Holler, Child by LaToya Watkins

Author:LaToya Watkins [Watkins, LaToya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

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3. The microwave dings and Jules lifts his head from his paws. He wants to eat. He stopped eating dog food when the fruit started falling. I was worried about him at first. The vet had scolded me for three years about him being overweight, but his refusal to eat his food and the rapid weight loss startled me. I thought he was dying. But then I started finding persimmon seeds, sucked dry, in the house and all around the concrete carport outside. There are other trees on the property. “Twenty mature fruit trees,” the “For Rent” ad had boasted. But persimmon is the only fruit for Jules. I laughed about it. Then it became normal. My dog turned fruitarian.

I had Jules when I met Phoenicia. We lived in my Arts District loft together. Where I grew up, dogs living inside wasn’t a thing. Rusty lived his entire life hooked to a stake beside our trailer. We never bonded, but not because of that. Rusty belonged to my father, who always made his ownership clear. I was never allowed to pet Rusty. To feed him. To look at him at all, really. The one time I tested my father—whistled at the dog and sang his name out sweetly—I ended up tied to the tree next to him. My father made me stay there for an hour, out there with the dog. He watched me the whole time, standing there with his whipping cord in hand, daring me to move with his eyes. I could hear my mother’s muffled cries through the open bedroom window. I was six years old then. I never really looked at Rusty again after that.

I found Jules in a potato sack in the bushes of the park where I used to jog. The vet figured that a breeder had left him there to die because he was born with a slight case of Wobbler syndrome. “Idiots,” the vet had said. “They only care about the money.”

He told me I could leave the dog, that he’d call his Great Dane rescue friends, but I decided to keep him. To rescue him myself. To have what I never got a chance to have with Rusty. And it was one of the best things I’ve ever done. He’s a good dog. But even if he wasn’t, I can’t imagine kicking him the way my father did Rusty. Depriving him of food. Tying him to a tree. And, at first, that helped me believe that I was nothing like my father. Would never be anything like him.

Phoenicia explained to me early on that she wasn’t a dog person, that she’d been bitten by a neighbor’s pit bull as a girl, but I assured her—made her understand—that Jules was the gentlest creature she’d ever meet, that he was a part of me. I’ll never forget how she tilted her head and smiled at that. And she made an honest effort to get comfortable with him. To get to know him.

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