Page 2 of Grace & Henry's Holiday Movie Marathon
The guy in the Mercedes has gotten his shit together and isn’t swerving anymore, and the snow from earlier is long gone. We pass a sign for the Maryland SPCA. I’m sure the sign has always been there. I’ve just never noticed it before because dogs haven’t been an option until now.
“How can a nose be warmandcold?” Bella asks.
I turn the music down again. “Hmm?”
She repeats the exact same words, but I still can’t make sense of them.
“She’s asking about the sign,” says Ian. “The one for the dog adoption place. It said, ‘Feel the warmth of a cold nose.’ ”
“Yeah, that,” Bella says. “I don’t get it.”
People always talk about how tough I am, and I’ve prided myself on that because it’s good to be tough. Now, though, as my daughter awaits my response, all that toughness vanishes, and exhaustion arrives like a heavy bag dropped from above. I’m pretty sure if Ian and Bella weren’t with me right now, I’d slump over this steering wheel and let my gray Jeep Cherokee go careening off the road. Thankfully, Ian, my smart boy, steps in.
“It’s, like, an expression,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“You know, dog noses are cold when you touch them, right? But they make you feel warm inside because people love dogs.”
Bella smiles again. Somehow, she rolls with that, too.
Those “When I’m Gone” strategysessions were a nightmare at first. They were sad and surreal, depressing, panic-inducing, weirdly officious, too. Like most god-awful things, though, they got easier, particularly because Tim was so good at them. He kept things light by telling the dumbest jokes you could imagine, like when he said that the Loudon Park Cemetery was the dopest cemetery in Baltimore.
“What are you talking about?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Everyone’s just…dying to get in.”
He even printed out agendas for the two of us. That would’ve been annoying if it weren’t so completely like him. A high school principal, Tim was adept at administration—an expert at checklists and the steady tracking of progress.
During one of our first sessions, the last item on the agenda read, simply, “Dog.” Ian and Bella have been obsessed with dogs since toddlerhood. They draw pictures of them, binge dog videos on YouTube, watch the Westminster dog show like it’s a Beyoncé concert. Tim proposed that I finally get them one when he was gone.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just…”
“You just what?”
This was back in the fall. We were in the TV room again. Thebeginning ofDie Hardwas on pause. The plan was to talk about his death then watch his all-time favorite holiday movie. Personally, I have trouble callingDie Harda holiday movie on account of so many guys getting shot or blown up, but to each their own.
I looked at the ceiling. The kids, like always during these sessions, were asleep upstairs. “Will they think we’re…replacing you?”
“What? With a dog?”
“Well, yeah.”
He laughed, which made him cough. “First of all, I’m irreplaceable. Secondly, I think you might be overthinking this one, Gracey.” He adjusted his pillow, sat up. “Things are gonna suck for them for a while, right? Wouldn’t it be nice for them to have something thatdoesn’tsuck?”
I briefly allowed myself to imagine having a dog again. I grew up with them—a bunch of sweet, beautiful idiots who stole socks and napped under the kitchen table. He was right, it was going to suck for the kids, but it was going to suck for me, too. A dog would be nice.
Then, my still-alive husband pushed Play andDie Hardstarted. “Oh, and you definitely need to adopt,” he said. “A mutt, for sure. Pure breeds are for assholes.”
When I park, the kidsunbuckle their seat belts and grab the door handles, ready to fling themselves onto the pavement.
“Here’s the thing, you guys,” I say. “Just remember—”
“We know,” says Ian.
“They may not have therightdog,” says Bella.
We’ve been over this: the possibility that the SPCA will be all out of dogs. Or, more likely, that they’ll be all out of the sorts of dogs that we can handle. I’m imagining rusty cages full of trauma-hardened beasts with murder in their eyes. In retrospect, I really should’ve done some research. “I’m serious.”
