Dog people-Part 1

When they were first married, my mother said that she would grill chopped onions and peppers on the stove whenever she wasn’t sure my father would come home. She thought that the smell would remind him that he wasn’t alone, he was being taken care of. He could forget about the stresses of being young once he walked through the door and the heavy vegetable smell wrapped around him. Every woman has her own way of keeping her partner close to her. The onions and peppers only came out if Daddy was having a particularly hard week or it was especially cold out, if they had a big fight and Mom saw him glance too many times at the front door while they were “trying to work things out”. It wasn’t a particularly powerful skill, but it got her out of a few pickles early on in their marriage.

That’s the part of the story that would be hotly debated whenever anyone would talk about the day Jesse came into my parents’ lives. My mother would be insistent that there had been no work-stress that week, no cold fronts and no fights. But my father distinctly remembered the onions and peppers. He would tell the story of Jesse’s first day almost poetically—how the pup trailed him home from the papermill that day and padded through the living room like he knew he already owned it. Mom would chime in here, noting that she had been laid out on the loveseat in front of the television with her stocking feet aired out over one armrest and a beer within arms length from her, warming on the carpet.

Daddy would tell us how the sound of the door opening had woken Mom up from her exhaustion to see the pair of them walk through the house and to the kitchen. He remembered her watching him take the onions and peppers off the stove and pour half of the contents onto a plate and the other half into a metal bowl. He brought the bowl down to Jesse’s mouth and watched as the dog ate every scrap. My father would say that Jesse knew even then where his place was in the house, which was not in the house at all. According to my father, the dog took a deep burp after eating his first meal in who knew how long, and immediately trotted to the backyard—no questions, no confusion.

That was when Daddy went back into the living room to join my mother in her confusion. He walked to the love seat with his plate of onions and peppers and lifted her legs up from the seat cushion so that he could sit under them. This is the part of the story that I could always see, the two of them fitting perfectly into that love seat like they would always do when we were growing up and they were too tired to move.

“We have a dog now,” he had said to her. “Thank you for dinner.”

And then Mom remembered that they watched the rest of a Three’s Company rerun like it was the easiest thing in the world.