The Dog Lived by Teresa J. Rhyne

Author:Teresa J. Rhyne [Rhyne, Teresa J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks

Chapter 3

A FAMILY OUTING

I loathe Christmas.

I loathe the entire month of December. (Let me get this out of the way: I also dislike chocolate and spa treatments, which once caused a friend to comment to Chris, “It’s like you’re dating a unicorn.”) I can recall only one Christmas that was distinctly enjoyable—I was six years old, and my parents gave me a black cockapoo puppy on Christmas Eve. I named him Tippit (quickly shortened to Tippy) after watching him run around our house knocking over the cocktail glasses my parents and their friends left on the floor next to their chairs. After that, though, Christmas was a series of arguments as my parents’ marriage fell apart and then a logistical nightmare over which parent’s house the kids would be at when. When my parents each remarried, we struggled with how to blend families and traditions while multiplying the logistics to now include step-relatives. My siblings and I spent most Christmases driving from one home to the next. Several times I had fast food for Christmas dinner. Once we finally grew past that stage, our luck changed—for the worse.

I was away at law school when Tippy died—in December. A few years later, my brother Jay had a motorcycle accident on December 1 and wound up in intensive care, not expected to live. He spent a week in a coma and several more weeks in intensive and critical care and then a rehab facility. The family spent Christmas at his hospital bedside in the critical care unit of the General Hospital. He survived, with a twelve-inch scar down his chest, a few nuts and bolts in his body, and no memory of December. A few years after that, my father’s wife Faye died from a brain aneurysm while standing in her kitchen baking Christmas cookies on December 23. Her funeral was on her birthday, December 29. The following year, my sister-in-law Jennifer lost her mother to cancer on December 14. The funeral was December 23. The year after that my stepfather Ted lost both of his parents between Thanksgiving and Christmas.

So, yeah, I loathe not just Christmas, but the entire month of December.

Chris, on the other hand, loved Christmas and the whole holiday season. He told me how his mother decorated their entire house, starting the process in mid-November. He enjoyed the trees she put up (I noted the plural with dismay), the decorations (she collected nutcrackers), the parties (several that were lifelong traditions), the food (I can’t imagine family recipes not printed on a take-out menu), and, of course, the presents. Lots and lots of presents. He even loved watching all the holiday specials on television. He enjoyed the season, and he wanted to celebrate together. With his family.

We’d only been together for six months—and “together” was a loose term. I was not ready to meet his parents. Initially, we’d kept things between us private. Not even our writer’s group knew we were dating. Mostly, we spent our weekends together in my house with only the beagle as a witness, and that worked out well.

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