It actually starts on Thursday night, when Jesse showed me this short film about a three-legged dog who dies. The film (“Last Minutes with Oden”) was well made, and I was fine in the beginning, before I realized that Oden was a dog. The dog who loves and accepts everyone, no matter how outcast they are. The dog who loves his tattooed owner and his balding friends, who doesn’t care who you are or what you’ve done. A dog who has cancer and is in pain. I lost it when Oden stood, revealing one front leg missing. One thing you must know about me is that I will instantly bawl upon seeing an animal of any variety that is missing a limb. You know that two-legged dog they parade around on talk shows? Yeah. I cry like a baby.

“But why?” Jesse asks. “It’s happy! It’s triumphing over adversity!”

That’s just it. I don’t think I can fully explain it, but there is something about a creature who has never hurt someone, never been obnoxious or rude, who (probably) cannot understand what is happening to it, there’s something about a creature like that, who shouldn’t even have lived, hopping around the stage of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. There’s something about it.

So you can imagine my state as the tattooed man carried the three-legged Oden to the car, as his friends said goodbye, asking the dog to tell Jesus hello for them, as they drove to the vet’s office. As a grown man covered in ink, his hands looking worn and his face gently lined, sobbed on the floor of the vet’s office, sobbed as the needle went into one of the remaining legs, sobbed as the dog closed his eyes, as his head sunk in the man’s hands.

I was a mess.

That was Thursday night, just before bed. Friday started early, because I had the Pampered Chef party to prepare for. The day was normal for about twenty minutes. The sun wasn’t up, not because it was too early for that, but because the sky was a stubborn mess of clouds. I got a phone call with some bad news and spent the rest of the morning a complete mess again. Finally I pulled it together and went to my babysitting job. At which I whimpered again, looking at a precious blond two-year-old and telling him he didn’t need to know about the sad parts of life yet, that he could wait longer for that, knowing he wasn’t understanding what I was saying.

At naptime, I took the boy upstairs and we went through the nap-rituals, and I sang “Old MacDonald” to him as I rocked him, as his head fell back onto my shoulder, heavy and tired. I sang until I ran out of barnyard animals, and then I kept singing, adding things like monkeys and, when I became really desperate, cheese. Finally, I put him in his crib and went downstairs.

The house is a lovely older home, eclectically decorated, with a large window in the kitchen that overlooks the backyard and a series of birdfeeders and squirrel feeders, which are densely populated in the mornings. The neighborhood is nice—no, more than nice. But a couple weeks ago, the boy’s father told me to keep the doors locked if we left for a walk, as there’d been some incidents of people looking for open doors, looking for easy targets for a burglary.

So, after the singing and the sleepy baby, I tiptoed downstairs, a dirty diaper in my right hand to throw into the trash can on the back porch. I walked into the kitchen. Where the back door stood open.

I instantly freaked out, spinning around, sure I would see someone standing behind me. No one was there, so I spun back toward the open door, and then stood frozen in the kitchen, the diaper raised like a weapon. If I were in my own house, I would have grabbed a kitchen knife or a broom or something. But, there, in a house that wasn’t foreign but also wasn’t my own, I just raised the diaper and turned back and forth, from the open door to the rest of the house. The sky outside was still a slate gray, the sun hidden, and the house was dark, except for the weak light from the windows. I listened for a moment, then finally became conscious of the diaper, which I quickly threw away before searching the downstairs for the intruder I thought was surely there.

But the dog was in the playroom, asleep. And I found no one in the house. I pushed the door closed, and locked it, hoping it had opened because of the wind. And for the next two hours I stayed very still and very quiet, listening, watching.

After that, the day was a shocking flurry of errands, which I performed without excitement or drive, my mind preoccupied with the news I received that morning, with the open door, which seemed like an omen. The sky never brightened, the sun having given up at some point in the afternoon, the clouds staying the meanest shade of gray, so that the whole day felt like the morning had never ended, that time was not really passing.

Little things that would normally be annoyingly amusing got under my skin. In the Wal-Mart parking lot, the trunk of my car kept slamming shut, so that by the time I turned to my cart to get another bag, it would blow shut, and I would have to open it again. I finally propped it open with one hand and loaded it with the other, which given my back injuries, the weight of the my trunk lid, and the fact that the remaining purchases were cat litter, soda, and other heavier items, meant I could add a backache to the festivities of the day. When I unloaded the groceries at home, a two-liter tore its bag and landed on my foot. When I went to move a bag of cereal to the pantry, it came open and spilled generic Golden Grahams all over my clean kitchen floor. Oliver took the opportunity to jump onto my clean kitchen counters, and when I chased him to put him into the master bedroom to keep him out of trouble, I skidded onto the carpet next to the dining room table he had run under. Only then did I remember the jeans I wore had holes in the knees. (Knees which, therefore, were rug-burned.)

The evening went on. The house was cleaned, the kitchen prepped, the carpets vacuumed. The party was fun. It wrapped up late and a few girlfriends stayed and we talked some more, and the conversation turned to child predators, and it felt fitting somehow that the day would end there, that the sun would not in fact ever show itself.

And today the sun is out, and all I want to do is go outside in a bathing suit and soak it up, all I want to do is be in warmth, to be internalizing the sun. But I know it’s far too cold for that. I know it will be months before I will warm up. But I also know that summer will come, one day when I’m not expecting it, and I will go to the beach by myself, and I will lie flat, face-up, and spread my arms and feel relief.

(To the list of things I can’t do well while on cold medicine, add “carrying a tune.” Those Christmas songs have never been so mangled.)

Around 8:00 p.m., everything was done at last and we loaded the cats in their carriers, set them up in the backseat of the too-full car, and drove off—gulping down cold medicine, sucking on cough drops, and hoping what little energy we had wouldn’t give out too early. That morning, I’d plotted out our overnight stay options (there was no way we were making the drive overnight). I had a list of hotels that accepted pets at two-, three-, four-, and five-hour intervals. On our way out, I wanted to hit the McDonald’s drive-thru for some cheap coffee, but they were closed, of course. A cold Starbucks drink from a gas station had to do.

The good thing about driving late on Christmas Eve night is that no one else was crazy enough to be driving then. We had the roads to ourselves. We made remarkably good time. At three and a half hours in, I realized we were about a half hour away from the five-hour hotels. For a few minutes, I thought, well heck we could just keep on driving. But, I hadn’t plotted out many hotels after the five-hour mark, and I hate going door-to-door with hotels trying to find one that took cats, so we just planned on stopping when we got to one on our list. A few minutes after we decided this, I started to crash. Wait, no, not the car. Physically, speaking. My eyelids felt itchy and dry. My legs ached, and my feet tingled. When you’re sick, nights are the worst, and it just hit me all at once. We still had about twenty minutes to go. I counted every mile.

Finally, we saw our exit and pulled off the highway. I was just about cross-eyed while getting our keys, and I didn’t process a word the hotel clerk said to me. She could have told me the room cost $300 and check-out was at 5:30 a.m. and I would have just nodded and grunted my approval, shuffling out the door, plastic card-keys in hand.

I drove down to the end of the building to park near where I thought the hotel clerk had told me to go (though I couldn’t be sure), and as soon as we got out of the car, it started to rain so hard I felt like I’d been hit with a bucket of water. Like a high school coach whose team just won a big game. Bam! We frantically pulled the cats out of the car—along with a litter box, litter, and a couple plastic bags of overnight things—and ran to a pitiful little awning that barely covered the back door to the hotel’s hallway, struggling with our plastic keys and dripping cold rainwater, arms full and cats yowling their displeasure.

Inside, I set the cats up with a litter box and water. I had hunted for one of those one-time-use litter boxes, but hadn’t found one, so I’d bought the smallest, cheapest box Wal-Mart had. It would have to do.

I silently congratulated myself for getting us to the hotel in one piece and in such good time, attributing our expediency to the fact that I had driven seven miles an hour over the speed limit, rather than the four over Jesse typically drives. Feeling rather pleased with myself, I peeled off my wet clothes and took a hot shower. Ah, sweet relief. The night had been a little rough, but we’d made it. I could still breathe through my nose—quite the accomplishment—and I was warm and dry and had a fairly decent bed waiting for me. We turned out the lights, and I thought I’d pass out in about five minutes flat.

Well. I was wrong.

First of all, our upstairs neighbors were (I’m assuming from the noises they were making) very obese people performing interpretive dance. Or, they were jumping from the bed to the floor and back again. Or, they were running in circles. Or, a combination of all the above. I’ve heard some strange things in hotel rooms at night before, but nothing like this. It was entirely perplexing. I considered calling the front desk but was too exhausted to sit up and place the call. I kept hoping they’d quiet down. The cats, too, were disturbed by the noise and, curious about the hotel room, they spent the night roaming, jumping from the bed to the floor and back again themselves.

Soon, though, I realized the people—or animals?—upstairs were not the loudest or most annoying thing we’d deal with that night. Apparently, our room butted up against a flimsy fence, which separated the parking lot from a gas station. At which people in what sounded like monster trucks liked to congregate on Christmas Eve night…well, technically Christmas morning by now. They revved their trucks, they yelled at one another, they made all sorts of loud and obnoxious sounds. I believe you could say they were carousing. In the middle of the night. On Christmas. Next to our hotel room. When we really, really needed the sleep.

When we “woke up” the next morning (to wake up implies being asleep, and I’m not entirely sure we were), I felt worse than I had the day before. I was back to breathing out of my mouth, which gave me a constant look of the half-dead, or half-asleep, my mouth hanging open in a somewhat doleful manner. As we got ready to leave, Gracie jumped into the litter box and proceeded to pee on the floor. The poor thing—she really thought she was peeing in the box (she even turned around to “cover” it), but her aim was completely off. So, we cleaned up the pee and threw away the rest of the litter.

And then I did something that will forever make me cringe in hotel showers. I washed the litter box…in the shower. With the hotel shampoo. Gross, gross, gross. I know. But what else could I do? I was too cheap to leave the litter box there. I had paid five bucks for that thing. Which, to be fair, was probably the same price I would have paid for the disposable box. But still, there was the principle of the matter. This was a non-disposable box that I had paid for. So, the shower it was. I hoped the shower got cleaned between guests, but I feared it didn’t.

After a sad breakfast of off-brand hotel cereal, bad orange juice, and decongestants, we gassed up the car and got back on the road. Most of the drive was rainy and more crowded than the day before. But we were still making good time, even though Jesse was driving all of three miles an hour slower than I’d driven the night prior. At the Florida line, the sky cleared and the sun came out, and though I felt physically wretched, my spirits were high.

About an hour away from my parents’ house, where we planned to deposit the cats before leaving for Jesse’s parents’ place for a Bond-Seabolt Christmas dinner complete with my aunt in from California and my grandmother, we stopped at a rest area for a bathroom break. As we walked back to the car, I thought, I should look over the car, just to make sure nothing’s wrong. I sometimes think things like this because I’m paranoid. What if we blew a tire? What if something heinous were hanging off the back of our car? What if something crucial had come loose? I always check, mostly amused by my neuroses and happy to see that I worried for nothing, again.

Only this time, one of our rear tires was completely flat.

I thought about the air compressor my dad had given me for my car a few years back. Which I’d failed to pack in Jesse’s car. It was in my car, in my garage, at home. And the spare tire was in Jesse’s trunk. Under our luggage. Which was under a set of golf clubs. Which was under a mound of Christmas presents, my laptop and camera, pillows, a set of towels, a fresh set of clothes to change into that evening…

It all came out. Our belongings strewn on the sidewalk for people to look over as they gawked at us while walking their Pomeranians. Jesse, wearing an old t-shirt and ripped jeans because they were the only ones not packed in the big suitcase, changed the tire and threw the stuff back in the trunk. We crawled along I-95, afraid to blow the donut, and eventually showed up on my parents’ doorstep, my hair frizzy from the Florida humidity, Jesse’s hands dirty. Our mouths hanging half-open, we sniffed a congested “Merry Christmas” and collapsed on their couch. Sleep-deprived, sicker than we’d been before the trip, and bearing gifts with crumpled bows, we must have been a sight, but we hardly cared. We were finally, finally home.

I certainly had plenty of examples from my father for how to express one’s self, especially to people to whom one is paying money. If Dad didn’t want the waiter to take his credit card to the machine in the back, where he could all too easily scrawl down its number, expiration date, and security code, all while we unknowingly finished the last of our steak fries, well he had no qualms about telling said waiter as much (leaving out the number-filching details, so as not to give any ideas). If Dad thought a price unreasonable, he would helpfully inform the merchant or service provider of such, and if Dad thought he ought to have a few extra features thrown in for free, he would suggest, firmly, what the seller should have seen as obvious.

So, how I found myself last night eating the absolute worst meal I’ve ever paid for, without saying a word to the waiter or the owner, I do not know. But I cannot blame my parents.

Here’s how it happened. I was going to pop a roast in the slow cooker early Sunday afternoon to have it ready when we got out of church that evening. Jesse suggested we eat out instead, since we’d been very good about eating in (or eating the free food offered at various Christmas parties) lately. I obliged, and we attempted to find some company for dinner. Everyone we tried had something going on, so it was just the two of us. I suggested Double Happiness, a Chinese restaurant I’d been wanting to try for over a year. We had heard good things about it, and I was in the mood for something exotic.

Even though Jesse would have preferred tacos, he agreed, and off we went. It was a chilly night, we were slightly dressed up, and the restaurant had soft lighting and Chinese lanterns everywhere. It seemed the start of a nice little date.

I ordered the Kalapur Chicken, described as “lightly battered chicken, crisply fried, served with a very light tangy-sweet sauce with a hint of ginger blossom.” Sounded good. Plus, it was on the “House Specialties” part of the menu, so that seemed a good bet.

The waiter asked me if I wanted white rice or brown rice.

“White rice,” I said, feeling like I should probably order brown but wanting white.

Our waiter took Jesse’s order, then turned toward the kitchen, stopping mid-pivot to ask, “Brown or white rice, did you say?”

I repeated “White,” and he was off. Jesse and I made small talk, I admired the paper lanterns, and we waited for our food. Eventually, Jesse’s order of dim sum came out. We waited for my order. Looked at the pale little dumplings on his plate. Kept waiting.

Eventually, I told him to go ahead and start his meal, fearing the dumplings would be ice cold before my entrée arrived. About a minute after he tucked into his dim sum, a plate arrived in front of me. With a side of brown rice.

No matter, I thought. Serves me right for going for the less healthy option.

Then, I began inspecting my dish. It appeared to be a clumpy mass of brown strips covered in some type of faded purple vegetable. The edges of the plate were dotted with sad-looking pale green broccoli, and I could see a few slices of what appeared to be uncooked zucchini under it all. But, not wanting to judge the dish based on its sad appearance, I stabbed a piece of chicken with my fork and took a bite.

I’m not sure how exactly to describe it. For the rest of the meal, I attempted to discern what it was I was actually eating, but the light was simply too low. The chicken was not battered all over, and it was fatty and may not have been fully cooked. I never was certain. The broccoli and zucchini were woefully undercooked. And the purple things on top? Cold. Not, this was once hot but sat around too long. Cold. It was some type of pickled vegetable. Everything appeared to have been dumped on the plate like macaroni and cheese served by a cafeteria lady in a hairnet.

I was so confused by my dish that for most of the meal I was just trying to figure out whether it was intentional. After a couple of the undercooked broccoli florets, though, I concluded it could not possibly be intentional.

But still, when the waiter came back to ask how everything was, I just looked at him with obvious pain in my eyes and a forced smile and nodded, my mouth full of food I didn’t want to swallow. I didn’t actually lie and say it was good. I never said it was good. But I neglected to state the most ridiculously obvious—that it was bad. Not just bad, but the chef quit and the busboy’s cooking bad.

The worst part was how expensive our meal ended up being. Jesse’s dim sum platter was mournfully insufficient, and while I had an enormous plate full of food, I couldn’t bear to finish even half of it. I declined the offers for a to-go box. And for all this misery, we paid nearly thirty dollars. I could have cried. Except I was too worried that I might have eaten raw chicken and that my stomach might be preparing to forcefully reject the meal, brown rice included.

If this had happened to Dad, I doubt he would have eaten the food, and I can’t imagine he would actually pay for it. I tried to think about Yana, who I’m sure would have sent the plate back to the kitchen so fast the waiter’s head would have been spinning. I tried to channel my inner Yana, but she simply wasn’t strong enough. Besides, I wouldn’t have eaten anything else from the kitchen after that plate. But, I could have refused to pay for it. Or something.

None of which I did. We paid our bill and left. And as we stopped by Islands to pick up a taco for Jesse, I resolved to never again eat and then pay for such a terrible meal. Next time, I promised myself, I would be assertive. It was my right, after all. I was paying for the meal. I should have been served something edible. Next time.

The fortune cookie, thankfully, was decent. I cracked mine open and just about died laughing.

It read: May you have a good appetite.

When we went to go to bed around 11:00, though, we knew something was really wrong. He hissed and growled when Jesse picked him up to put him in the laundry room. That’s when Jesse found the lump, a golf ball-sized bulge on his chest. It was obviously causing him pain. I called the emergency vet, and they suggested we bring him in. By this time, it was about half-past 11:00, and the roads were pretty empty. I was exhausted already; the day before, I’d started feeling like I was coming down with something.

We waited at the emergency vet, half-watching an episode of “Mythbusters” on the waiting room TV. The light in the waiting room was a little dim, and it was black outside. Then, we were led back to an examination room with a metal table in the middle, and black dog hair on the brown tile floor. The vet tech who worked with us was very friendly, and remarkably awake for the hour. She was the perfect one to work at a place like this—calming, unflappable. She took him in the back to shave the area. We warned her about Oliver’s typical behavior at the vet. For vaccinations, he has to be muzzled, and they usually bring in two extra vet techs to hold him down.

When she came back from shaving him, she informed us that the mass was an abscess and needed to be drained. We nodded our approval, and she left again. Then, we heard a yowl and a hiss (think: jungle cat), and she came back and asked if they could sedate him, as “he’s not being, um, entirely cooperative.” We agreed this would be the best thing for everyone involved. After awhile, the vet came in and told us the abscess had been lanced, the “purulent material expressed” (i.e. “it was green”). Oliver would be waking up soon, and we could take him home.

A little bit later, we heard the jungle cat sounds again, and then someone came in to get his carrier. They brought him back, and he just looked at us, like how could you?

Nearly $300 later, we left and went home. It was after 2:00 a.m. We took him out of his carrier, had a bit of a scare with frothy spit coming out of his mouth (apparently the stuff they used to clean the wound was bitter and made him try to spit it out), and put a cone collar on him so he couldn’t lick the wound, which was at this time bloody and truly awful looking.

We kept him in the bathroom, and the only time we slept more than two hours at a time was between 2:30 and 4:30. That’s when I woke up, worried he might be thirsty, so we checked on him and tried to get him to drink some water (he wasn’t interested). Then, every time I fell asleep I’d dream about him. Then, I’d wake up and listen for him. I could hear him trying to get the collar off, and the scrape of the plastic against linoleum or the bathroom cabinets kept waking me up in the times when I hadn’t been asleep long enough to start another dream.

Finally, I woke up to light outside and voices in the kitchen. Jesse’s parents were up. I listened for Oliver. The cone sounds had stopped. In fact, it was perfectly silent in the bathroom. Why wasn’t he making noise? He could hear them in the other room. He had to know we were up (he can hear from the laundry room when we’re up, and he immediately starts to bang on the door to remind us to let him out right now). But, nothing. I shook Jesse awake.

We cracked open the bathroom door and poked our heads in, fearing the worst. And there was Oliver, sitting next to the cone, looking rather satisfied with himself.

Since then, we’ve managed to get the cone on more securely, and so far he hasn’t gotten it off again. We take it off so he can eat and drink, but he seems to have made his peace with the cone, though he hasn’t mastered walking with it and still bumps into things. It’s truly pathetic. The most surprising part is that he allows us to put the cone on without putting up a fight. He just stretches his neck out and waits patiently until we finish.

The whole ordeal was scary and exhausting and terrible. I know this is part of having a pet. I know he’s not going to live forever. But, I hate this part. I don’t see why he can’t live forever. I cannot imagine the house without him.

He likes to sleep on one of the chairs from the kitchen table, as he can lay down with his cone hanging off the edge. I move the chair from one window to the next, depending on where I am. I can’t wait for him to be fully recovered and back to his old antics. I won’t even mind if he gets into the pantry and steals the last of my sourdough…

Some pictures:

So handsome, even with a plastic cone around his neck.

Gracie can’t figure it out.