Dog House by Carol Prisant Page B

(e.g., “hoss” instead of “house,” and “dahn tahun,” not “downtown”) and little to add as we small-talked our way through the crabgrass and the heat and how much it might cost to fix up our bargain and whether we could afford it and the curiously empty house across the street, where they’d recently discovered a leaky oil tank buried in the lawn. EPA restrictions were just becoming effective then, and we’d heard that the absentee owners had been forced to spend seventy-five thousand just to dig up the old tank and put in a new one. Millard’s father was appalled. As the gorgeous light of what one of our sniffier friends once referred to as our “vulgar sunset” flickered to dusk in the west, Millard and I made up our minds that the next day—if it was all right with our houseguests—we’d take half an hour or so to run over to the empty house to learn what we could about oily lawns. We were worried. If a contemporary house could have oil tank trouble, imagine what we might be in for.
    Also, after only a day, we were anxious to be by ourselves.
    So late the next afternoon, leaving careful instructions with Joan to hook the screen door high and low so Cosi couldn’t get out, we walked across the street.
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    You know what’s coming.
    As Millard and I kneeled side by side, examining a telltale patch of blackened grass in the late-day sun, there was a terrific bang on the street. A hedge hid our view, but someone was screaming out there, and people were yelling. Millard stood up and ran to see.
    I stood up, too. Sunstruck. My mind ice white.
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    Only the upper catch of the screen door had been hooked, you see, so that Cosi had gotten out the bottom, where it opened just enough to let an insufficiently plump little dog squeeze through in search of her people (why hadn’t we gone for ice cream more?); onto the porch, down the steps, up the driveway and across the street; a gutsy little dog who had never crossed a street, never been out on a street and never been left in the care of anyone who didn’t understand that one could want to kiss a dog. She was hit by a carful of kids taking a curve too fast, and they never even stopped.
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    Arms around each other, we found our way back into our house, where I climbed the stairs and didn’t come down for two days.
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    Millard wrapped our Cosi in a soft old blanket and buried her where we could always see her: down a short flight of stairs at the corner of the veranda, looking toward the harbor.
    And our houseguests wouldn’t leave.
    Not only didn’t they leave, but Joan—who’d never had dogs or children—seemed determined to overlook how crushingly bereft we were. She kept smiling her smarmy lady-smile and wanting to chat and trying to get me to eat something or have a drink of water. Why do they always offer you water?
    I was galled by her cheerful insensitivity.
    She hadn’t hooked the screen.
    I never forgave her for that.
    Much later, a friend, a dog lover who came to visit and condole, told me she had never seen a man as devastated as Millard was that day.
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    How intense, the emotional investment we have in our dogs. Neither Millard nor I—and at that time we’d been married almost thirty years—had ever left ourselves as entirely vulnerable to each other as each of us had been to that little dog. Long marriages develop comfortable areas of opacity and restraint. And raw bits, of course. So when he left for work in the morning for the rest of that summer, I could see from the kitchen window that he was doing his best not to look at that sickening spot in the road as he swung his car out of the drive. I never mentioned it though.
    For myself, I eventually took to approaching the house from the opposite direction, despite its being very much out of my way. For almost two years, I couldn’t look at that curve.