Please Ignore Vera Dietz by King A. S

Author:King, A. S. [King, A. S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 0375865861
Publisher: Ember
Published: 2010-10-12T06:00:00+00:00

On Mondays at the adoption center, new animals arrived that the vet had spayed or neutered over the weekend, and it was my job to make sure that they recovered and to keep their paperwork up to date. On Fridays, we had to ready new animals for the procedure and get them organized for pick-up at five. In July, the day after my all-boys-are-dicks conversation with Dad, there was a long-haired Afghan hound who’d been found in the park, covered in dried mud/feces/who-knows-what. He was scheduled for surgery on Sunday. One of the younger volunteers washed him (twice) and then gave him to me to brush.

It took over two hours to comb out the knots, little by little, without hurting him. He sat still and quiet for the most part, but yipped when I accidentally caught his skin with the metal teeth. I was instantly reminded of my mother, who would comb my hair every morning while staring into space, never stopping to apologize when she pulled too hard or made me cry. She did so many things with that vacant look on her face—as if she was daydreaming of living somewhere else.

Most days I didn’t think about my mother. She’d been gone three years, and a large part of me was happy about that. The older I got, the more I realized she’d never really been all there to begin with. The older I got, the more I realized that my happy-Mom memories were often fabrications invented to make me feel better about her being chronically unhappy.

Oddly, by midsummer, these sad realizations about my mother translated into a sort of talent. It started with a bet one day when a couple adopted a beagle I just knew they would return. Beagles are energetic, and these people looked like the type who liked constant calm.

When they left, I turned to Mrs. Parker and said, “I give them two days, tops.” The next day, right before closing, they returned the dog and asked if we had anything older or more docile.

From then on, when people came to adopt, Mrs. Parker would walk them through the paperwork and then she’d refer them to me.

I liked this new interaction with people—asking seemingly innocent questions about how much they loved their furniture or wall-to-wall carpeting. I liked how Mrs. Parker trusted my judgment (she called me her secret weapon), and though it was sad to see an animal returned to us, I was elated when my few hunches turned out to be right.

In late August, we got a box full of rescued Shih Tzu puppies. They were crawling with fleas and covered in scars and cuts and scrapes from being kept in a tiny gerbil cage. One of their siblings had died from being suffocated by the others, who were piled in on top of it. Though they smelled like death and were covered in matted, sometimes bloody fur, I fell completely in love with them.

Mrs. Parker said they needed foster homes because they were too young to stay at the center on their own overnight.

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