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Deborah’s first dog is a mutt with matted hair she finds stealing trash on the beach during one of the long walks she started taking after she and Kathy moved in with Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Gene. He growls at her the first time she comes too close, and she lifts her hands, stepping back a few paces and trying to show him she’s not about to fight him over a crust of bread. He eyes her warily but stops growling long enough to eat. It’s fine. Deborah can respect that.
The next day Deborah gives him a little nod but doesn’t try to get closer. He doesn’t growl.
The day after that Deborah brings some food scraps and throws them to him. He gobbles them all up and follows her at a distance for half of her walk.
Day after day, Deborah ventures a little closer. She sets down a little pale of water one day and watches him drink as much as he can in one go, puke it all up, then try again—slower this time, lapping at the second half of the pale. (After that, she brings water more regularly.) The table scraps elicit the most enthusiasm, and by the end of the second week, he runs right up to her and snuffles at her hand, then trots alongside her for as long as she walks.
It shouldn’t feel as nice as it does to have earned the dog’s trust. She doesn’t want or need another responsibility, not when she already spends half her nights in Kathy’s bed holding her hand and stroking her hair until she can fall back asleep. Deborah’s tired in school every morning, but she can handle it. She’s 15 now, after all, and she can still remember her mother sitting her down when she was 6 and telling her she was about to become a big sister and that being a big sister meant taking on new responsibilities. Just because her mom isn’t here anymore doesn’t mean she can shirk those responsibilities.
Still, Deborah doesn’t name the dog. Just walks with him and sits with him and sometimes whispers secrets to him that she won’t say aloud for another fifty-odd years.
Gene says they don’t have room for a dog in the house, says they can’t go feeding strays. Deborah doesn’t tell him they already have been for weeks. She recalls her dad saying that Gene always took things harder. He was the oldest. Remembered more of the Depression years than any of the other kids. Let them shape him in ways that hardened him to the world.
Day by day, Deborah gets the dog in better shape. She brings a washcloth and bathes him as best she can, cuts away the sections of fur that are too matted to be salvaged, brushes him out with an old comb she found in the bathroom. By the end of it, he almost looks like he hasn’t been living on the beach for god knows how long.
One day Gene invites Deborah to go out on the boat, and Deborah nods, trying not to give up the game too soon.
She pockets a roll and traipses alongside Gene down to his truck, where he’s already got the boat hitched to the back. The drive over there is quiet. Gene’s not really one for idle conversation—not until he gets out on the water and has something to do with his hands. But they arrive soon enough, and Deborah helps him lug the old rowboat down to the sand.
They’ve barely made it a few feet when the dog—newly spruced up and looking much friendlier these days—comes bounding up to them, tail wagging and tongue lolling out of his mouth.
Deborah watches Gene’s face, waits until she spots the softening of his expression, the little crinkles by his eyes deepening with a smile he doesn’t quite let show.
“Aren’t you cute?” Deborah coos, like she’s never seen the dog before in her life. She slips him a little bite of bread when Gene isn’t looking and gets a lick on the nose for it.
The dog hops into the boat, putting his front two paws on one of the benches and staring up at Gene.
“What?” Gene huffs out one of those hoarse laughs of his. “Do you think you’re coming?”
The dog lets out a little woof.
“Maybe he’s a boat dog.”
“Tip the boat, more like it.”
Deborah chuckles.
The dog jumps back out of the boat when they start moving it again, walking alongside them as they haul it down to the shoreline and into the shallow water. He prances in the shallows, touching his nose to his reflection before scampering away, again and again.
“Go find your family. Shoo!” Gene calls as he pushes off and begins rowing at a slow pace.
He seems to forget about the dog as they row lazy circles in the calm seas. He asks Deborah about school. About her teachers. About Kathy. It’s not the same as going out fishing with her dad. (She doubts anything ever will be.) But it’s a nice effort on Gene’s part, and she thinks he’s come to enjoy the company.
When they get back to shore, the dog’s still there. (Deborah knew he would be.)
“Don’t you have a family?” Gene asks.
Deborah makes a show of looking for a collar. “I don’t think so. He must be a stray.”
Gene glances from the dog to the sun. “Getting warmer,” he says, frowning down at the dog.
“Hopefully it won’t get too hot.”
The dog trots alongside them back to the truck.
“Do you think he has water?” Deborah asks. She lets her eyes go wide and earnest.
“Maybe he can come back for today. Get some fresh water. You and Kathy can ask around for the family.” He nods to himself. “A good job for you two. Keep you out of trouble.”
Deborah rolls her eyes when he turns his back. As if either of them are anything but sad and lonely.
Still, the dog comes back. And after two weeks of asking around, Gene decides he may as well stay with them. “Doesn’t take up that much space, I suppose,” he relents.
They name him Scout. (Well, Kathy names him, and Deborah goes along with it. In her head, he’ll always just be Dog.)
He’s Deborah’s dog through and through, and after a year of him pawing at Deborah’s door once she went away to college, Gene and Charlotte send him to live with her.
He’s Deborah’s constant companion. They eat dinner together—his bowl on the ground right beside her place at the counter. He listens to her rehearse lines before auditions and eats a celebratory cupcake with her when she lands her first leading role. He waits up for her on performance nights and rests his head on her chest when the nerves get the best of her before opening night.
The only thing he doesn’t like about her life is Frank.
A little drunk and very exhausted one evening, Deborah tells him to forget what she once whispered in his ear on the beach all those years ago, tells him that Frank is her future, that Frank is funny and sweet and charming and will open doors she can’t open on her own.
Scout doesn’t listen.
He bites Frank’s ankle when they’re fooling around on the couch one night, and from then on, they mostly go to Frank’s place. (Years later, Deborah will think back on that night and wonder if she should have listened to Scout’s warning. She thinks maybe it’s for the best Scout isn’t with them anymore by then. She wouldn’t have been able to cope with the gloating.)
---
Life on the road isn’t exactly conducive to having a dog. Deborah has an act she’s still figuring out and a burgeoning fanbase and a daughter who still thinks it’s Deborah’s fault her parents aren’t together anymore.
Deborah longs for the simplicity of a dog again. The care and love were so straightforward. She did right by Scout. Scout did right by her. The yelp when she stepped on his tail was momentary, a blip on the radar before she cooed out an apology and scratched behind his ears and let him up on the sofa despite her promises not to.
DJ is anything but straightforward. Oh, Deborah loves her. Of course she loves her. But it never seems to be in the right ways or the right amounts. There’s always something there, something between them, that distorts everything she does until it’s an ugly, misshapen parody of itself. It’s failure after failure, and Deborah clutches at the laughter she gets when she’s on stage as her lone success. Every gleeful cackle pulled from the audience, every eager fan waiting to meet her after the show patches over those hurts until she barely notices them anymore. (At least not until something catastrophic happens and rips the bandages off in one go, exposing old, festering wounds to the whole world’s scrutiny. But the whole world isn’t sitting in the crowd at her show; people who love Deborah Vance are sitting in the crowd at her show. And Deborah clings to them tighter than ever.)
Deborah doesn’t get a dog again until DJ’s a full year out from her second overdose and Deborah’s nine months into her relationship with Patrick—her first serious commitment since Frank. DJ hates him on principle, as if she’s not an adult and a little too fucking old to be pulling the “child of divorce” card, and Frank’s quoted in the media saying his one “word of advice” to Patrick would be to keep a fire extinguisher on hand, but Patrick lets it all roll off his back. He’s…steady. He dresses impeccably and takes Deborah to nice dinners and never seems threatened by her success.
It's a perfectly fine relationship. A great one, even. And if Deborah feels like something’s missing, like she’s putting on the perfect show for an audience who’s barely watching, well, that’s her problem to deal with on her own time.
Maybe Patrick isn’t interested in the perfectly tantalizing slit up the side of Deborah’s dress, and maybe he doesn’t look at her with anything more than bland appreciation, but he does listen.
Not two days after telling Patrick about Scout and how much she’s missed having a dog in her life, he appears with a wriggling puppy—a corgi, he tells her.
She thinks, looking down at the little ball of fluff, that this is not a dog that would growl at her over a sandwich crust and bite a date’s ankles for her honor.
She learns very quickly how wrong she is.
A working breed through and through, Francesca—Patrick’s choice, not hers—is as fierce as she is small. She barks at strangers and struts through the newly acquired mansion with an outsized confidence Deborah can’t help but admire.
She goes jogging with Deborah and Patrick each morning and destroys stuffed toys in the corner while Deborah does her VHS tape aerobics classes in the evenings.
At night, she sleeps between them—a habit Deborah never managed to break her of after Patrick invited her up into their bed that first night. She becomes a convenient excuse, a reason why they couldn’t possibly—not tonight, dear—that has nothing to do with the way Deborah appeals (or doesn't) to Patrick, with whatever ways she’s failing as a woman.
When Patrick comes out and moves out two years later, Francesca stays. A constant. She doesn’t blame Deborah or hate her for the change. She simply stretches out onto the pillow that once was Patrick’s and snuffles and snores her way into a better sleep than ever.
Of course, what is once given cannot be taken away.
The bed is Francesca’s. And, Deborah soon learns, it doesn’t matter that she has found someone new—someone who looks at her like she’s worth wanting, worth lusting after—to share that bed with. Tipsy on wine and utterly intoxicated with the way Marty looks at her, Deborah leads him up to her bedroom for the first time, only to find the bed occupied. “C’mon,” Marty says, whistling and patting his leg. “Off.” Utterly unimpressed, Francesca gives him a long look, then stretches her stubbly little legs as long as they can go and falls back asleep right in the middle of the bed. Even though it means months of making do with the guest room, Deborah can’t help but admire a bitch who doesn’t let a man take what’s hers.
---
For her sixtieth birthday, Deborah—after four martinis and a past-mid-life crisis to rival Marty’s—decides she needs a new dog. It’s been three whole years since Francesca warmed her bed, and Deborah still finds herself reaching for her in the middle of the night.
It isn’t until she’s brought home a puppy from the reputable breeder Marcus found her that Deborah realizes she’s never named a dog herself. She strokes the puppy’s fur and feeds him treats and shows him around the house for two long days before landing on Barry.
Jo asks if she named him after the president.
Josefina asks if Deborah’s sure about that.
Marcus furrows his brow and simply doesn’t ask.
And Deborah doesn’t tell.
Barry is the calmest dog Deborah’s ever met. His puppy energy is handled by the trainer Deborah hires, and he comes back a perfectly sweet, low energy dog, content to snuggle by Deborah’s side and watch as much Law & Order as she wants. Deborah doesn’t jog anymore—too much time in heels for that left knee, her physical therapist had said last year, not that Deborah will sacrifice the heels anytime soon—but she doubts Barry would join her even if she did. She buys an oversized beach umbrella that she sets up next to his lounge chair, though, and he sprawls out and watches her swim every morning.
They spend four years just the two of them with intermittent visits from Marty when he’s between wives to break up the monotony.
For Deborah’s 64th birthday—her fourth 60th birthday, rather—she gifts them both with a new puppy.
Cara is a hell-raiser.
Marcus calls her a demon dog.
Josefina shakes her head and tuts about a house that’s suddenly ten times harder to run.
Damien jumps on the furniture when she comes barreling into the room, desperate to save his heels and shoes from the tiny terror.
Deborah is delighted by her (at least once she gets a puppy-proof lock put on her closet door after a particularly trying week in their relationship that involved several thousands of dollars’ worth of shoes being treated as teething toys).
After a few too many attempts by Cara at diving straight into the pool to follow Deborah—a velcro dog, the trainer had called her, utterly attached to Deborah to a fault, though Deborah doesn’t see the fault there—she buys Cara the world’s smallest dog life vest. She outgrows it (and the need for it) soon enough, and they finally learn that a morning spent swimming laps alongside her favorite human is nearly enough to exhaust her for a few hours.
It takes three full years before Cara really settles down, the zoomies giving way to lazy nights spent cuddling Barry and Deborah on the couch.
A year later, when a brash, entitled asshole walks through the front door for an interview Deborah most certainly did not schedule, she finds herself wishing the little hell hound was still at her worst. She thinks she wouldn’t mind seeing Ava Daniels get chased right back up the chimney with a corgi biting at her heels…
Instead, the dogs go and fall in love with Ava. Traitors.
Ava must be giving them food, Deborah’s sure of it. Down in her dusty dungeon, maybe… It would be just like Ava to slip them all sorts of processed foods and win them over like some sad sack of a stepfather trying to be the cool parent. Not that Deborah’s planning on marrying her. Christ.
---
A writing retreat, a slap, a betrayal, a lawsuit, a four-month tour, and a rooftop conversation that hurt more than any breakup Deborah’s ever gone through later, Deborah finds herself alone in bed after another empty, successful show with no one waiting in the wings for her.
The bed feels too big without Ava sprawled across it, all gangly limbs and loud laughter and warm skin.
Deborah pats the mattress with the flat of her palm and whistles for the dogs, watching as they bound up onto their ottoman stepstool and then onto the bed, taking their places at her side.
“I bet you don’t miss Ava, hmm?” she murmurs, stroking her fingers through their long fur. “She took up too much space.”
They don’t answer, of course. But she feels their disagreement all the same.
“Maybe it was nice having her around,” she admits.
Barry lets out a world-weary sigh as he snuffles further into the fleecy blanket Ava had plucked out of the storage closet and brought into Deborah’s room to make it more “comfy,” as if bedrooms were notoriously uncomfortable rooms.
Long-buried feelings come bubbling up to the surface as she lets herself dwell in memories of Ava, and Deborah takes a shuddering breath in, then out. Confessions strain at the edges of her teeth, and her jaw aches with the effort of keeping them all in.
She glances down at her mostly silent, sleeping companions.
She decides she’s too old to still be whispering her secrets to her dogs.
It’s been half a fucking century. (Fuck, that realization pierces her like a lance.) She thinks she deserves to say the words to someone who might actually understand.
---
Barry and Cara adapt just as quickly to Ava’s presence in Deborah’s bed as they did to her presence in the Cheesecake Factory, which Ava has since formally christened the house as by way of a little plaque on the mailbox. (Her contribution to the décor, she’d explained, since all her worldly possessions barely filled a single room.)
The dogs leave with matching huffs when things get to be too loud for their liking—a novelty after years of Marty, Ava jokes, and Deborah nips at her throat rather than acknowledge the accuracy of the statement—but Ava’s willingness to let them both sleep in the crook of her knees or sprawled across her chest more than makes up for the disturbances.
The new dog, however, comes as the harder sell.
It’s more than a year into living together that Ava casually begins bringing up how much space there is in the house. Deborah, terrified at the thought that Ava is hinting at wanting a child, is so relieved to hear her mention “this really cute mutt at the humane society” that she doesn’t even let herself think before agreeing.
“This really cute mutt” turns out to be a one-year-old, 70-pound neurotic mess of a dog that comes to the house wearing a harness adorned with more patches than Deborah can count. “Not fond of men,” Deborah reads aloud. “I’m nervous.”
“Hashtag relatable, am I right?” Ava asks, a crackle of half-hysterical laughter running through her words.
“Don’t look at me.” Deborah arches an eyebrow at Ava.
“Okay, that one’s mostly for the men. But here. I have his favorite snacks!”
Deborah sighs. There is no part of this dog that is going to work in their house.
“Just…just toss them to him at first, but he’ll build up the confidence to come to you, I promise.”
There’s a note of desperation to Ava’s words, like she needs this to work just as badly as the mutt does. And suddenly Deborah is 15 all over again, slowly building the trust of a mangy stray who’d nearly taken off her fingers over a crust of stale bread. “Alright,” Deborah says, her tone softening as she takes the bag of treats from Ava and tosses a handful in the dog’s direction. “I’ll give you two some time to settle.”
“Wow, um, okay. Thanks.”
“If he shits on my silk rugs, you’re sleeping outside.”
“You mean him?”
Deborah arches a single eyebrow and holds Ava’s gaze. “No.”
---
It turns out that real steak ranks far above whatever “favorite” peanut butter bites the shelter had sent Ava home with, and it isn’t long before Deborah has the still unnamed dog eating out of her hand—nervous, but willing to nudge at Deborah’s legs and hands on the off chance that more steak will appear in them. Day by day, the nudges turn into licks, and by day six, he’s sprawled out between her and Ava on the couch, belly up, long legs stuck out every which way, and snoring like a freight train.
The biggest hurdle still to come is the introduction to Barry and Cara.
Per the shelter’s recommendation, they’ve kept them separate for the first full week, letting them all smell each other in the house and yard and spot each other through doors and windows and gates, waiting to have them meet until the mutt got his clean bill of health and settled in a little better.
“They said he’d do great in a house with a confident dog to show him the ropes,” Ava tells Deborah for the twentieth time this week. “So this should go great!”
Deborah hums. “Cara is Miss Confidence.”
“Exactly!”
Deborah does not point out that for all Ava’s bravado, she still has not named the dog, which feels more telling than anything else.
As it turns out, there was little to worry about. The dogs are a far easier sell than the people, and his tail wags as he play-bows and bounces in big circles all around the confused corgis.
“You’re doing it, buddy!” Ava cheers. “You’re playing!”
Barry and Cara both glare accusingly at Deborah, who simply shrugs at them. “Meet your new brother.”
Cara barks and snaps at him when he bounces too close, but she begrudgingly walks alongside him for a long walk around the property, and Barry seems to take it all in stride, so long as he isn’t expected to keep up with this new ball of energy.
A week later, Deborah receives her daily “pupdate”—Ava’s coinage, obviously. It’s a video of Gritty—Deborah hates it, but Ava was too excited for her to say no—practically tip-toeing across the room and ever so carefully curling himself into Cara’s bed. “He’s a little spoon!” it reads.
“How long did Cara last before she kicked him out?” Deborah sends back from the downstairs office.
“THEY’RE FULL ON CUDDLING!!!!!” comes Ava’s overly enthusiastic reply.
(If Deborah makes the photo Ava attaches her new iPad background, that’s between her and anyone who dares to touch her tablet.)
Before long, Gritty is a fully integrated member of the household. He traipses behind Cara whenever he can, taking every last one of his cues from her. She shows him how to sit pretty for Josefina and ask for forbidden snacks, and she slowly but surely convinces him that Damien, despite being a man, is not that scary. Marcus is a much easier sell, to Ava’s combined confusion and delight. The trainer insists it’s because Marcus showed absolutely no interest in Gritty. Marcus, who has since warmed to Gritty (though he refuses to call him by his given name), insists it’s because Gritty has good taste, unlike someone…
He's a perfect fit in every way, really. Except one.
Because every time, without fail, that Deborah and Ava try to do anything—anything—in bed except sleep, that fucking dog is right there with them.
They teach him “off,” but he takes his place right at the nightstand and rests his chin on the edge of the mattress and stares up at them with his big brown eyes.
“I swear to God, Ava,” Deborah huffs. “I have had seventy years of mediocre sex. I’m not letting your dog ruin this for me.”
“Why’s he my dog when he’s annoying?” Ava whines, draping herself across Deborah’s torso to shoo Gritty back to his bed. “Find Cara,” Ava tells him. “Go bother her.”
“Don’t bother her!”
The dog just looks between them and wags his tail.
“Maybe this is something the trainer can help with?” Ava blinks down at Deborah and tries for a winning smile.
“We will talk about this with the trainer over my dead fucking body.”
“What’s your solution, then? Text Marcus to come babysit every time we want to fuck?”
Deborah glares at Ava. “Your dog. Your problem. Now fix it!”
“Okay, okay.” Ava bites her lower lip. “So are we just, like, going to bed now?”
“No.” Deborah lets her voice go saccharine sweet. “You’re going to take that dog of yours next door to the guest bedroom. And on your way out, you’re going to get the lube and the vibrator for me.”
Ava’s jaw drops. “Seriously? Without me? That’s, like, my favorite thing to watch!”
Deborah gives her a honeyed smile. “Well then you better get this sorted, hmm?”
By the next week, Ava’s working on a “go bed” command with Gritty.
And by the end of the month, Deborah has a new bit in her act about Gritty earning a new patch for his harness: “Professional Mood Killer.”
And by the end of the year, he takes his place as an overly exuberant ring bearer at their small, beach-front wedding, taking off and crashing into the surf the second his job is done.