That Nice Girl with the Dogs
“Sasha. Doesn’t she look like Duchess? You remember Duchess.”
“Yes.”
Of course I remember Duchess.
* * *
Duchess was my first dog, an old Doberman sent by a relative to stay with us for her last years. Duchess slept on the floor by my bed. I fed her and took her for walks. She let me train her to jump through the hula hoop, find the bone, fetch the stick. After a year, Duchess had lumps all over her belly, sometimes didn’t finish her food, and whined in the night, but I didn’t fully understand what any of that meant. I took her life for granted, but then, I was only eleven and not yet acquainted with death.
I was lying on my bed in a patch of sunlight reading a Little Lulu comic book. Mom stood in the doorway and said, “The man is coming for Duchess today. I can’t be here—I’ve got to go do some errands. If he comes before I get back, can you do it?”
“Okay,” I said, half in the comic book world with only a vague understanding of what she was asking me to do. Mom had told me, most likely while driving me to my baton or violin lessons, that a man would come to get Duchess because it wasn’t right for her to suffer. I didn’t want Duchess to suffer, and somehow put the rest of it, unimagined, out of my mind. I went back to the bright colors and flat, harmless world of Little Lulu.
