31 Xavier
31
XAVIER
A RE YOU FREAKING kidding me?” Samantha said, staring at me.
I’d just told her about my mother’s call.
We were sitting at In-N-Out. She’d been holding the same french fry for five minutes while I told the story.
She shook her head. “What is up with this entire generation of aging adults who refuse to accept responsibility for themselves? Seriously, what is it? I could never imagine my kid not talking to me for a decade and me not going ‘Hey, maybe it’s me?’”
I snorted.
“And for them to believe they were in the right and to say it with their whole chest like beating the crap out of a child is in any way justifiable.” She looked disgusted. “I hope you never at any point bought anything they were selling.”
“I didn’t,” I said.
“No wonder you were so tired when you got here. They probably sucked the energy from your soul.” She ate the fry. “Do you think if they apologized, you would have been open to it?” she asked. “Like, if they came from a genuine place, they understood what they did wrong and they were honestly remorseful for it?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know. That possibility is so far from anything I could ever expect, it’s hard for me to even conceptualize it.”
She studied me. “I think you would have accepted an apology.”
“Why is that?”
“Because you’re reasonable. And I think you want peace. I’d want revenge, but you’re a much better person than me.”
“Ha.”
“How hard would it have been to be like, ‘Hey. I was an alcoholic. I did things to you I regret. I’ve worked to change.’? I mean, because he did get sober. He has changed,” she said. “And your mom clearly knows what an ass he was when he was drinking or she wouldn’t have mentioned it like something he deserves an award for. He’s just not willing to make amends for any of the crap he did while he was drunk.”
“I’m glad he’s sober,” I said. “If only for the sake of the long-suffering servers at the places they like to eat.”
“I can’t stand people who are rude to service workers,” she said. “It’s the best litmus test there is. That and putting your cart away at the grocery store.”
“They never put their cart away,” I said.
“Of course they didn’t. Jerks.”
I fiddled with a straw wrapper on the table. “I try to think sometimes about how they got to where they are. Nobody is born like this. I get these animals in my clinic that bite because they’re scared or in pain or they’ve been abused.” I went quiet. “Maybe my parents were some of those things. Maybe it changed them. I would be open to hearing about it if they had the ability to acknowledge it themselves and take some accountability.”
She bobbed her head. “Yeah,” she said. “I think we grow up and we either get harder or we get softer on our parents. We realize how fucked up they actually were or we give them a pass because adulting is hard and now we get it. They’re people and they make mistakes.”
“Did your parents make mistakes?” I asked, looking up at her.
“Oh my God, yeah. One time when we were teenagers, my mom got so mad at how messy the house was, she took a trash bag and started walking around, throwing away our stuff. She threw away my new Vans that I had saved up for. I held a grudge about that day for years . But now I sort of get it. She was probably exhausted, overstimulated because we were loud, tired of asking for help. Maybe she had a headache or cramps. I’m not saying she was right to do what she did, but I do understand it. And you know what’s funny? Knowing this now doesn’t change the memory, but it changes the way I feel about the memory. That’s what apologies and perspective does. It changes how you feel about what happened.” She looked me in the eye. “I am so sorry they robbed you of that. You deserve more. You deserve an apology and for them to admit that they suck.”
I couldn’t explain how grateful I was to feel so seen.
It was different from what my friends did for me. They backed me up and supported me, the same as Samantha was doing now. But they based their opinion of me and my parents on what they’d seen with their own eyes. They’d been there. They’d met the monsters of my youth.
But Samantha saw completely through all of it based solely on knowing me alone. She believed me.
And she was right. I would have accepted an apology.
I probably would never have let them fully back into my life. I’d never really trust them. It would take at least a decade to ever rebuild any sort of relationship. But it would have been nice to have what my parents put me through be acknowledged. I knew now that I would never get that. That I’d have to be okay with that. For the most part I already was. It was the phone call that set me back. The leaves still hadn’t settled. And right now the part of me that wanted peace was officially smaller than the part that wanted revenge. And I could only punish them one way, by having everything they wished I didn’t. By being more than they ever said I would.
Mom thought my clinic would go out of business? It would be there for the next fifty years. I wanted them to have to drive by it every time they went to the store and see my name on the building.
Samantha sipped her Coke and I gave her what she liked to call one of my contemplative gazes.
And they would never know her . I wished they knew how sad that should make them. How much they were missing.
And kids. They would never know my kids.
“Do you want children?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said, setting her drink down. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“How many?” she asked.
I thought about it. “Two? So they can know what it’s like to have a sibling. I didn’t get to know that.”
“Ha. You could end up with a Tristan.” She raised her straw to her lips and then lowered it. “What if I didn’t want them? Or I couldn’t have them?”
“Then we’d have dogs. Cats. Ferrets. Whatever you want.”
She pursed her lips playfully. “Sooo what you’re saying is, I stick with you, and I can have infinity pets.”
“Maybe not infinity pets. We have to be able to give them a good quality of life.”
She was nodding sagely. “But like, I could definitely show up with an extra dog or cat now and then and you’d just sigh loudly and ask me what its name is?”
“That is accurate.”
“I think all of our animal babies should be rescues,” she said.
“Agree.”
“Can we have goats?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She grinned. “You really wouldn’t break up with me if I couldn’t get pregnant?”
I laughed a little. “No. Would you break up with me if I couldn’t get you pregnant?”
“Hell no. That’s a big decision though. A lot of guys would leave if their partner couldn’t have kids.”
“I never understood that,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because if you were my wife you would be my world. Everything starts with you and ends with you. Anything else is just the stuff that happens in the middle.”
She peered at me. This time hers was the contemplative gaze.
She cleared her throat. “I’m going to run to the bathroom. Look at my new Murkle’s post while I’m gone, it’s a good one.”
I went to Instagram. A new graphic was up. It was in Christmas colors with text that said:
DM us so you can tell your friends a mustard brand left you on read.
I clicked the message box and sent the word Hey to a mustard company. I got an instant auto reply:
Thanks for sliding into our DMs. Click the link below and order a bottle of our mustard with free shipping. Do it. You’re messaging a mustard brand, it’s not like you’re having a lit Saturday night.
I cracked up.
No, my parents would never know her. They didn’t deserve to.
We left In-N-Out and drove to the grocery store. The Dart was baking, as usual. We parked and went in.
“So we split up courses and I drew appetizers,” she said, walking into the produce section. “I want to make these jalapeno popper things I saw in a video.”
“The fruit is so much better here,” I said, looking at the oranges.
“It’s not traveling as far. Do you want to have a garden? To go with our menagerie of rescue animals?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know how to garden?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said, walking behind her. “But I will do whatever you need me to.”
“You’ll till my fields?”
“I’ll plow whatever you want, as vigorously and as often as you’d like.”
She cackled.
As she bagged the peppers she needed, I watched her quietly, smiling.
I liked that we were talking about the future. Even if it was just about our fantasy garden and our fantasy pets. And I liked this day. Napping and eating burgers and just going to the grocery store together. It was so mundane, but I wanted the mundane. I craved it.
You think that it’s the big memories you should be chasing—and it is in a way. Birthdays and vacations and special occasions. But the small memories are the fabric of your life, the ones so inconsequential that you don’t even remember them. You just remember how you felt when you were making them.
I would be content just following her around a grocery store in exchange for nothing more than the moment that I wouldn’t even remember later. I’d just remember it had been a good day and that I’d been happy.
She got what she needed. I paid and I was carrying her bags out to the car. We were almost to our parking space when I happened to glance and see something in the front seat of a beat-up Camry.
A pug. It was panting.
“Uh, is that car not on?” Samantha said, seeing it the same time I had.
I walked around it. No, it wasn’t on. The windows were cracked half an inch. It was eighty-five today. I set the bags down and tried the doors, they were locked.
The dog collapsed on the seat.
“Shit,” I muttered. “Call 9-1-1,” I said.
I ran back to the Dart and grabbed the tire iron from the trunk. When I got back to the Camry, Samantha was on the phone. “Hi, yeah, there’s a dog locked in a hot car and my boyfriend’s about to break the window. We’re in the parking lot at Vons on Glendale Avenue.”
I started hitting the window in the back seat.
It shattered in a hailstorm of tinkling glass and I put my hand in and unlocked the passenger side door and dove in.
“I need water,” I said, lifting the limp dog out.
A few people had stopped to watch. One of the women ran back to the grocery store.
The dog’s tongue hung blue from the side of his mouth. His eyes were open.
I set him down in the shade on a planter and put my ear to his chest. He was alive but barely.
I was calm. Pissed off, but calm. I was always calm in a crisis. I had a lot of experience with it, my whole childhood had been a crisis. I had my parents to thank for that, the one thing they could take credit for.
The water arrived and I started pouring it over the dog, trying to get his core body temperature down.
A man pushed through the crowd. “What the fuck? You broke my window?”
I ignored him. I was still working on my patient.
“Yeah, we broke your window,” I heard Samantha say. “Your dog was dead in the front seat.”
Another woman’s voice joined in. “It’s ninety today, and you locked this dog in a hot car?”
“I cracked the windows!”
“How about we lock you in a hot car with cracked windows?” someone else said.
A police cruiser pulled into the parking lot in my peripheral vision. I kept working.
Someone ran from the store with a second sloshing kitchen bowl of water. I put my ear to the dog’s chest again, then checked his gums. My jaw flexed. I took the water and poured it over the animal, paying special attention to the pads of his feet.
There was a kid in the crowd. I wished someone would get him out of here. He didn’t need to see this.
The dog twitched. Then he sat up.
I let out a relieved breath and the crowd began to cheer.
I gave the dog a little water while he came back around.
The man was shouting at the cops. “This fucking asshole just broke my window!”
Samantha was already on it. “Uh, excuse me? You’re welcome?”
“I saw the whole thing,” someone else said. “The dog was overheating. That guy saved him.”
The pug was sitting up on his own now. I pulled the bottom of my shirt up to wipe sweat off my brow. “I’m a veterinarian,” I said. “This dog was suffering from a heatstroke. It’s animal cruelty, it’s a crime, and it’s legally enforced.”
I didn’t know what the laws were in California for breaking windows to save animals, but I didn’t give a shit.
Apparently I was within my rights because twenty minutes later the officers were writing him a ticket and letting me go.
I was still crouched, monitoring the patient, when the police finished up with the man.
“You need to take him to an emergency vet for fluids,” I said to him as the police got back in their cruiser.
He balled his ticket up and threw it. “Fuck you. I’m not spending a dime on him. I got a broken window and a ticket for a five-dollar dog? He can die again for all I care.” He looked like he was going to hit me.
I stood slowly to face him. I was a full six inches taller than him and twenty years younger too. I hadn’t been in a fight since Dad, but if I was going to break the streak, I didn’t mind doing it today.
Samantha stepped in front of me. “You’re not gonna take him to the vet?” she said to the man. She pulled her phone out. “Say that again. Tell me how you locked your dog in a hot car on a ninety-degree day, we had to break your window to save him, the cops gave you a citation for animal cruelty, and now you’re refusing to take him to the vet for treatment. Tell me again.”
The man’s face went ruddy.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Let’s see what your employer thinks of this. I’m about to make you famous. Just to recap, you’re a dog abuser. Alllllll these people filmed the whole thing. Your dog basically died and my boyfriend just happens to be a veterinarian who saved him for you and now you won’t get your dog treatment.”
He looked at her and he looked at me. Then he glanced at the camera and the onlookers still hovering and recording. He decided it wasn’t worth it.
“Fuck you.” Then he stalked off to his car and left without getting his animal.
When he was out of sight, Samantha put her phone down and turned to me, letting out a breath. “Is this how dogs end up in the witness protection program?”
“This is exactly how dogs end up in the witness protection program,” I muttered.
“I’ve always wanted a pug.”
“Well, today’s your lucky day.”