A Big Mistake

The best thing that ever happened to me led to a big mistake.

A taste of ice cream, that’s all it was, but it split my world right down the middle, like a cleaver through a cantaloupe. Everything, every unhappy seed, was now exposed. I went home from Italy and told my husband we needed to save our marriage, even though I knew the moment I took that taste of ice cream it was probably too late. I gave up and moved out six weeks later. I gave up the little cottage we’d remodeled together, its turquoise paint like the country of Belize. I gave up the garden I’d conceived and planted and nurtured for six years. The esperanza I’d pruned and shaped into a beautiful tree, the four varieties of lantana in full bloom, the hibiscus big as plates, the butterfly plants. I left the wedding album, the photos of our years on Tranquilo, the furniture, even the food processor Neil didn’t know how to use. I gave up trying to convince him this was the best thing for both of us and left him with his rage.

Only one thing mattered to me. I couldn’t give up the dog.

I remembered the summer day we picked her up from the shelter in Beeville five years before like it had just happened. He’d searched for her on the Internet the way some people look for love. We drove out there in the rain, found the “shelter.” It was a yard with a chain link fence and about 15 mangy dogs barking their heads off. When we walked up to the gate, 14 of them lunged and yelped and begged us to adopt them, but Iris hung back from the pack. She had a smile like a shy toddler and short gold fur. She had black spots on her tongue that looked blue in certain light and a thick, foot-long tail she kept tucked up under her belly. We got her into the truck against her will. As Neil drove, she shivered and panted desperately. I pinched fleas off of her for 45 miles and cast them out the open window. She stank like dog and fear.

Back at home, I put on my bathing suit and uncoiled the hose. I held her between my slippery thighs as the rain beat down and I scrubbed her with flea shampoo for puppies, even though she was a year and half old already. I cooed and told her I loved her, she was a good dog. After the bath, she ran to the back of the yard and hid behind the dense banana trees for three days.

We hired a trainer, a big, misshapen woman who drove a beat-up Dodge pickup with American flags flapping on both sides of the cab. She was the dog whisperer. She figured out Iris in 15 seconds and spent four sessions training us. “See that scar on her forehead?” the trainer said. “Somebody hit her with a two-by-four. Probably had a nail in it. She’s lived on the street, scavenged for food. She don’t trust nobody.”

We learned how to take her for walks. She wouldn’t tolerate a leash. She didn’t know how. So we looped a rope through her collar about twenty-five feet long. He held one end, I held the other, and we jogged slowly toward the Frisbee park at the end of our block. Iris tried to lay down on the sidewalk, dead weight, but we pressed on. Once we hit that grass, she started jogging the same pace as us, and then that smile returned to her face. Once she knew the freedom of a full-out run, there was no limit to her joy.

It was like that for five years. We built our relationship with Iris brick by brick, one small, extension of trust at a time. She’d sit and lay down and roll over, proud as anything every time she got it right. She climbed mesquite trees like a mountain goat in the Rockies. The only room she liked in the house was the one with the flap in the door through which she could escape at the first unexpected noise. She wouldn’t get on furniture, even if invited. She slept under a coffee table next to the doggie door, except during thunderstorms, when she’d squeeze under the dresser in our bedroom and hunker down without a sound.

One night, after about six months, we were watching television and heard some unusual barking. “Did Van get a new hunting dog?” I asked about our redneck neighbor. “Pretty wimpy bark for a hunting dog,” Neil replied. The barking continued long enough to become annoying. I was getting off the couch to investigate when he looked up and said, “Is that our dog?” We’d never heard her bark. We tiptoed toward the back door and slipped out onto the patio. She was standing erect, staring at the back of the house, making this high-pitched little yelp at a gecko stuck to the siding.

Iris was the one thing in eight years of marriage we could share without fighting. She was the one thing I'd seen him love without losing his temper. When I gave up on us, I moved into a one-room, in-law apartment several blocks from the house we’d shared. We tried joint custody, but Iris acted like my apartment was a prison cell. The back yard wasn’t secure, so I couldn’t leave her outside on her visits, and I felt awful the way she sat and panted desperately by the door.

Either one of us could have kept on giving her the great and wonderful life she richly deserved. I really, really wanted her, yet I didn’t put up any fight. The truth was, I didn‘t think I had any more fights left in me. I felt lucky to have escaped what was certain to be forty years of us making each other miserable. I felt happy to have met someone else, and guilty that Neil hadn’t. So I made a big mistake. If only I’d had one more fight in me.

It’s been two years now since I last saw Iris. I moved to South Carolina, where the funny father of three lives. When he stays over at my house, so does his dog, Sophie. But when there’s a thunderstorm at night, it’s Iris I wake up and look for under the dresser. I don’t have a doggie door, but sometimes, when I’m reading in my living room on quiet afternoons, around the hour she usually decided was time for her run in the Frisbee park, I can hear that door flap with her insistent in-and-out reminder. Maybe I should get another dog. But no. Not yet. I’m still not ready to move on.