The Accidental Dog

Twenty-one years ago my boyfriend and I returned from a midnight movie to hear scream-yelps coming from under my apartment porch. You can't believe that a frightened puppy can scream, but this stray did as it tried to elude the woman who was trying to catch him.

I took the brown and white puppy in, much to my boyfriend's dismay. I already had a collie that had lived with me in Virginia and Tennessee and now Texas, and as I was living in a very cheap studio apartment, he knew I lacked the funds and space to take on this responsibility.

My boyfriend didn't call for three days, until one of his friends told him he was being immature to break up with me over a dog. I had already taken the puppy to the vet for vaccinations, and received the warning that the cute puppy might have some St. Bernard/Golden retriever in him. I didn't tell my boyfriend this when he finally screwed up his courage to call to patch things up.

The puppy grew. I named him Shep. He was an excellent companion for my tri- color collie, Winston. They kept each other company while I worked, and though the neighbors felt sorry for them as they sat on the concrete slab porch in the heat, I couldn't tell that they were unhappy. Maybe the collie had warned his new puppy that life with me was pretty much without a lot of extras.

Before the quickly-growing puppy turned a year old I married my boyfriend and headed off to Oklahoma with him. His long-suffering attitude toward the newcomer became moot after he realized he was going to have yet another addition. My husband's world was growing quickly, and as we shopped for baby things, we also bought the dogs a big doghouse so they could be warm while we were at work.

The dogs eschewed going into the doghouse, but Shep loved to sit on top of it and survey his world. We went to Tennessee for Christmas and got a call from our petrified neighbor who told us that we had a dog in our yard that "was as big as a horse and staring over the fence barking down into her yard constantly." When we returned, we moved the doghouse away from the fence so that Shep could no longer try to make her yard part of his domain.

Two weeks after the birth of our baby, we moved back to Dallas into a fairly shaky neighborhood. We were young and naïve, but we did notice that things in our house and neighborhood were not optimal. The laundry was in the garage, and had a quirk so that occasionally when I pressed the Start button on the dryer, the front-of-the-house garage door would suddenly go up. You didn't dare venture outside to do your laundry in your bathrobe lest you expose yourself to passersby. There was an old lady who lived next door who would get confused and think our house was hers. She'd stand on the porch with her sack of bananas, scrabbling at my door and wondering aloud, "Why won't they let me in my house?" And there was a dysfunctional woodpecker that had it in for the security light the city had put in our backyard. The woodpecker rat-a-tat- tatted like crazy on the light atop the tall pole. The woodpecker, we surmised, could see the sensor on top, and must have thought it was an insect he could get if he just worked at it hard enough.

I began to write between working and being a mom. Shep continued his job as family pet and added guard dog to his resume. One day I was out front with my now-toddling daughter when a car with two scruffy men pulled up. As they stared me down, I told my baby to go into the house. I held Shep's collar as he growled low in his throat. My makeshift plan was that if they opened their car door, I was going to let Shep go while I dashed inside. They must have read my intention and decided that the ruckus wouldn't be worth it, because after smirking at me, they drove away.

The incident had frightened me, and after that, I didn't play outside much with my daughter. We could hear occasional gunfire in the neighborhood, and some nights I sat up in a chair by the window. "Come to bed," my husband would say, but I couldn't until I was certain all the action had subsided for the night.

Yet two nights before Christmas around three a.m., I heard a loud crash. I whispered, "Did you hear that?" to my husband.

With the demeanor of a man who had no intention of being roused from his bed to go hunt for bogeymen, he said, "It was probably just some dogs knocking over trash cans," and went back to sleep. At the foot of the bed, Shep let out a growl. For my pleasant-natured dog to growl in the wee hours meant some investigation was advisable. I crept to the front door to peer out into the darkness. A police officer was standing over something rather long in the front yard. He was also writing notes on a pad which I realized was probably a citation for us. Now, my husband might not get too excited about most things, but negative financial impact does sway him, so I went to wake him.

"Honey!" I said, "there's a cop out front! I don't know what's in the front yard—maybe it's a body, I can't tell—but I think the cop is writing us a citation for it!"

My husband shot from the bed, pulled on some warm clothes and hurried outside. I stayed inside, petting Shep and praising him for being on guard. It turned out that the mystery object was a bathtub that thieves had stolen from a foreclosed home on our street. When the tub slipped from the truck bed with a crash, they abandoned their prize.

I was pregnant again and had been making a Christmas tree skirt with my daughter, a last special project for the two of us before the new baby arrived. The broken bathtub was an objectionable yard ornament, so I called the city up begging them to come haul it away. They weren't interested in helping, so I went out in the cold and began picking up the shattered ceramic pieces, feeling a bit sorry for myself. No one wants a bathtub in their front yard at this time of year—you can't dress it up and pretend that you meant for it to be a nativity or Santa's sleigh for eight dashing reindeer.

But an angel came to my rescue as I was picking up the ceramic shards. A gentleman who clearly understood the value of iron core, as I did not, offered to take it away for free. I was joyous. He told me he was even happier, and our neighbors said they were grateful.

We had our baby in March. My husband came home one day and said we needed to move. Something about the birth of a son seemed to make him believe we should leave the old neighborhood behind, so we moved back in with my in-laws. Four months later, we found a new house and moved our two children and one dog into the new dwelling. Unable to leave things alone, I felt that my daughter, now four, needed a dog to replace the one we'd lost. We went to the shelter and let her pick out a Basenji, because the lady assured us that Basenjis didn't bark. This was music to my patient husband's ears, and so he endorsed the adoption.

Betty didn't bark so much as scream. It was a shriek that added to Shep's bark when matters weren't to his liking. I was on the phone one day with an editor when the local fire alarms sounded. The dogs wailed to protect their ears, a hideous din. Clearly shaken, the editor said, "What is that?" I hurriedly closed the window.

However, despite all the doggie drama in our household, by this time my husband had decided that Shep was a "good-looking dog." This was my husband's way of communicating that he and the hound had bonded. It was hard not to bond with Shep. He hammered his big head on our bed when he wanted something; he adored the children. He even adored the Basenji. He nurtured her, licking her ears and refusing his food until her bowl was filled as well. Heaven forbid that she might be cold; he would bark, looking at her with concern until we let them in. Shep loved winter and hated the heat of summer with his double-layered coat, but if Betty was cold, in they came.

By now I was writing full-time, and Shep was still guard dog-in-chief. Our security alarm went off one rainy day while we weren't at home. The neighbors said that when the police came to investigate, they could see an officer's yellow slicker moving rapidly around the backyard as he evaded Shep. Shep got a face full of pepper spray, and the officer received a hole in his pants. We called it even.

The day came, as they invariably do, fifteen years after I'd adopted Shep, that he had to go to the happy hunting ground. My husband was devastated. In the end, he had loved that brown hound with the white heart on its face. It had been my husband's idea a few years before to take the dogs to the church for the blessing of the animals. I have a picture of that day on my table. It came to me that my husband wanted Shep to have a long and happy life, and that's exactly what he got.

Yet my son suffered without "his" dog. My husband said there would be absolutely no more dogs, but when my son was about thirteen, I put in a call to the Golden retriever rescue society for an older dog. My husband, coming in from work about this time and hearing the phone interview, began immediately expressing his displeasure.

And yet one Sunday after our daughter's horse show, my husband found himself at the pet store waiting for the Golden retriever his son wanted. I can't say my husband was a happy camper; I would call his attitude resigned.

He ignored Bailey for the longest time. He called Bailey "the dog" or "it," as in "It needs water."

But Bailey's personality was a lot like Shep's. He loved family. For months Bailey would go over to my husband as he sat in his chair, encouraging him to pat him on the head. He would say, "No, dog," and Bailey would go to the other side of the chair, in case the answer was different over there. My husband would say, "No, dog," and Bailey would go down the hall, returning a second later in case the answer had changed. It hadn't.

Bailey carried a tennis ball in his mouth at all times which he loved to tease us with. He'd deliberately hang the ball just from his lips, tempting us to grab for it, and when we lunged, he'd suddenly corkscrew his neck so that we could never, ever get it from him. One night my husband, just certain it couldn't be that hard, leaped from his chair to snag the ball. Bailey eluded him, too, and a reluctant chuckle burst from my husband.

But he still wasn't a fan.

I'm not exactly sure what happened between my husband and Bailey. Maybe he had time to realize how much the children loved this dog. Maybe he realized that we had survived the little house where we'd lived and that our family life was going pretty well. Maybe he realized he didn't have to worry about the grief that comes with losing a beloved family pet. That day comes, it always does, but so did the day nearly three years after we had Bailey when my husband and I decided to take an evening stroll.

"Should we take the dog?" he asked me.

Surprised, I said, "No, that's all right."

He said, "Get his leash."

Knowing how he felt about Bailey, I said, "It's okay."

I watched my husband go into my son's room, grab the leash from its box, and standing rather helplessly in the hall, jingled it and called, "Dog!"

Bailey, who had taken over the house by this time to the extent that he slept upside down with his paws on the laundry room wall, didn't hear this summons.

So after a moment of indecision and what looked like surrender, my husband walked into the den, jingled the leash again, and said, "Dog!"

Bailey jumped to his feet. My husband clipped him onto the leash and off we went, the leash held firmly in my husband's hand. Now, any night we walk, Bailey is right there beside my husband, doing what dogs do best, which is steal their way inside the unsuspecting human heart.

Goin' to the movies: For paws lovers, Lassie Come Home (1943) with a very young Elizabeth Taylor will always be my fave. Sans paws and newer fare, my kids tell me that the second Transformers is awesome! I haven't dipped my toe into the Transformers saga yet, but I think I'll have to take a pop-culture jump and try it out.

Wonderful books: British veterinarian James Herriot's series of short stories and recollections of his practice in the English dales take Best In Show for me.

Wise words: Success is a great deodorant—Elizabeth Taylor, English-born British-American actress

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Until next time, Tina Leonard

Tina Leonard has a publishing history of more than forty projects. With sales of over a million books, she is also a Bookscan and Waldenbooks bestselling author. Tina enjoys family, friends, researching projects, and a good glass of wine when she's not on deadline. She is looking forward to her November release, A COWBOY FROM CHRISTMAS PAST. You can find out more about Tina at www.tinaleonard.com.