Ten minutes later, I’m sitting at home eating my takeout pizza and wondering if Richmond is being equally bad. In an effort to mitigate my sin, I drop the end crusts onto the floor so Hoover can do the thing that earned him his name. After sucking up every last crumb, he goes to the door and whines to be let out. That’s when it hits me. Tomorrow’s trip to Chicago is likely to be an all-day event. And Hoover, though he has done remarkably well thus far, hasn’t had his bladder tested for more than an eight-hour span.
The responsibilities of dog ownership weren’t uppermost in my mind when I found him, especially since I wasn’t sure I’d be keeping him. I ran a lost-and-found ad in the local paper, but got no response. I’ve had him for nearly a month now and with each passing day he steals a little more of my heart. Even Rubbish adores him. It’s easy to see why, because as companions go, Hoover is damned near perfect. He senses when my mood needs lifting, listens patiently to everything I say, keeps me warm in bed at night, and shares my taste in ice cream. If only I could find all those traits in a man.
While I’m overjoyed to have Hoover, his presence does leave me with certain scheduling issues I didn’t have before. As I let him outside and watch him wander about sniffing until he finds the perfect place to piddle, I consider taking him along tomorrow. But we’ll be riding in Hurley’s car to who knows where and for how long, so I quickly dismiss that idea. I then think about asking Izzy and Dom to take care of him but I’m hesitant to impose on Izzy any more than I already have, and besides, the less I have to face Izzy while I’m withholding information from him, the better.
I would ask my sister, Desi, but she, Lucien, and the kids all left town early this morning to drive to Arizona to spend Thanksgiving with Lucien’s parents.
That leaves my mother. The obvious problem with this idea is that my mother is a serious germaphobe and I suspect a puppy will look like a giant agar plate to her. But she is also a hypochondriac, and that aspect of her personality gives me an idea.
“Come on, Hoover,” I say. “Let’s go for a ride.”
Thanks to today’s rising temperature, a good deal of the snow that fell Thursday night has melted. As a result, a lot of what was white and pristine yesterday is now gray and slushy, turning Hoover’s tootsies into mud magnets. I’m not too worried about him muddying up the back of the hearse. I was told when I bought it that the rear carpeting was some industrial-strength commercial stuff that would resist the most insistent of stains. Given the cargo that was typically carried back there before I bought it, I shudder to think what tests the carpet company ran to be able to make that claim. But because my mother would probably go screaming in terror at the site of mud-caked paws, I grab an old towel from the house and clean off Hoover’s feet the best I can.
There’s no need to call ahead to see if Mother will be home because the woman rarely ventures out of the house. According to her, the outside world is full of horrible threats: germs, radiation, cancer-inducing sun rays, skin-wrinkling poisons, secondhand smoke, airborne pesticides . . . and that’s before she starts thinking up the more bizarre dangers, like getting your head split open by “turdites”—her word for those frozen, blue meteorites that are created when crap gets jettisoned from airliner toilets. I’ve always thought Mother could score big in Hollywood—the makers of disaster movies could learn a thing or two from her when it comes to thinking up ways for people to be annihilated.
Mother’s long-term paranoia and hypochondria have definitely shaped my psyche and may have been why I chose to be a nurse. As a young child I kept expecting her to turn up dead any time, either from one her many supposed ailments, or some uncanny and unfortunate accident. As a result, I was always choosing alternative caregivers from among my friends’ parents and imagining what a more normal life might be like. Over the years Mom dragged me along with her to hundreds of doctor appointments, an experience that always proved terrifying. But my fright didn’t stem from a fear of Mom’s illnesses or possible death—by the age of ten I began to suspect that her only real sickness was a mental one. Instead I was scared to death of being mortified by her behavior.
Because of her fear of germs and her belief that doctors’ offices are giant petri dishes, incubating all the horrific diseases of every patient ever seen there—a fear that unfortunately has some foundation in truth—she would always refuse to sit in the waiting room. Instead she would insist on being taken back to an exam room immediately upon her arrival. If she wasn’t, she would raise a fuss until she got her way, something that typically happened pretty quickly since the front desk people were always anxious to shut her up and get her in the back so she would quit scaring the other patients.
Unfortunately, getting past the waiting room was only half the battle. Once Mom got to an exam room, she would make the nurses go through a rigorous cleaning procedure that she had to personally supervise, an exhausting process that often took fifteen minutes or more and plucked the last nerve on the most patient of nurses.
As a result of all these idiosyncrasies, Mom knows every generalist and specialist in town because she has seen and made herself persona non grata with most of them. Nowadays she travels nearly an hour to see her doctor and she has toned down her behavior quite a bit. I think she finally realized she was running out of options and would soon be forced to weigh her fear of flying against her fear of death because the only doctors left who would be willing to see her would be too far away to drive to.
My marrying a doctor certainly helped things, and in my mother’s eyes it’s the one thing in life I did right. When I started dating David, she was ecstatic; when we became engaged, she nearly had an orgasm. She can’t understand why I now want to divorce him over something as mundane as infidelity. I have to admit that David, despite his many faults, has always been a veritable font of patience when it comes to my mother. And she definitely pushes the limits, calling him often and at all hours of the day and night. If I had a dollar for every house call David ever made to my mother, I’d be pulling into her driveway right now in something a whole lot nicer than a hearse.
Today there is another car in Mom’s drive and it’s one I recognize. It belongs to William-not-Bill Hanover, a nerdy, germaphobic accountant with a bad case of OCD and an even worse comb-over. William was my blind date for a Halloween party a few weeks ago and the results were nothing short of catastrophic. However, he proved to be a perfect, albeit younger match for my mother. Apparently the sharing of a common mental illness is a powerful aphrodisiac.
I leash Hoover and head for the front door, trying to sidestep the slush piles to keep his paws as clean as possible. Apparently Mother either saw or heard me pull up because the door whips open before I reach the porch. She looks at Hoover with a horrified expression and claps a hand to her chest. Her normally pale skin is whiter than usual; she looks like one of those pale, see-through creatures you might see on a National Geographic special about the denizens of the Mariana Trench.
“What is that?” she says, pointing at Hoover and curling her lip in repugnance.
“It’s a dog, Mom. I’m pretty sure you’ve seen one before.”
She gives me a disgusted look. “I know it’s a dog. I meant why do you have it? And what is it doing here?”
“It is a he,” I say. “And he’s mine. I found him a few weeks ago starving and abandoned, so I took him in.”
“Dogs are filthy creatures,” she says, wrinkling her face. “They harbor fleas and worms and that mange stuff where their skin sloughs off like someone with Hansen’s disease.”