Family Affair (3 page)

When I was about seven, I once thought I recognized my dad at
the arcade on the Santa Monica Pier. I knew him from his skinny ankles. I didn’t remember much of the man, but his tapered jeans made his ankles stand out from the rest of his well-built form. He was playing Skee-Ball, that endlessly frustrating game where you roll a wooden ball down a lane, up a little ramp, and into a bull’s-eye with holes in it, the smallest and innermost circle yielding the most points. I remember the episode vividly because of what he bore on his shoulders: a little girl who should have been me. The girl looked nothing like him and probably belonged to his date, a lanky blonde with smoky eyes and a throaty laugh she emitted every time her spawn nearly fell from her perch.

I tugged at my mom’s sleeve and pointed at the happy threesome. “Is that my dad over there?” I asked.

“No, sweetie,” she said. “Of
course
that’s not your father.” But she spat at him on our way out. So add hallucinations to the list of gifts from Dear Old Dad.

Brooke and I get to Swingers and order one brownie sundae to share and two cups of coffee. I find that I’m eating the majority of our dessert, even though she was the one supposedly dreaming about it.

“I have to watch my girlish figure,” she says. “How else will I trick some poor schmuck into marrying me?”

“Love?” I offer.

“Yeah, how’s that workin’ out for ya?” she counters, with no small amount of snark.

“Very well,” I lie. Well, not lie, but I do admit that things have felt a little bit off lately. I can only attribute it to the fact that we’re nearing the middle of the season and Brett gets stressed out every year around this time, and it worsens as it goes along. Which I understand.

The waitress comes by and warms up our coffees. I think Brooke and I both notice that she wears a name tag that says
America
, but Brooke lacks the filter not to comment.

“America?” Brooke says. “Is that your name? I had a maid named America when I was little!”

“Brooke!” I say as I sink in my seat and smile apologetically at the waitress, who is glaring at us. She stalks off.

“What? I like the name. I was complimenting her.”

“I don’t think that falls under the compliment department,” I say.

Brooke feels bad, I can tell. “I
loved
America, if it’s any consolation,” she says. “Or maybe I just loved having a maid. That was awesome. That was when my mom was married to Lance and we lived on Roxbury Drive. Those were the days. He was so freakin’ rich. Too bad he turned out to be gay. Man, I loved having a maid. Oh, America, were you only around today.”

“Let’s just move on,” I say, looking around to make sure our waitress isn’t within earshot, uncomfortable at the mention of her name again.

People who are mean to waitstaff in restaurants are a major pet peeve of mine. I know Brooke really didn’t mean anything bad by it, but she can be a little clueless at times. On the other hand, at least she didn’t mention the waitress’s horse with no name. It’s just a hot button for me, since I spent so much time in restaurants growing up.

My mom worked at Carlo’s Pizza and Trattoria, which was more pizzeria than trattoria, what with the paper plates translucent from grease, orders hollered over constant chatter, and shabbily dressed clientele, but Carlo, the owner, thought using the word classed up the joint. In retrospect, I’m pretty sure he wasn’t even Italian.

My mom worked there since I was about twelve years old. I did most of my homework assignments, ate most of my meals, and gained most of my freshman fifteen (which I’ve heard wasn’t supposed to happen until I was a
college
freshman) at Carlo’s. I also took AP Human Nature there, which came in the form of being delivery girl for two years, once I got my license. And a hostess prior to that blessed day. I learned that people will try to
get away with just about anything—and will succeed as much and for as long as you let them. People push until you push back, and nobody illustrated this better than the customers.

I won’t bore you with the details, because they’re mostly unimportant, but let’s just say that “Keep the change” can be very misleading. You don’t know embarrassment until you’ve started to walk away with two dollars and eighty-seven cents only to have some guy yell after you, “Hey, where do you think you’re going? I said keep the
change.”
Or the other variation is the bill coming to nineteen dollars and thirty-nine cents and the customer handing you a twenty-dollar bill, saying, “Don’t worry about the change.” Okay: a) What makes you think I’m going to worry about sixty-one cents? And b) I
am
worried if that’s my tip. I want to go see a movie, not buy a stamp.

For all the obnoxious customers, and after all the days I complained to my mom until I was blue in the face, I’d do it all over again, times a thousand, if I could just laugh with my mom again. We often ended up laughing about all my complaints regarding the job. Her eyes crinkled when she cracked up, and she’d shake her head back and forth as if to force away the humor because she was embarrassed by her laugh. It was a magnificent laugh.

My mom—my beautiful, overworked mother—died of breast cancer when I was in the tenth grade. I’d thought my life was over, too. If it wasn’t for Brett and his family, it might have been. Brett and I had been dating for about eight months when my mom was diagnosed—he was one of the few guys who didn’t open with a Clapton joke; his own music knowledge wouldn’t allow for such a “gimme”—and for a year and three months when she was dying. The Fosters took me in like I was part of their family. I moved in for a week when she first passed away because I didn’t want to be alone, and I never quite got around to moving back out. We never made anything official, seeing as they kept expecting my absentee dad to report back in, but after a while it was like I’d been born one of them. We were a new team. All of us. I loved it.

So, yes, I’ve lived with my then boyfriend/now husband since high school. Which makes me either very cool or very Appalachian, but in any event, Brett and I dated through high school, then went to the same college, and we got married right after graduation. His mom, Ginny, is awesome. I couldn’t ask for a better surrogate. His sister, Trish, was my maid of honor, and his dad, Bill, walked me down the aisle. Trish and I started our own pet photography business—by which I mean we take pictures of animals, not that I have numerous photography businesses and this is my favorite—in which I’m the photographer/product developer/customer-service person, and she’s the marketing/ accounting/ everything-else person. It’s another team that means a lot to me.

I’d always known I wanted to work with animals, but I had no idea I’d end up a pet photographer. My first attempt to break in to the animal business was at Miller Animal Hospital. I’d decided I wanted to become a veterinarian but wanted to test the waters before I went to school for it. I got a job as an assistant veterinary technician, but the only opening they could offer was the graveyard shift—which I enthusiastically accepted, hoping to distinguish myself as an eager-and-willing future vet.

My first night’s excitement was a phone call that came in at one a.m. from a panicked woman having a crisis because her dog refused to look at her. She kept calling the dog, “Edgar! Edgar!” but it came out more like “Ed-gah!” because she had the not-so-subtle remnants of a New York accent. “See? He won’t look at me!” Obviously I couldn’t
see
, since I was on the phone with her.

“Have you done something to betray his trust?” I asked. “My old dog wanted nothing to do with me when I switched his regular dog food to that stuff in the blue bag.”

“I didn’t change his food!” she said. And then she yelled again, “Edgar!”

“Do you happen to have a hat made out of ham? I’ll bet that would get his attention.”

She had no ham hat, and wasn’t enjoying my hypothesizing. I didn’t know what else to do, so I said she could just bring him in. I knew there wasn’t anything wrong with the dog. I knew that like I knew that Matthew McConaughey would appear shirtless in the next week’s
Us Weekly
—and like I now know that husbands, like dogs, sometimes won’t look at you—but I was bored, and this was going to be my first client. Plus, as far as I was concerned, any and all canines were welcome to visit me anytime.

The woman arrived about twenty-five minutes later with a shower cap on her head and the remnants of cold cream along her hairline. She thrust Edgar, a shar-pei—terrier mix, onto the front desk. Of course no dog likes to balance precariously on a ledge five feet off the ground, so he looked like a quivering Don Knotts. True to the shar-pei half of his heritage, his face had a landslide of doggie skin that weighed so heavily on his eyes it’s a wonder he could look at anything at all. Of course, this also made him look like he could have been hatched from the woman, who had a similar landslide of skin overtaking her face. I won’t mention her lipstick, which looked like it had been drawn on with oversized clown makeup.

“Edgar!” she shouted at him. “Edgar!” No response.

So I gave it a try. “Edgar?” I gently called. No response. Then I got the idea to change my pronunciation: “Ed-gah?”

And that actually did it. He
looked
at me. Thus making it clear that eye contact wasn’t the problem and that he wasn’t going deaf.

“Ma’am,” I said. “I think… I mean, I’m pretty sure he just looked at me …so I think he’s okay. At least, as far as eye contact goes.”

“Why won’t he look at
me
, then?” she asked.

I didn’t have an answer. Except that maybe her high-pitched Brooklynese was unsettling even to him, and he didn’t want to encourage her speaking any more than necessary. I was smart enough not to propose this. Brooke probably would have.

“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, even though clearly she was
worried since she’d brought poor Edgar in—which I suppose was technically my fault.

“Me and you,” she said to the mutt—which ironically came out sounding like “Mean you”—“we never had problems communicatin’ before. Why won’t you look at me?”

I never got a chance to hear his response, if Edgar was going to give one. (I wonder sometimes if it would help me with Brett now.) Dr. Eisen, the on-call vet, walked in at that point from his napping post in the back and asked what was going on. His eyes were bloodshot from resting on his arm instead of a pillow, and he had a crease in his cheek from his shirt.

When the woman explained her crisis and his eyes turned to me—eyes that said,
Really? You actually told this woman to leave her home at one a.m. and come here because her dog wouldn’t look at her
?—I had no excuse. Edgar got his complimentary dog biscuit and they left the office, and Dr. Eisen explained in a borderline-hostile tone that we were open after-hours only for emergencies, and that if we let every crazy person bring their pets in at all hours, we’d be jeopardizing the lives of the pets that needed real emergency attention. Then he went back to sleep.

Not twenty minutes later there was an actual emergency, and it proved to be more than I could bear. A woman stormed through the front doors and fell to the floor with her yellow Lab in her arms. He’d been hit by a car, was bleeding from several spots, and his breathing was shallow. The woman was in tears, and I’d like to say I comforted her, but I had no experience in such matters and instead fell to the floor with her and her dog, and started to cry as well. Wail, in fact. I sobbed with the woman as if the dog was
our
pet. Of course, I’d yelled for Dr. Eisen first, and when he rushed out to bring the dog to an exam room, I could tell by his look of disdain that I was going to get another talking-to.

“Layla, please follow me,” he said sternly.

I got up, brushed off my pants, and trailed him to the back. I held the dog and petted his head as Dr. Eisen cleaned and
stitched the wounds, my face drenched in tears and my chest heaving from heavy sobs. Every time I regained my composure, the dog would look at me with his large brown eye—the only one that was visible as he lay on his side—and I would lose it all over again.

Once the dog was sedated and resting comfortably, Dr. Eisen sat me down.

“Layla,” he said, and then took a breath—that breath you always know is going to be followed with bad news. “I appreciate your enthusiasm for this job and your love of animals, but judging from tonight, I don’t think this is the right field for you.”

“But—”

I started to defend myself, but he cut me off instantly. “There will be far worse cases, much more blood. Some animals—many—won’t make it, and you need to be tough.”

“I
am
tough,” I said, as I reached my tongue up and toward the right to catch another salty tear.

But that was it. I was fired. After one night on the job. Not even after a night—after four hours. Veterinary school would not be in my future. Which was fine, I suppose. One unresponsive Edgar and an overly empathic response to a wounded Lab’s owner saved me the additional four-year school commitment after the standard undergrad time. And after messing around taking pictures at a dog park one day, I realized that I was actually better at something
else
involving pets. And now I’m in the right place—at least, regarding my job. Sometimes it’s good not to get what you want.

Also, I like that the animals don’t tend to die on you from getting their pictures taken. Sorry—their “portraits.” We’re trying to go upscale.

“You know all this talk about SUVs and how bad they are for the environment?” Brooke says, as she swipes the last bite of our sundae. “Do you know there’s a huge tax break if you buy one that’s over a certain weight and you claim it as a business-only vehicle?”

“If you’re a farmer,” I say.

“I’m serious. They’re called
light trucks
. They’re classified as a work truck. And you can essentially write the whole thing off on your taxes. So basically you can get a free Hummer!”

“You just wanted to say ‘free Hummer.’”

“No, I’m seriously gonna get one.”

“Not to be a stickler for details,” I say, “but you don’t even have a job. I’m pretty sure you need a business, or at least a job, anyway, to be able to write things off.”