21: They Take My Dog

Originally emailed on March 16, 1999.

For weeks, Sam and Michael and I have been trying to sort out new custody arrangements for the boys. I have been trying to stay cheerful about the idea in the face of its inevitability--certainly I can't protest the boys spending more time with their own father, and certainly their father has as much desire and as much right to be with his children as I do. At least, that's what I tell myself.

Not wanting to fight about the question, we decided to let the boys tell us what they wanted. The problem with this approach, we quickly discovered, was that the boys had different things to say, depending on who asked them. Mark, who seems to have hit an early, surly adolescence, was as vehement in telling his father and Michael that he wouldn't live with a couple of pansies in a million years as he was in telling me that he longed to get away from me and to a household run by men. Sammy, on the other hand, clung to me and begged to be allowed to stay at my house all the time when I asked what he wanted, but clung to his father in exactly the same way when I wasn't around.

"What do you suppose they really want?" Sam finally asked me one evening on the phone.

"Mark wants to rebel against us and hurt our feelings, and Sammy wants to please us both," I answered.

"Probably they're too young to know what they want. We're their parents," Sam said. "We should be making these decisions and asserting our authority."

"I suppose so," I answered.

"So, let's make up our minds," Sam said. "How should we handle this?"

"Well," I said, "as far as Mark is concerned, nothing we do will be right. As far as Sammy is concerned, he'll be afraid he's letting one of us down no matter what, but we may be able to help him out with that by presenting a unified front and reassuring him. As far as I'm concerned, any change in custody arrangements is a change for the worse, but I have resigned myself. Therefore, we might as well please you and come up with a plan that makes you happy. Tell me again exactly what you want."

And on we went from there. We finally agreed that if we were going to share custody, with the boys spending half their time with each of us, it would be less disrupting to make switches at intervals of months rather than weeks. Sam wanted his time with the boys to start as soon as possible, so we agreed they'd move in with him and Michael right away, and stay there through the end of June, and that I'd have them then through the end of August. We're not quite sure how to handle things once the next school year starts, since Sam lives in a different school district than I do, but we figure we have time to work that out. Sam claims he's happy to drive the boys to school and pick them up every day for the rest of the school year so they don't have to change schools until the fall, if then. We'll see how he does as Super Commuter Dad. I'm going to have them every other weekend from the end of school on Friday until the beginning of school on Monday, and I get them every Wednesday evening.

So this past Saturday, Michael and Sam came to move the boys. Michael and Sam were both elated but trying to tone it down out of respect for me. I kept having to step into the bathroom to cry. Mark was sullen, for the most part, though he occasionally turned on a kind of fake cheerfulness about the move if he thought he could hurt my feelings by it. Poor Sammy didn't know how to feel; he's excited to be with Michael more, but he said he was scared about going to his dad's new house, bought special so the boys could each have their own room.

"You don't need to be scared of the new house," Michael said. "It's just like the old house, only with one more bedroom." This is true; they're condos in the same development.

"I don't want my own bedroom," Sammy said. "I don't like sleeping all by myself."

Michael and I exchanged an "A-ha!" look over Sammy's head. "What can we do to make it less scary?" I asked. "Maybe Michael will put in a nightlight."

Michael nodded, "And you have the room right next to your dad's and mine. We'll leave the doors open so we can hear you if you need anything."

Sammy said, "I want Hot Rod to sleep with me."

"But honey," I said, "Hot Rod lives here at my house." Sammy burst into tears. Michael and I looked at each other again. "Maybe just for a little while?" Michael said. "Until he's used to his new bedroom?"

I looked at Hot Rod, her ears at attention since the mention of her name. I looked at Sammy, crying. I said, "Sam doesn't like Hot Rod."

"Sammy and I will take care of her," Michael said. Sammy nodded. "Please, Mom?"

The next thing I knew, I was all alone in my house, without even my dog for company. Every room held a sad reminder: a bone of Hot Rod's we'd missed under the coffee table, Sammy's favorite cereal bowl still waiting on the kitchen counter for me to do dishes, the sheets waiting to be stripped off the boys' beds and washed. Not able to bear the loneliness, I wandered out of the house, and over to Harriet's, where I found her and Nona surrounded by cardboard boxes, packing to move to their new place later this week.

"I've been in this house twenty-five years at least," Nona said to me. "And I don't think I've ever gotten rid of a thing. Let me give you some advice: clean your closets once in awhile."

"I will," I said, and started crying.

Harriet put her arm around me. "Are the boys gone?" she asked.

"They took my dog," I said. "They took my dog."

"They took Hot Rod?" Harriet said. "That's just evil. I mean, it's one thing to take your children away from you, but the dog!"

I said, "I feel so awful. Maybe I should have fought, made him take me to court."

"Yeah," Harriet said. "A guy shouldn't be able to take your dog without a jury trial."

I said, "I meant for custody of the boys."

Nona said, "You made a decision not to put yourself or the boys through that, remember?"

"I remember," I said. "But it feels awful right now."

I cried for awhile, one of them on each side of me on the couch. When I finally sniffled myself out, Nona said, "Why don't you sit here drink some tea while Harriet and I go wash up and change. Then we'll take you for dinner, someplace tasty. You'll feel better. Harriet, get Louella some tea."

I was staring morosely into my teacup and listening to the shower running upstairs when the front door opened and a friend of Nona and Harriet walked in. I'd met her a couple of times before. "Hey, Louise, isn't it?" she said. "Where's Nona and Harriet? Hey, what's wrong? You been crying?"

"Louella," I said. "They're upstairs getting ready to go to dinner. I don't want to talk about it--April, is it?"

"April, May, June," she said, "What's the difference? Whatever you call me, I'm like a breath of springtime in the winter of life."

I looked at her.

"That's what my mother always told me," she said. "It's not April."

"Not April is a funny name," I said. "You'd think I'd have remembered that."

"No," she said. "It's a month. But April is the wrong one."

"Oh," I said, and stared into my tea again.

After a moment, she said, "Aren't you going to guess?"

"I'm too busy moping," I answered.

"OK," she said. "I'll go look for the girls."

A few minutes later, Harriet came down. "Would it bother you if May joined us for dinner?" she asked. "I know you're not in the best of moods, but we sort of forgot that we'd made plans with her tonight. We can tell her something came up if you want. She'd understand. She saw you crying."

"I wasn't crying," I said. "By the time she got here, I was just moping. She can come if she wants. I don't care. I don't care about anything."

"Well, good. We'll have a jolly party, then," Harriet said. "Hey, May," she yelled up the stairs. "Louella says she doesn't care if you come to dinner. And she says she wasn't crying when you came in."

I gave Harriet a killing glance, but May seemed cheerful enough when she came down the stairs. "I didn't say she was, Harriet," she said. "I said she obviously had been. And I said it was too bad because her very pretty blue eyes were turning all red."

"This probably isn't the best night to flirt with Louella," Harriet advised May. "She's going through a rough time."

"Harriet," I said, "if you don't stop teasing me, I'm going to go home."

"I'm sorry," Harriet said, genuinely contrite as she always is when she teases too hard. But that never stops her. She turned to May and said, "You can flirt with her if you want."

Dinner was fine. I moped and pushed my salad around on the plate, and then I moped and pushed a piece of grilled chicken and some broccoli around, and then I moped over a cup of coffee while everyone else had dessert. Finally, I moped my way through my second viewing of Shakespearein Love, which I like so much that it almost elevated my mood from dismal to merely bad. At the end of the evening, May invited me to have lunch with her later in the week, and I accepted with extremely bad grace, after which I moped my way up the sidewalk and into my house, where I found Ed watching the Disney channel in my living room.

"Ed!" I said. "I'm surprised to see you."

"But happy?" he asked, standing up and coming over to hug me hello.

"Well," I said.

He said, "I thought you might be lonely with the boys gone."

I said, "I am. It feels different from when they go for a weekend."

He said, "I thought it might. But I was surprised to get here and find the door unlocked and Hot Rod gone. I was a little worried."

"They took Hot Rod, too," I said.

"Hot Rod, too?" Ed said. "They really cleaned you out."

"Yeah," I said. "So I went over to Harriet's. I guess I forgot to lock the door."

"You could have called me," he said. "If you needed to talk."

I said, "Ed, I'm tired and sad. But after I've slept for about ten hours, I'll tell you all about how I didn't call you because you haven't exactly been the most reliable friend lately."

He said, "Ella, I know that's true. And one reason I came by tonight is to tell you that things are going to be different from now on. I know how important you are to me, and I don't want to let you down. I want us to get back to the way we were before. Or even better."

"Ed," I said, "I'm in no mood to discuss our relationship or listen to promises. I just want to go to bed." His arm around my shoulder, he turned me toward the stairs. "Alone, Ed," I said. "I'm sorry."

He sighed. "But you'll have coffee with me tomorrow morning?"

I said, "I'll call you when I get up. We'll see how I feel then."

"OK," Ed said. "I'll go now. I just wanted to see that you were all right."

"I'm all right," I said. He went toward the door. "Oh, Ed," I said. "I think somebody asked me on a date tonight."

"Oh?" he asked.

"I said I'd go," I said. "I thought you should know. It's just lunch."

"Lunch tomorrow?" he asked.

"No," I said. "Later this week."

"OK, then," he said. "You call me tomorrow morning and maybe we can have coffee."

"OK," I said.

"Goodnight, then," he said.

"Goodnight," I said.