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Authors: Cathy Lamb

BOOK: A Different Kind of Normal
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Boat believes he is a human. He wears a pink collar and a tiny gold bell even though Boat is a boy dog.
“I brought home a red collar and he refused to put it on. Bah!” Arty told me one day as he lay in bed, heart failure chasing him down. “I go back out and get him a green collar. Wouldn’t wear it, dumb dog. Bah.”
“Stubborn dog,” Mrs. Mossovsky said. She was knitting a pink sweater for a three-year-old great-great-granddaughter named Margaret. Her fingers didn’t move nimbly anymore but the love was there.
“That bad dog gives the word
stubborn
a new definition. What is he, a fashion model dog?” Mr. Mossovsky rasped out, struggling a bit for breath. “I go back out to the pet store again and I get him a pink collar with the jangly bell, that’s all they have left in his size. His neck is the size of a tree trunk. Tree trunk dog. I should have named him Tree Trunk!” He slapped a hand on the sheet.
“Why did you name him Boat?” I asked.
“Because his feet are so floppy they remind me of boats! Boating! And I got a hankering for boats. Had to go boating on Saturdays to get a break from the Mrs.” He pointed to his wife, next to him in bed, whom he adored.
Mrs. Mossovsky leaned over slowly, her bones not working so quick anymore, and kissed Mr. Mossovsky on the cheek, her white curls soft. She is also on hospice care because she is also suffering from heart failure. No, it is not odd that they have the same thing. They are ninety-three. Hearts go.
“The Mrs. has lush lips,” Arty told me. “See them? Always has. That’s why I married her when we were eighteen. I saw those lips and I said, ‘Margaret, I can’t live without those lush lips. Will you marry me?’ ”
Mrs. Mossovsky chuckled. She’d heard the joke thousands of times, but they still found it funny together. She poked a knitting needle at him. “Stop that, Arty. Don’t get fresh.”
“Fresh?” he wheezed. “Fresh? Don’t let me get started on your Tillie and Tabby.”
Tillie and Tabby are Mrs. Mossovsky’s
breasts,
yes, they are. Tillie and Tabby reminded me of Tate’s General Noggin, Bert and Ernie, Billy and Bob. . . .
“Arty!” she admonished, a tiny voice from a tiny woman whose tiny heart was slowing. “Now, stop! Stop!”
But it was routine, she knew it, I knew it.
Arty winked at me. “Best breasts in the nation, right there.” He pointed at his wife’s breasts as if I would not be able to locate them on my own. “Always thought that, too. She nursed all seven of our kids and she still has a rack that gets me going, can’t help myself. I love the Mrs.”
“That’s wonderful news, Arty,” I said. “Precious.”
“Yeah. That woman has made me a lucky man. Lucky almost every night, that right, Margaret?”
“Arty! That’s enough! Stop!” Mrs. Mossovsky continued to knit. I saw the smile. She wasn’t embarrassed. She was ninety-three years old and there was no such time for that foolishness anymore.
“And Boat?” I prodded Arty.
“The bad dog, Boat. What a bizarre, frisky dog. I think he’s gay. Gay as gay can be! Gay! One of our sons is gay. The nicest one, I will say. I like his husband, too. Brian. Nice guy. Right, Margaret?”
“Right,” she answered. “We love Brian. Carpenter. He made us a dining room table. Sits the whole family!”
“Sits the whole family, that’s right! It’s a finely crafted table! He’s a wood artist! So the gay dog, that—Boat.” He pointed at the dog lying on his king-sized bed at their feet as if I couldn’t locate the dog, either. “He doesn’t like the red collar, doesn’t like the green collar, and I come home and I show him the pink collar with that clingy-clangy bell on it. As soon as Boat sees it, he starts barking, jumpin’ around like he’s a kangaroo or something, twirling around, and I put it on his neck and he loves it! Loves it! Don’t you?” He raised a weakened hand to Boat’s head and petted it. “You gay dog, you. Bah!”
“How old is Boat?”
“Old! He’s damn old. We spend hundreds every month on his medical care, don’t we, Margaret?”
“Hundreds!” she agreed.
“He has special food. Special vitamins. He has bad hips, a bad heart, can’t see so good, partly deaf, or maybe he’s faking that part, I don’t know. He’s old and sick. Same as me and Margaret here. Poor Margaret,” he whispered, but he wasn’t skilled at whispering. “She’s got a bad heart, too. I’m not going until after Margaret. I gotta be around to fight off all the men, you know.”
“That’s a fine idea, Arty. I’d stick around, too.”
“The Mrs. is sexy as hell.”
“Sexy!” Margaret mocked. She was still stunning. Perfect bone structure doesn’t quit. Neither does peace. Peace makes a face lovely.
“The gay dog, Boat, likes a pink collar. What does he expect me to do? Paint his fingernails pink? Give him a pink bow? You’d want all that, wouldn’t you?” He petted the Saint Bernard. “Pink all over. I’m a man. I don’t wear pink. Blue. Gray. Brown. Those are my colors. Margaret wears pink. She’s got three pink negligees. I know, ’cause I bought them for her. She wears them to bed all the time, isn’t that right, boobs?”
“Arty, please! Stop! Jaden is here.”
“I don’t care, sweets. I like to see you naked. I want to see you naked now.”
“I will be soon, Arty. Take a nap first.”
“Nap schnapps. Naps are boring. When I’m dead I’ll be able to take all the naps I want.”
Whenever Arty or Margaret left the bed, Boat the Saint Bernard would get gingerly off, so carefully, and wobble around to keep an eye on them. He was old. He didn’t have long.
The night that Arty started to die, Margaret called me over to their house.
“Dear, I can’t do this alone. All the kids are coming, but I want you here in case. Please, Jaden?”
The large bedroom held the whole family that night. I knew all of them because they were constantly visiting, helping around the house, mowing the lawn. They were an emotionally healthy family, cheerful, polite, and grieving, but accepting of their father’s illness, and their mother’s illness, and what that meant. Their oldest son was seventy-one. The youngest member of the family was a one-year-old.
Arty left this world peacefully, with some medication from me to keep him comfortable, Margaret in bed with him, with her knitting, Boat in there, too, the kids and grandkids all around.
Right before he died, though, his eyes opened and he found Margaret.
“Hello, Margaret, my Margaret,” he rasped out. “I love you. I have always loved you.”
“Oh, Arty, I love you, too.” Margaret’s tears dropped on Arty’s face.
“I’m sorry, my love. I wanted to see you out first, but it doesn’t seem it will work out that way. I will wait for you, Margaret. We’ll go into heaven together.”
He took in his loving, crying family and smiled; then Boat wobbled up the bed and licked Arty’s face and he petted his bad dog. Boat put his head on Arty’s chest.
With his eyes on Margaret, Arty’s lids slowly closed. Within two hours he was dead.
When his heart stopped, Boat lifted that huge head off Arty’s chest and licked his face. He licked Margaret’s face, then gingerly left the bed with the help of two great-granddaughters and creaked over to a corner and stood staring up at it, the bell on his pink collar ringing. He didn’t move for thirty minutes; he stood and stared at that corner. He barked a few times.
I knew what he was doing. I’d seen it before with animals and their owners.
Arty was up in the corner. He was waiting. He was watching. He was saying his good-byes to the sobbing family members in his bedroom.
Within one week Margaret was dead, too, Boat beside her, his head on her chest. I was there, as were the kids and generations of grandkids. Boat licked Margaret’s face, then gingerly left the bed again, so painfully, the bell on his pink collar ringing. He stared at the same corner and barked a few times.
The next morning Boat died.
Now this could be seen as a tragic story, but it’s not. Margaret and Arty were in their nineties. Their lives had been long and blessed, with both fortune and trouble, but they had each other through it all and they had their children and grandchildren. Boat was ten years old. He was an adored dog.
They had had it all.
 
I want to have an Arty and Margaret kind of love.
I want to have a Grace and Russ and a Faith and Jack kind of love. Grandma Violet told me both couples were “mad for each other.” I think we all want that love madness. We all want someone we will be
in love
with forever. Not a rather vague love, the kind you have for a spouse who’s been pretty good over the years, and you’re used to each other, and you’re friends, and you have kids together and you’ve built a life. That’s a valuable love, too. It’s a gift. To have someone you love walk through life with you, that you really like, is a blessing.
But what we all crave, I think, is the
in love
relationship.
Where the passion for each other is still burning when you are old and dying, your hands wrinkled, your face showing decades well lived, in bed together, holding hands, a bad dog like Boat at your feet.
I wanted to have a Boat at my feet with Ethan.
I smashed down the utter loss I felt and buried it in my loneliness.
 
On the last night of tryouts I picked up Tate at the gym.
I waited and waited, outside in my car, in the dark, the cold rain streaming down.
They were five minutes late, ten minutes, fifteen. I saw one kid after another come out of the gym and climb into cars.
Charlie with the braces came ambling out. Milt and Anthony climbed into their mom’s car. Kendrick who resembled a gecko came out.
No Tate.
I envisioned him in the locker room, hiding, head down.
I envisioned him up on the bleachers. Maybe he’d run there to cry?
I envisioned him walking home through the rain, too distraught to face me.
I closed my eyes and tried to get a hold of my quaking emotions. All these years he hadn’t played basketball on a team. If I had let him play, he’d have done better in tryouts. I slapped a hand to my forehead. Had I been too paranoid about his safety? Was I making the right decision even now? What if he made it? What if he didn’t? How would he feel? What were the repercussions either way?
I heard a pounding on my window and sat straight up.
It was Tate.
He wasn’t smiling.
I climbed out of the car and stood in the drenching rain, facing him. “Tate?”
He didn’t move for long seconds, then slowly, dramatically slowly, a grin spread across his face.
“Oh my gosh,” I breathed. “Oh my gosh! Did you make it?”
His arms flew up into the air. “I made it, Boss Mom, I made it!”
He picked me up, swung me around, then stood back and did a jig in the rain.
A jig. Exactly like the jig my mother had taught him to do when singing a song from
The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas
.
I did the jig with him, then he hugged me again, lifting me off my feet.
“Thanks Mom thanks Mom thanks Mom!”
I had never, truly, seen that kid so happy.
He had made the basketball team.
It was miraculous. It was exciting.
I was thrilled for him.
I was scared to death.
 
I called Coach Boynton that night.
There was nothing he could do about my medical concerns and I knew that. So I went to concern number two.
“I am concerned that Tate will be made fun of by the other teams.”
“I know all the coaches. I’ll tell them about Tate, and they’ll talk to their teams. Hopefully the message will get out that they are to be respectful toward Tate as are the students at their school. I can’t guarantee you anything in that area, and they can’t either, Jaden, but we’ll try our best.” He sniffled. He’s sensitive. “I worry about that with Tate, too.”
“I’ve worried for seventeen years.”
“I know.”
“I didn’t want him to play.”
“I know that, too, but, Jaden, how do you stop this?”
“What do you mean?”
“The kid has a dream and you know teenagers. When they dream, they dream wide and far, whether it’s realistic or not, and anyone who stands in their way becomes the enemy.”
“I have been that enemy.”
“I’m sorry, I am.”
“Okay, Robert. He can play.”
He whooped. “This is gonna be a hell of a year, Jaden, hell of a year.”
“Keep him safe or you’ll lose the family jewels.”
“Letty would come after you for that. The family jewels belong to her, after all.”
“Then watch out for my kid or I’m comin’ after you.”

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