Mabel

Like a lot of childless couples, my wife and I got a dog a year after we married. We had no plans to have children and we were at a point in our lives where a dog seemed like a good idea.

This was back in 2010, when we lived in Houston, a few months after my father had died. I’m not sure if there was a correlation. Losing a father, wanting a dog. When you’re in your early 30s, you’re looking toward the future, but my future didn’t seem particularly set. I’d bounced around during my 20s, working in coffee shops and restaurants before getting a couple of grad degrees and taking a job at the University of Miami that I left after two years. My first novel had been rejected by 15 publishers and my agent had given up trying. With my dad dying at 58 years old, I had a lot of ambition to live and live quickly. 

Perhaps that’s where the dog came in. It felt like starting anew and it felt like such a grown up thing to do. When your dad dies, you have the sinking feeling that you’re next. More than losing your virginity or buying a house, a dead parent turns you into an adult.

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Although we were intent on a dog, we weren’t ambitious. We didn’t visit shelters or

rescues. We just said, “let’s keep an eye out and we’ll get around to it.” What happens happens.

Then one night in January, we went to the Rice Village farmer’s market. It was cold that day,

cold for Houston, near freezing and people there—southerners—freaked out that their pipes would burst. We’d lived in New England for a long time, so we welcomed the cold.

The dogs, however, did not. Sandwiched between a baker and vegetable stand was a dog rescue. Not for any particular breed, just dogs taken from death row in hopes of being re-housed.

Most of them were designer dogs, the kind that were easily adoptable. Boston Terriers. Scrunched faces. Fashionable. But amongst them, was a little terrier, silver faced, bushy mop of hair on her head. Two coats to keep her skinny body warm.

“That one,” my wife and I said simultaneously.

We walked her around a bit, let her pee in the grass and she seemed quiet and gentle and she

smiled. Legit. She just had a smile on her face and I know this sounds sentimental—it’s hard not

to be about dogs and it’s hard to take for people who don’t understand dogs—but that’s what it

looked like.

“This is Spring,” the woman said.

Dumb name, I thought.

We agreed to take her.

After the paperwork was filled out, I went down to the woman’s house the next day, where she kept a lot of other dogs. She was a bit eccentric, it seemed. Personifying the dogs as if they were people in a way that made even me, a dog lover, uncomfortable. She spoke to them in baby talk.

When I got “Spring” outside, I put her in the backseat, but before I’d shifted into second, she’d

crawled on my lap and I drove that way with her home. Then, on the first walk, before my wife

had come home from work, “Spring” kept looking back at me, making sure I was there. Like a baby chick, I’d been impressed on her. I was her person.

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We took her to the vet the next day. Fleas. Ear mites. A $600 bill.

I called the woman, left a message asking for our money back. We could use it to get “Spring” healthy. 

She returned my call while I was teaching, leaving a long, windy message about how people want perfect dogs and how everyone doesn’t understand how hard she works and what sacrifices she makes and that she’d take “Spring” back.

All I’d wanted her to be was honest with me. She wasn’t. I was pissed.

My wife, however, saw it differently. “Sometimes you need to pay crazy to go away.”

So we never called her back.

By then, Spring had become Mabel. 

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We had ten good years together. My wife, Mabel, and I. We drove to California. We visited the Grand Canyon. We moved from Houston to Chapel Hill. There were dog parks and long walks. Nights where she curled between us, snoring, dreaming. She greeted me at home, jumping into my lap, putting her head under my chin, sighing. She loved tennis balls, her stuffed lamb chop, good ass scratches. 

Mostly, I remember her keeping me company. She slept under my desk as I wrote and graded papers. She occasionally hopped on my lap or demanded a walk while I was doing that. I wrote her into both of my books. A small silver terrier. 

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About six years after we adopted Mabel, my wife got pregnant. We’d talked about it a bit but hadn’t been ambitious about it. What happens, happens. It happened.

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During the pandemic, while my wife and I tried to work, and our son watched more television than he needed, Mabel was still hanging around. A little slower, a little sleepier. 

One afternoon, I took my son into the forest behind our home and we made a “fairy garden.” Decorating a tree with feather boas, beads, and spray paint. We put a tennis ball on a stump, one Mabel had found. We took her out there and let her sniff around. 

“I think she likes it,” my son said.

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I’m not sure why I’m writing about this, except that there was something similar about watching her deteriorate her last year of life, and watching my father do the same.  I’m still trying to figure it out. 

Maybe it’s the knowledge that their death was coming. The helplessness one feels as they watch someone you love die. This isn’t comparing the death of a dog and human. Not the scope or tragedy of it. Mabel was fifteen. My dad was 58. He could’ve lived longer if he’d made other choices. Mabel was just old. I’d always expected Mabel to die by this age. I thought I’d have my father for much longer. 

Or maybe it’s more about my own fear of death, the marching on of time that will lead to my own darkness. To my son watching me pass. The feeling that with every life I see go, my own is getting closer to the end. I’m not sure. I’m still trying to figure it out. As I watched Mabel die, my father kept coming back to me in my dreams. I’m not entirely sure why. 

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After Mabel died, my wife painted a stone with her name and paw prints. We took it out to the fairy garden behind our old house and placed it there near her tennis ball. 

A year later, while my son was out there, he touched it and said, “We miss you, Mabel.”