Giant George (16 page)

And I was, in all the ways that really mattered in life, but he wasn’t playing ball on this one. So I had to be clever and
outsmart him with my brainpower. And, applying it, I worked out that if I drove around to the parking lot out back, I could take him into the clinic via the back door instead. Of course, he wasn’t stupid, so this solution would continue working only as long as he didn’t suffer any further indignities at the hands of the good doctor, but since I couldn’t imagine anything worse than him losing his
cojones, I figured we were good for the foreseeable future. And should something unpleasant involving knives or needles need to happen, then I’d just have to come up with a Plan C—a Plan C that might need to involve a whole bunch of heavy-lifting gear, but I decided we’d cross that bridge if and when we came to it.

In the meantime, George was in, and up on the doc’s scales, and I was in for something
of a shock. Not that it would be a complete shock when it came: there was the way the doc whistled after he’d led George up on the platform and the way his eyebrows shot up when he read off the number on the scale. But when he spoke, I knew exactly what I expected him to say. And he did.

“You know, Dave,” he said, as George stepped back down off the platform, “in all my years in practice, I can
honestly say I’ve
never
seen a Great Dane as big as George here. You see his weight?”

I hadn’t. He now obligingly showed me. “This dog now weighs in at two hundred and forty-five pounds.”

Now, that
did
take me back. “Two hundred and forty-five pounds? But that’s—”

“Huge, Dave. That’s
huge
. That’s, let me see, over
thirty
pounds
more than when we last weighed him, in fact. That’s way more than
any Great Dane that I’ve ever heard of—one thirty to one sixty pounds is normal for a male, but
two forty-five
? Incredible. Just plain incredible. Not that we didn’t see it coming, I guess.”

I shook my head, stunned. I knew he’d grown some, but by
that
much? I guess we just didn’t see it so much when we saw him every day. “But should he even still be
growing
at this age?”

Doc Wallace shook his
head. “No, he shouldn’t. But perhaps he’s not now. He’s three years old, right?”

I nodded. “Just this month.”

“So, then, he’s probably done. Or, at least, he
should
be. In fact, I’d say you’ll want to be careful with his food intake. He looks great right now. His weight, build, and height are all in proportion. He’s in really good condition all around, in fact. But you’ll need to be pretty careful
from here on in. If he gets any heavier than he is at the moment, then it will potentially become harmful for his health.”

That I did know. We’d had that drummed into us from puppyhood. “We’re careful,” I told him. “We
have
to be careful. If we’d let him, he’d eat way, way more than he does.”

The doc nodded. “But he’s in fine shape right now, as I said. So whatever you’re doing at the moment,
keep on doing it.” He ran a hand across George’s glossy flank, then scratched his own head. “But what a size! In all my years… What a
size
!”

He was still scratching his head when George and I left his office.

“You’ll never believe what I’m going to tell you,” I told Christie, minutes later, from the parking lot of Doc Wallace’s clinic. It had become our ritual, this, after my visits to Doc Wallace.
We’d pile in the truck, then I’d call Christie and say, “Hi,” and she’d always say, “Go on. How much?”

Except she didn’t—not today. She said something completely different. She said, “And you’ll never believe what I’m going to tell
you
…”

She was pregnant again. George and I hurried home.

This time we decided to tell no one—not a soul. We weren’t superstitious people, so it wasn’t that we thought we’d jinx things; we just didn’t think we could handle the emotional strain of talking to family and friends about it if the worst happened and we lost this one too. No, we decided to keep it in our
little family—just me, Christie and George. It was our big secret.

And from that point on, it felt like we were in this weird limbo, like the rest of our lives were on hold. Sure, we carried on as normal, did our jobs, met with friends. Even though Christie’s sudden refusal to drink wine was attributed to her being particularly tired (which she was) or having work in the morning (which she mostly
did), when it hadn’t stopped her before, happily no one seemed to notice.

And we had plenty of other things to occupy our minds: we had all but finished the building work part of remodeling the house, and for Christie, at least, we’d gotten to the fun part. Where I liked nothing better than to be wielding a drill or rip
ping up and ripping out stuff, for Christie, though she could knuckle down
and get her hands dirty (and had done), the best bit was when you got to start making the place your own.

And I was happy to let her become our new project manager, and to defer to her on all the decisions that needed to be made about decorating, furnishing, which color went with what—all that inexplicable cushions ’n’ candles stuff. For once I was also happy—though this was strictly a temporary
arrangement—to have her drag me into all those stores full of unfathomable girl-things and attempt to pass sensible judgment on various items, many of which I couldn’t properly identify as having any sort of function whatsoever.

What we didn’t do—didn’t do at
all
, not for a moment—was make plans for our new lives as parents, or allow ourselves to look at any baby stuff. We’d go to a shopping
mall and it would be like we were both wearing blinkers. We didn’t even window-shop when we passed a baby store. In fact, we’d speed up and hurry past.

But, happily, the days and weeks passed, one by one, and each scan (every one an exercise in holding our breath) was completed without drama or bad news. And finally, somehow, we arrived at that momentous date—twenty weeks—and the scan, of all
the scans and examinations and procedures the one that had loomed so large and heavy on our horizon.

As ever, we were braced for the worst, but, having done her examinations and taken all her measurements, the doctor told us that everything looked normal. And, by the way, would we like to know the sex?

We exchanged glances. Did we want to know that? Did it even matter? We’d already heard the
news we’d wanted to hear: our baby was okay. I don’t think either of us cared about the baby’s gender right now.

But Christie raised her eyebrows at me as the nurse wiped her belly. “
Do
we?” she asked me.

I shrugged. I wasn’t sure. Did I? I pondered. Maybe I did. “I guess…” I said finally. “Why not?”

Because perhaps, in truth, we’d already had enough surprises—all of them, up to this point,
pretty bad ones.

“Yes,” I said again, nodding. “Go on. What are we having?”

“A girl,” the doctor told us. “You’re having a baby girl.”

We were both a little shocked by this news. Me for the completely illogical reason that we hadn’t really talked about a girl’s name for this one, and Christie because this pregnancy had felt so like her first one that it had never occurred to her it
wouldn’t
be a boy. She’d also privately—and she only confessed this to me later—been anxious about not feeling sicker than she did. We both knew that suffering from bad morning sickness might be grim to deal with, but it was also a sure sign that you were pregnant—and all the folklore says you have it worse if you’re carrying a girl. Bang goes that theory, then.

And now, at long last, it felt properly
real. We were having not a boy but a little baby girl, and, finally, we felt we could make plans for her arrival. It felt, if not quite like all our Christmases had come at once, at least like we could allow ourselves to get excited.

Right after the ultrasound, Christie started focusing on
baby stuff at last. She’d been so longing to be able to share her joy with everyone. At the beginning of
June, her sister-in-law organized a baby shower for all her family and friends back in California. Then her Tucson friends, wanting to get involved too, organized another one for her in July.

We started decorating, creating our baby’s nursery, and bought a new crib for it. We already had a beautiful dresser, handed down by Christie’s grandma, so we painted that a rich dark red mahogany to match
the crib. And since we knew it was a girl, we had no reason to be neutral, so we wallpapered the whole room with butterflies. That done, it was simply a question of more waiting, as the days and weeks began to stack up.

George naturally ignored almost everything about this. While we immersed ourselves in the idea of becoming parents to our new daughter, life, for him, carried on pretty much as
normal. And why wouldn’t it? Though interested in our various decorating antics and purchases (he particularly enjoyed chewing up the crib’s giant box), he hadn’t the slightest inkling of how comprehensively his life—life for all of us—was about to change. All he did know was that his mom was getting steadily bigger and, as a consequence, less inclined to be sat upon, which was just something he
had to put up with.

Life in general was pretty good for George. He particularly enjoyed our Friday-night happy hour excursions. They were by now becoming an institution of sorts, though little did either
of us realize back then that they’d have life-changing consequences for
him
.

It was mid-August by now, and we’d just returned home from the doctor’s office. Christie was only a few weeks from
her due date, so we were beginning to count down to the big day. Another day, another exam, another clean bill of health. We were both, I think, feeling this thing beginning to hit us. In a matter of days, after waiting such a long time, we were finally going to put our traffic avoidance plans into action, get to that hospital and, God willing, become a real mom and pop.

I felt full of energy.
But then, I guess, I wasn’t the pregnant one, was I? “We should do something,” I said when we got home from the clinic. “Take George to the dog park, then go out for food? What d’you fancy? Chinese? Thai? Mexican? Or maybe go for a steak?”

But Christie, who was getting to that point down the line where her gut had little room left to fully appreciate the many options, considered for a moment,
and then shook her head. “You know what? Actually, I’m pretty tired tonight, honey. Why don’t you take George around to Paul’s for a couple of hours, then grab Chinese takeout on the way home.”

“You sure?”

She grinned, wrapping an arm around her enormous round belly. Then she laughed. “Trust me, I’m
super
-sure. If I never have heartburn again,
ever
, it’ll be too soon, and Chinese is the absolute
worst. Plus this body’s had quite enough exercise for one day. So I—or, rather,
we
”—she ran her hand across her bump—“shall go have a long soak in the tub, while you boys”—
she paused to kiss George on his snout—“go off to happy hour and do all your boy-stuff.”

It was just getting dark when George and I headed over to Paul’s house, the buzzsaw sound of cicadas loud in the still air. It was a warm
evening, and, as we often did on balmy nights like these, we were having cocktails outside in the gazebo. Well, most of us were; I’m mainly a beer man, and Paul was, as usual, drinking Guinness.

“Hey,” he said, brandishing his glass, as I grabbed myself a bottle of beer from the cooler. “Dave, I have news. Did you manage to catch that piece in the paper this week?”

I’d been distracted, watching
the antics of his ten-year-old son, Liam, who was playing with George in the yard. It seemed incredible to think that in a few weeks from now I would be a father too, and have my own child—Christie and I would have our own little daughter—and that one day, God willing, she would be playing out in our own yard with Georgie.

“Oh, sorry,” I said, realizing that I’d been miles away, and finally registering
that he was talking. “The paper. Of course.”

“So did you read it?”

“Let me see, now. What
did
I read? I read a piece about new trends in the real estate market. And, yes, a fascinating article about the Arizona tree frog. Either of those pieces the piece you mean?”

He put his glass down to fetch himself another beer and shook his head.

“No, I meant the
Guinness
piece,” he said, nodding again
to his own glass as he brought it back over. “There was an article
about the Guinness World Records I thought you might be interested in. Wednesday, I think I saw it.”

I sipped my own beer. “Oh, I’ve got you now. You mean there was a piece about the record for the world’s biggest dog?”

Paul rolled his eyes. “No, I mean the record for the biggest number of paper clips you can fit up your nose
at one sitting when there’s an R in the month. Of
course
I mean about the record for the dog.”

“Really?”

“Yes, and it turns out the world’s tallest dog’s a Great Dane too. Name of…” He raised his voice a little. “What was the dog’s name, Lee?”