud isn’t going to want to poo in the pub, is he?”
“I’m sure he’ll wait until he’s outside. And he probably won’t need to go at all. But if he does, we’ll be very glad we brought the bags.”
Our first date had been at an extremely swanky high-end restaurant.
It had also been part of a wider plan to rehabilitate my public image, save my job, and generally stop my life from being ruined.
Well, given where I was in those days, from being more ruined.
Somehow, though, this trip to a decently reviewed local pub with our rescue dog that we were slipping into the two-to-three-hour window when our foster daughter was out the house seemed way, way higher stakes.
“He’ll be okay, right?”
Oliver gave me an indulgent smile. “Spud will be okay. Jasmine will be okay. They’ll both be okay. Neither of them are going to poo anywhere they shouldn’t or bite any strangers. Now come on, I know we don’t have a booking to be late for, but it’s a popular place and it does fill up.”
So we set off. The pub we’d picked was only a short walk from our house because while Spud could go in the car, he didn’t much like it, and all three of us felt like we could do with the exercise.
Of course, we’d also picked it because it was dog-friendly, but that had narrowed our options down far less than I’d expected.
Whether from a gradual cultural shift or the sudden need to accommodate a bajillion lockdown puppies, half the venues in London seemed to have gone puppy-positive.
This particular venue advertised its puppy-positivity with a sign reading “Dogs with well-behaved owners welcome,” which I tried to find annoying but secretly found cute.
Other than that, it was just a very nice, very straightforward English pub, with one of those white-paint-black-beams facades that I wanted to call Tudor, but mostly because that was the only historical period I actually knew.
“There are…a lot of people here,” I said, a bit nervously, as we were shown to our table. “And a lot of dogs.”
“Ruff,” agreed Spud, less nervously.
“He’s ready for it,” replied Oliver, looking down at our contribution to the general doggishness.
For a moment or two, Oliver and I busied ourselves with the menus, and I felt briefly guilty. “Sorry, they seem a bit low on vegan options.”
Oliver gave me a think-nothing-of-it smile. “That’s to be expected. They do doggy ice cream, which will please Spud, and a vegetable chilli, which I’m sure is lovely.”
“Are you?” I asked. “Or are you just being nice?”
Oliver reached across the table and took my hand. “What matters is that we’re here together. Just you, me, and Spud.”
“Ruff,” said Spud. And there was an answering “Ruff” from another table. Followed by another “Ruff” and then two yaps and a growl.
I peeked suspiciously over to where the other noises had come from. There was a corgi lurking nearby, and whereas every other dog in the place looked deeply chill, it looked twitchy, stressed, and about to take its twitchy stressedness out on anybody who got near it.
But as Oliver had said, this wasn’t about having a wide range of vegan options, or not being exposed to yappy animals, it was about being together, so I ignored the corgi, smiled back at my boyfriend, and just said, “Yeah.”
“It’s been a while,” he added.
And I said “Yeah” again.
“And also”—he sounded uncharacteristically hesitant—“and also a lot.”
In many ways, it was a massive relief to hear him admit it. “So much a lot. Like looking back—”
“Ruffruffruff yap ruff,” interjected the evil corgi.
“Looking back,” I continued, “getting a dog to see if we were ready for a kid was kind of lowballing it.”
Oliver laughed, and I was glad he was laughing again because I’d been missing it. “Just a little,” he agreed.
“Do you think it’s too late to start training Jaz with one of those clicker things?”
“I don’t think she’d respond well to it.” Unfortunately, while I’d been going for wryly amusing, Oliver ran very quickly out of both wryness and amusement. “Then again, I don’t think I know what she’d respond well to.”
There was…not bitterness exactly, but there was an edge to Oliver’s voice that I really hoped wouldn’t last the whole evening. “You do,” I told him. “At least, you do as well as I do.”
“That’s very kind of you, but it’s simply not the case.”
The boyfriend-instinct in me wanted to disagree because the alternative was to tacitly say, You’re right, you flat-out don’t get our foster daughter.
But while I’d never have put it that harshly, there was, perhaps, the tiniest smidgen of truth in the idea that he and Jaz didn’t quite fit perfectly into each other’s worldviews.
So I went with the safely neutral, “We never expected this to be easy.”
“No,” Oliver agreed, and then pulled his phone out. Which I thought was weirdly rude of him until I realised that this was an order-on-the-app place. “Do you know what you want, by the way?”
I’d barely thought about it, but fortunately this was a pretty typical pub, menu-wise, and being a filthy carnivore, I could just go straight for the burger option.
Oliver tapped our choices into his phone and scanned his card, and then I once again had his utterly undivided attention. Which I’d missed almost as much as making him laugh.
“Yapyaprrrrrufffyap.”
Mostly undivided attention.
“Rationally,” Oliver said slowly, and I could see him glancing at the evil corgi out the corner of his eye, “I understand that it isn’t my job to make her like me.
I just think”—he gave my hand a little squeeze and his lips narrowed—“I don’t think I’d accounted for how bad it would feel when she didn’t. ”
“Yap,” said the evil corgi. “Ruff. Ruff. Rrrrufff. Yap.”
“Also,” Oliver went on, letting the next table’s dog distract him from what I was beginning to realise was a genuinely hard topic for him, “I’m immensely glad that we trained Spud better than that.”
“Ruff,” said Spud.
“Daddy Oliver is right,” I told him. “You are the goodest boy, aren’t you?”
To my relief, Spud had no sense of irony, so he didn’t respond to this by making the exact kind of scene I was congratulating him for not making. Instead, he just thumped his tail on the ground and looked happy.
“At the risk of sounding unbelievably Daily Mail,” Oliver went on, “I find it very hard not to think you shouldn’t be allowed a dog if you’re going to let it carry on like that. If nothing else, it’s very unfair on the dog.”
A waiter passed by the evil corgi’s table, and it snapped at her. Not so close that she was in any real danger, but close enough that it made her jump.
“It’s pretty unfair on the rest of us too,” I said. “Then again, it might just be corgis in general. Have you ever met a corgi that wasn’t a massive dick?”
Oliver gave me a playfully superior look. “I like to think anything can be its best self, given the opportunity. Even a corgi.”
“Are you telling me that corgi”—I jerked my head towards its arse, which was currently sticking out from under the table, probably because the rest of the corgi was doing something evil beneath it—“is misunderstood? Does it have a tragic backstory?”
“Yes, its tragic backstory is that it was bred to run around on a farm, herding animals, and it was bought by two Londoners who thought it would look good on TikTok and demonstrably did not train around its natural instinct to nip at animals and control the space it’s in.”
“Ruff,” said Spud, supportively.
I plonked a depressed elbow on the table. “Well, now I just feel bad. It’s no fun being mean about a dog that’s secretly yearning for the wide-open fields of…of…wherever there are wide-open fields.”
“I’m sorry.” I’d been mostly messing around, but Oliver looked genuinely chastened. “I didn’t mean to rain on your snark parade.”
“Oh, come on. You know my snark parade’s all-weather.”