Sit Stay Heal by Mel Miskimen
Author:Mel Miskimen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2016-07-12T16:00:00+00:00
Chapter Seventeen
Doggy in a Can
The landscape at the kennel club was quieting down from the loud greens of summer to the softer, muted palette of autumn. Seamus was working hard trying to locate the dummy my father had hidden in a little rise of tall grass the color of the raw-sienna crayon in the Crayola box. We were doing a blind retrieve. The dog had to use its nose to find the dummy. Expert handlers can get their dogs to turn their backs on the action, then turn back around and go on command. I was not an expert, and Seamus craned his head to follow my father’s movements, which defeated the purpose. “Cheater!” I said when Seamus came back with a mouth full of dummy.
Even though it was early October, it had snowed. Not much. Just a dusting. Still, I wasn’t prepared. My warm clothes were in the attic in their plastic vacuum-sealed bag. Winter clothes, like the furnace, weren’t supposed to be put on until later, as in Halloween later. My father stood next to me and cleared his throat. I hoped he wasn’t getting sick. But would it surprise me? Not after the year he’d had.
We were walking back to the truck, letting Seamus run around and sniff things, when my father said, “I had to take Aunt Florence for her, uh, final arrangements.”
When Dad wasn’t giving me helpful tips regarding my retriever-in-progress, he was busy taking care of the elderly—Mugsy, his fourteen-year-old field-trial champion, who couldn’t hear and didn’t know what his back legs were up to, and my great-aunt Florence, who also couldn’t hear, was partially blind, and, like the dog, could no longer jump up into my father’s truck. Between the three of them, at eighty-four, he was the spring chicken. If my dog-year math is correct, Mugsy came in around ninety-one and Florence…714.
She lived around the block from my parents, in her own home, widowed since the 1980s. She and her husband had had no children, and because my mother and father had this 1940s Greatest Generation sense of duty, they saw to her needs: dinner, groceries, and home maintenance—jobs made increasingly more difficult as she (and they) aged.
Aunt Florence was born in 1911. She never went to high school, was the youngest of twelve. She had worked for years in the hosiery department at Gimbels—before employees were “associates” and customers were “guests,” when salesladies wore black with a simple strand of pearls and got the box of stockings for you from behind the counter. She still scrubbed her kitchen floors (on hands and her original knees), kept all of her tchotchkes dust free, and somehow managed to go down the steep and narrow basement stairs to do her laundry with an old wringer-type washing machine: “It still works. Why should I get rid of it?” She didn’t cook anymore; she just reheated.
My father was her meals on wheels, her groundskeeper, accountant, and snow-removal man. Not only was he responsible for her driveway
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