21. Adrian
Adrian
Imoved Mofongo back to the rear seat at the first red light. He was on the console again by the second. We did this four times between my apartment and the clinic, which was a seven-minute drive, which worked out to approximately one repositioning every hundred yards.
“Mofongo,” I said, as gently as my frustration allowed.
He looked at me from the console with the calm, wide-eyed attention of an innocent puppy who had made a decision and was simply waiting for me to accept it.
“Papito, the back seat is your seat.”
He sneezed.
“That’s not an argument.”
He shifted his weight forward, redistributing himself so that more of him was in the front than the back of the car. It was a trick I hadn’t seen from him before. It was a clear escalation.
“You can’t ride up here, mijo. It’s not safe. It’s—”
He did the head tilt thing, the full one with his left ear flopping forward and both eyes locked on me with an intensity that suggested he was genuinely trying to understand.
“Don’t do that. Don’t get all cute when I’m scolding you.”
He did it more.
I tried not to laugh, knowing it would only encourage him, then drove the rest of the way to the clinic with a beagle on my center console, ears streaming back slightly in the air conditioning like a tiny dog in a very slow Titanic movie, only without the ships and icebergs.
I told myself this was temporary and that we would be addressing it seriously when we got home.
We would not be addressing it seriously when we got home. We both knew this.
The vet’s office waiting room had a laminated photo of a Malayan tapir on the wall under a label that read Our Current Patient. I’d been looking at it for about thirty seconds, Mofongo sitting on my foot doing his own assessment of the tapir, when Marcus appeared from the back hallway.
He looked at me. Then he looked at Mofongo. Then he looked at Mofongo’s ears specifically, which today were doing something particularly ambitious.
“Mr. Voss,” he said with a professional composure belied by the knowing grin in his gaze.
“Hey, Marcus. How’s the morning?”
“Very productive, thank you.” His eyes hadn’t left Mofongo. “He’s grown.”
“Every week.”
“His ears are—” He picked up a pen, scribbled something, then set it down. “I’ll let Dr. Davis know you’re here.”
Marcus disappeared through the back hallway, moving slightly faster than was probably standard. I heard him say something to someone on the other side of a door. Then a sound that might have been Diane saying, “How big?” and Marcus saying, “Just go look.”
Diane came through the door and froze.
“Oh,” she said.
Mofongo stared up at her. She stared down at him.
Mofongo, sensing an opportunity, sat up straighter and deployed the full head tilt.
Diane made a sound that was not professionally compatible with the scrubs she was wearing.
She crossed the room and crouched down. Mofongo launched himself at her with the complete, unguarded joy of a puppy who considered every new person a gift specifically arranged for his benefit.
He got both paws on her knee and his entire back half involved in the greeting, his wag extending through his hindquarters in a full-booty endorsement of her existence.
“Hello, little guy,” she said, a wide, toothy smile parting her lips. She spoke in the voice people used for puppies, babies, and occasionally, for particularly skilled lovers. “Hello, hello. Look at you. Look at those ears. Those can’t be real.”
“They’re proportional,” I said. “To his future self.”
“They’re extraordinary.” She smiled up at me. “Has he always been this—” She gestured at Mofongo, who had now gotten both front paws on her shoulder and was conducting a thorough examination of her ponytail. “—this much?”
“Since day one,” I said. “If anything, he’s more focused now.”
I watched Diane fold herself around my dog as though she’d been waiting all morning for a reason to envelop a creature. Marcus now hovered close enough to get a turn. I felt the specific, complicated warmth of being somewhere that was glad I’d come.
I didn’t entirely trust that feeling.
This was not a flattering thing to know about myself, and I knew it about myself with great precision.
I am excellent at being welcomed and terrible at believing it will last. I show up with pan dulce and a good story and a dog with unreasonable ears, and rooms open for me, then some hard little abacus in my chest immediately starts calculating how long it will take before the room remembers it didn’t actually order me.
Abuela would say I think too much for a man who takes his clothes off for a living. Abuela would probably be right. She usually is. It’s her most annoying quality, narrowly beating out her second-most-annoying quality, which is being willing to say so.
But what I have never told anyone—because it sounds like a bid for sympathy, and I would rather be caught shoplifting than pitied—I keep a bag half packed.
Not a real bag, just feelings shaped like one, ready to leave before anyone can ask me to.
My mother taught me that, without meaning to, from three islands away, one missed birthday at a time.
“He likes you,” I told Diane, out loud, in the room, in English, in the present, where things were currently fine. “It’s a whole thing. You’re his now. I don’t make the rules.”
“Good,” Diane said, not looking up. “I accept.”
And Mofongo, who had never once in his short life questioned whether he was wanted, sneezed on her with his whole heart.
She detached Mofongo from her hair with the ease of someone who had handled animals professionally for years, stood, and re-assembled her composure.
“Room two. Dr. Davis will be right with you.”
Brendan stepped in before we could even get settled. He held a chart in one hand and had his professional mask securely affixed. He looked at me, then at Mofongo, then crouched down before he’d fully cleared the doorway.
Mofongo cocked his head, one ear flopping almost to the ground.
Brendan held out the back of his hand.
Mofongo sniffed it once, confirmed whatever he’d suspected, and allowed an ear scratch with gracious tolerance.
“He looks good,” Brendan said, standing.
“He ate a dish towel last week,” I said. “I don’t know what good looks like for him anymore.”
“Did he pass it?”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Did you see a dish towel in his poop?”
“No, but he seemed fine.” I shrugged. “He was very pleased with himself about the whole thing.”
Brendan pecked a note in the computer chart. His face remained unmoved, unexpressive. I figured he’d been told stranger things in this room and knew how to hide his surprise.
“Watch for any lethargy or reduced appetite. Otherwise” —he glanced at Mofongo, who was currently investigating the baseboard—“he’s probably fine. Puppies eat things. It’s part of it.”
“The dish towel was mine,” I said. “My abuela gave it to me.”
“Did Mofongo know that?”
“He seemed unbothered by it. I don’t think he understands sentiment yet.”
Brendan’s lips finally quirked. “Then it’s probably not personal.”
Mofongo had worked his way to the corner of the room and was pressing his nose into the junction between the wall and the floor like some detective who had found a significant clue.
He sneezed. Then he pressed harder.
“Mofongo.”
He ignored me completely.
“He does that.”
“I know,” Brendan said. “He did it at his first appointment, too. He’s thorough.”
“He’s something.”
Brendan performed the rest of the exam with the firm, gentle attention I knew he offered all his patients.
I stopped pretending I wasn’t watching as he checked ears and eyes and teeth.
Mofongo submitted to the ears and the eyes with reasonable cooperation.
When it came to his teeth, he squirmed like someone enduring something they found personally offensive but couldn’t argue their way out of.
When the stethoscope appeared, Mofongo made his position on it immediately clear by attempting to eat it.
Brendan deflected with barely an effort.
“He does that, too,” I said.
“Every time,” Brendan said, repositioning. “He’s consistent.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“In medicine, consistency is useful,” he said, which was not quite a yes and not quite a no and was, I was learning, a very Brendan kind of answer. It reminded me of Peter with a bit more personality.
Brendan listened to Mofongo’s heart and lungs while my little one stood on the exam table vibrating with what looked like excitement wrapped in uncertainty.
His back half had begun a low, continuous wag that had nothing to do with anything specific and everything to do with the general situation of being alive and three weeks further along than the last time he’d been in this room.
“Heart sounds good,” Brendan said, removing his stethoscope before Mofongo could make another attempt at it. “Lungs sound clear. He’s grown well.”
“He grows fast,” I said. “He’s going to be enormous.”
“He’s going to be medium,” Brendan said. “Probably twenty-five or thirty pounds.”
“That’s enormous for a creature I can currently fit inside a backpack.”
“You’ve put him in a backpack?”
“Once. He liked it. He stood up with his front paws on the edge and looked around like he was on a boat. My abuela took a photo. It’s her phone background.”
Brendan’s left brow rose. The look he gave me was one I’d started to recognize as him deciding what to do with a situation that impacted more than his brain. A few heartbeats later, he returned to pecking on the keyboard.
“It’s time for vaccines,” Brendan said as Marcus entered with a silver tray.
Mofongo’s reaction to the first shot was immediate and dramatic, a full-body flinch, a betrayed look directed at Brendan, and then at me, as though I were responsible and had some explaining to do.
“You’re okay,” I told him, using my most soothing voice.
He craned his head, trying to look at the spot where the needle had been. Then he looked at Brendan. Then at Marcus. Then he glared back at me.