11
Shockingly, Ruth seemed to know a lot about puppies. I watched as she helped Susie and Bobby pack a cardboard box full of towels to make a bed, and then they took an alarm clock and wrapped it in another towel.
“This is to remind Pepper of her mother’s heartbeat, so she won’t cry all night,” Ruth explained.
“Can she sleep in my room?” Bobby asked.
“I named her! She gets to sleep in my room,” Susie argued.
“When she’s bigger, she can decide where to sleep,” Ruth said. “For now, she needs to sleep in an adult’s room so we can take her out if she needs to relieve herself.”
“Can I sleep in your room with you, then?” Susie asked.
“That’s up to your mother,” Ruth said, without looking up at me.
“Please, Mama? She needs to know she’s my dog.”
Bobby opened his mouth to protest, but it dawned on me that if the puppy was sleeping with Ruth, Ruth became the de facto adult.
And I needed to make it clear that this was Not a permanent change of abode.
“Actually,” I said, “Pepper should sleep in my room. When Grandma goes back to Her house, we don’t want Pepper being confused about who her owners are. ”
Ruth still hadn’t looked up. “You heard your mother,” she said. “The box goes in her room.”
Pleased with myself, despite the shoe that looked like it would retain a stain—maybe I would write to Heloise myself for this one—I went to start dinner.
Ruth made no objections to me cooking, but instead took the children and the puppy out to play in the backyard, telling them that a tired puppy is a well-behaved puppy.
By 3 a.m., I regretted every life decision I had ever made, from marrying a man related to Ruth to the number of stairs in our house (which I miscalculated on my third trip down them to try to get the crying puppy to urinate anywhere other than on my foot).
“Please,” I begged as she stood on the patio with me, staring dejectedly at our lawn as if it didn’t meet her standards for defecation. “Just go potty so I can sleep.”
The puppy tilted her head at me, then came over, curled up on my slippered foot, and closed her eyes.
This was worse than having a baby. A baby might cry, but a diaper change and a bottle were a relatively easy fix. I wondered if they made diapers for puppies.
No. I couldn’t do this. Raising two children on my own was enough. The dog was going back to wherever it had come from the following morning.
A light came on behind me, and I turned around, prepared to shoo whichever child it was back to bed. But Ruth stood at the back door in her bathrobe, with rollers in her hair.
“Did she go?” she asked.
I shook my head miserably. “She just keeps crying and then doesn’t do anything when I take her out.”
Ruth bent and scooped her up into her arms, cooing comfortingly as the puppy snuggled into the crook of her neck like a baby.
“The first night is always the hardest,” she said in that same singsong tone she was using to settle Pepper.
“They miss their mother and littermates. But they adjust quickly.” I had a sharp retort on my tongue about how I would be sleeping if she hadn’t decided to bring an addition to our family without talking to me first, but there was no malice in her face, and so I simply nodded.
“Come on, libele ,” she said, calling her “little love” in Yiddish. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
“She’s just going to cry again,” I said.
“Shh. Let’s see what we can do.”
Ruth climbed the stairs, and I turned off the living room light.
She went into my room and settled the puppy in the towels, tucking her gently next to the one that ticked.
Pepper snuggled in and fell right back to sleep.
“Keep her by the clock, if you can,” she said.
“And if that doesn’t do the trick, a hot water bottle in a towel should. ”
She turned to leave, but I called her name, and she looked back at me from the doorway. “Thank you.”
“A puppy won’t fill the hole left by their father,” she said. “But you’ll see: puppies make hearts grow so that hole seems a little smaller.” And then she was gone.
I thought I would fall right back asleep, exhausted as I was, but instead I lay awake, listening to the muffled ticking and the soft sighing of the puppy as she slept.
How did I get here ? I wondered. This wasn’t the life I was supposed to be leading.
If I was awake in the night, it should have been because of Harry’s snoring.
What I wouldn’t give for that snoring now.
I flipped over, facing Harry’s side of the bed, and reached out, though I knew my arm would find nothing but the blanket there.
I could have laughed this all off if he were here.
But he wasn’t.
I turned onto my back and looked at the ceiling in the dim, ambient light from the street outside my window. A week ago, I’d felt so prepared to handle whatever else life threw at me. But now? So far, Ruth’s logic on puppies wasn’t working because the hole in my heart just felt larger and larger.
Resigning myself to a sleepless night, I scooted to the edge of the bed and reached my arm down into the cardboard box, resting my fingertips lightly on the soft fur of the puppy’s neck. It didn’t matter how many sleepless nights I had. What mattered was how my children healed.
“I guess you can stay,” I whispered. In her sleep, she stretched her legs and then curled up against my hand. And eventually, I drifted off as well.
I awoke to a sharp pain, as tiny, needlelike teeth sank into my index finger.
I yanked my arm back onto the bed as the gray light of dawn peeked around the edges of the curtains.
I peered down over the edge of the bed, and the puppy yipped at me, then lolled her tongue out and jumped up, trying to get out of the box and onto the bed.
And maybe—just maybe—my heart was a little bigger after all.
Because instead of being annoyed, I climbed out of bed, put my robe on, and took her downstairs, despite my exhaustion.
I wasn’t even irritated that Ruth was the one who got the puppy to sleep.
“You’re not so bad, are you?” I asked as she ran back to me after doing her business in the grass.
She gnawed on my slipper in response. But it was a step up from peeing on me. I would take what I could get.