4. Adrian
Adrian
There’s so much nobody tells you about getting a puppy, like how you will stand in a vet’s parking lot for six minutes after your appointment, holding eight pounds of squirming beagle against your chest, replaying the moment when a very attractive man put his hand on your arm and then removed it like he’d touched a hot pan.
Your pup will sneeze on you three times throughout said hand-touching-and-removal, and you won’t notice a single sneeze.
Mofongo sneezed a fourth time.
I looked down.
He looked up at me with his enormous ears and his painted-on white nose stripe with the absolute certainty of a creature who had known me for four hours and had already decided to adopt me as his daddy.
“So,” I said. “That’s the vet. He’s your doctor now.”
He blinked.
“His name is Brendan. He has good hands. He touched my arm and then stopped, which I’ve been thinking about ever since. That’s kind of embarrassing, isn’t it? I need you to keep that between us, okay?”
Mofongo sneezed again. This time, puppy spittle coated my shirt. He promptly licked it off.
“Okay, ew,” I said. “But I guess that’s fair. Or was that your way of agreeing to keep my secret? You’re going to have to be patient with me. I don’t speak Beagle yet.”
Mofongo licked my shirt again. I took that as affirmation and not him cleaning the flour off the fabric, which, in hindsight, was a very human way to see his non-affection-related slobber.
Getting my baby beast into the car took four minutes because he had opinions about the passenger seat, the seat belt, and—I say this with burgeoning dog dad love—the pine tree air freshener hanging from the mirror, which he attacked with the determination of a guardian who had identified a clear and present danger and intended to neutralize it personally.
“Papi, that’s decorative.”
He growled. The sound was small and ridiculous, entirely committed, and the most adorable thing I might’ve ever heard.
“You’ve been alive for eight weeks. Are you seriously trying to protect me from pine?”
He growled again.
“You know what,” I said, “you’re right. I never liked it either.”
I took it down and tossed it in the glove compartment. Mofongo watched this with satisfaction, then sneezed, lost his balance, scrambled back upright, and looked at me as though nothing had happened.
I stifled a laugh to avoid damaging his childlike ego, snatched up my phone, and dialed Benji. As the phone rang, I drove across the massive parking lot to the spaces in front of PetSmart, having suddenly realized that I owned nothing puppy related—no food, no bowl, no crate, no bed.
Mofongo had already neutralized an air freshener and peed on the concept of boundaries.
“I got a puppy,” I said when Benji picked up.
There was silence.
“His name is Mofongo.”
The sound Benji Kwon made was somewhere between a laugh and a spiritual event. I waited it out.
“Shopping list, now,” I said. “Please.”
“Crate, bed, puppy food, not adult food—yes, there’s a difference—two bowls, a collar, a personalized tag with your phone number for when he escapes, a leash, four toys maximum—and because I know you, treats, dental chews, and pee pads.” A pause. “Oh, and wipes.”
“Why wipes?”
“You’ll understand soon,” he said. “Also, which vet did you take him to? The hot one in South Tampa? He’s delicious, from what I’ve heard.”
“Goodbye, Benji.”
“Was he cute? Come on. You have the voice you get when—”
I hung up.
Benji didn’t need to know about the hand-on-arm thing or the way the vet made my insides jumble.
Brendan, I scolded myself. His name is Brendan, not “the vet.”
Mofongo’s whine brought me back to the present.
I scooped him up and climbed out of my car.
Inside PetSmart, Mofongo produced a gravitational effect on every human within thirty feet.
By the food aisle, I had collected four people with opinions about kibble, two children conducting simultaneous petting operations, and one man named Harold who was seventy-something and had owned beagles for four decades.
“That one’s too rich,” Harold said, pointing at my first food selection.
I put back the salmon. Harold nodded like I’d passed some test.
Mofongo spent the rest of our trek down the food aisle trying to climb out of my arms to race toward a rawhide bone display he had decided was his by divine right.
“Those aren’t for you yet,” I told him.
He wiggled and nipped.
“Papi, look at me. You’re the size of a cantaloupe. Your ears are literally bigger than your brain.”
He made a sound that landed somewhere between a bark and a deeply personal grievance, then tilted his head. One enormous ear flopped forward with the motion, and he stared with such concentrated effort that I laughed out loud right there in the aisle.
“He’s trying to understand,” Harold said.
“He looks like he’s taking a dump.”
“Forty years of beagles,” Harold chuckled. “They’re always listening . . . and pooping. You’re not wrong about that.”
Harold walked every aisle with us and was right about everything. At the register, I set Mofongo on the floor, where he promptly sneezed on Harold’s shoes. Harold laughed from the belly, patted me on the shoulder, and said, “You’re going to do great.”
I knew he meant me, not the dog.
I desperately needed to hear it.
We got home at eight-fifteen.
I set Mofongo down in the center of the living room and stepped back. He looked at the couch, then at the kitchen.
Then he looked at me.
“Esto es tu casa,” I told him. This is your home.
He considered this for three seconds, walked to the corner of the room, and peed.
“Ay.”
He looked at me over his shoulder while he did it, utterly unapologetic.
“Mofongo. Inside is not for that.”
He finished his business, gave the corner a satisfied sniff, and trotted back to the center of the room like a soldier returning from a victorious battle.
“We have one rule,” I said. “That lives outside.”
He sat down and tilted his head.
“I’m serious.”
He sneezed, walked to my foot, and sat on it.
I squeezed my eyes shut and tried not to laugh. The last thing the pup needed was encouragement.
“Fine,” I said. “We’ll work on it.”
I got the wipes.
I understood the wipes completely now.
I called Abuela at nine. She answered before the first ring finished.
“Mijo.”
I didn’t bother with pleasantries. We’d never been much for small talk.
“I got a puppy. His name is Mofongo.”
The laugh that flew out of her started somewhere deep, arrived as joy, then morphed into something close to a cry. I sat on the kitchen floor with my head against the cabinet and grinned at the ceiling.
“Mofongo,” she said, finally pulling herself together. “You named that poor baby after mashed plantains.”
“Abuela, when you see his face, you will understand. He peed on the floor and looked me in the eye while he did it.”
“Like a man who knows what he wants,” she said approvingly.
“That’s one way to see it.”
“Saturday, you bring him before your shift. I will make the real mofongo. We will introduce them.”
“You can’t feed a puppy—”
“I know how to feed a baby,” she said, and the discussion was over the way discussions were always over when she used that tone.
“The vet says we go back in three weeks,” I said, immediately regretting the transition because there was no casual way to drop that sentence, yet I had done it anyway.
She breathed.
Just breathed.
But Abuela’s breathing had a vocabulary, and this breath said approximately four hundred words, all in Spanish—and Grandmother, which was its own language.
“Fine, his name is Brendan,” I said, because it was easier than letting her work the silence like some CIA interrogator.
“Bren-dan,” she said, letting the syllables roll on her tongue.
“It’s a vet appointment, not a date, Abuela. For vaccines.”
“Fine,” she said, warm and unbothered. “Saturday. Don’t be late.”
I ended the call and sat on the floor a little longer. Mofongo’s snores floated up from where he lay curled in my lap, absurd for something that small.
“She already knows,” I told him.
His breathing caught, and he adjusted himself without opening his eyes.
“I said his name one time and she knows.”
Mofongo’s eyes wiggled beneath his lids.
“Three weeks is not that long,” I said.
He resumed snoring with what I chose to interpret as agreement.
Mofongo woke me up at eleven-fifteen.
His crooning started small—one test sound launched into the dark.
I lay still and listened.
He escalated.
I surrendered.
We went outside, which in theory, I had understood. In practice, this involved me standing in the courtyard in pajamas while Mofongo approached the grass like a scientist establishing baseline data.
Sniff here.
Circle back.
Sniff again.
The courtyard had information, and he intended to have all of it before he committed.
“Anytime, papi.”
He looked up at me.
“I’m not rushing you. It’s only midnight.”
He sneezed at a patch of grass like it had personally offended him, then finally handled his business and looked up at me, waiting for his review.
“Muy bien,” I told him. “Perfecto. Good boy.”
His whole back half wagged—not just his tail, his entire back half, like the happiness couldn’t fit in his tail alone and needed more real estate. I crouched down, and he launched himself at my face. I caught him and laughed in the dark because what else was I going to do?
My alarm went off at three-thirty.
I did the math.
The math was bad.
Mofongo was still asleep, snoring with the righteousness of a dog who had peed outside correctly and been told he was perfect. He didn’t need math or an alarm or complications.
“Easy for you,” I told him.
He snored with feeling.
I showered, made coffee, and stood at the counter looking at him through the crate door longer than my schedule allowed, then drove to the panadería through empty orange-lit streets. This was Tampa before it decided what it was. I always loved this hour.
Dona Carmen was already there. She was always there. I had long since stopped trying to understand how.
She looked up when I came through the door. “You look terrible.”
“I got a puppy.”
She put down her spatula.
“His name is Mofongo.”
She stared at me for three full seconds, then started laughing. I tied my apron and ignored her, because 4 a.m. and Dona Carmen laughing was a better morning than most things I could name.
The first dough had overproofed. I worked it back carefully, patient and quiet.
“Demasiado tiempo,” I told it. Too much time. “We’ve had this conversation.”
“You’re talking to the bread again,” Dona Carmen said through a smirk.
“The bread listens.”
“The bread is bread.”
“Six years of deep relations with dough say otherwise,” I said.
She made the sound she made when I was right but wasn’t going to say so.
I worked through the first hour in a rhythm that had organized my mornings for six years—dough and heat and the particular satisfaction of making the same things well, over and over, until the repetition became its own kind of clarity.
Mofongo drifted through my mind’s eye.
Then I thought about seeing my abuela on Saturday.
Then Benji’s inevitable interrogation.
Finally, without conscious thought, I remembered Brendan’s hand on my arm.
I slid the pan sobao into the oven and wiped my brow with a towel.
“What are you smiling at?” Dona Carmen asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re smiling at the oven, Adrian.”
“The oven is performing well.”
She looked at me long, clear, and with her I-know-exactly-what-is-happening-here smirk, then turned back to her work.
“The vet was kind,” I said for no reason.
She continued rolling dough without looking up.
“We go back in three weeks.”
“Three weeks isn’t so long,” she said.
As though confirming what everyone kept saying, the timer went off.
The pan sobao came out warm and with the rich smell of something made right. Dona Carmen broke off a piece—the end, always, fifty years of that rule—and ate it with her eyes closed.
“So good,” she said.
Outside, the sky was growing lighter at the edges.
Three miles away, Mofongo was still asleep with a stuffed animal under his ear.
I had a puppy named after mashed plantains and garlic, a vet’s number in my phone, and three weeks that were, apparently, not so long.
I pulled out the next tray and got back to work.