What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay (12 page)

“Oh my God!” Mom dropped the dish sponge.

“Damn it, it looks like she got in the bones.” Grandpa Joe pried Cookie’s jaws open and Ben stuck his hand down her throat. The garbage can lid was standing open and there were turkey bones all over the floor. I made a dive for Cupcake and fought her for the bone in her mouth. Turkey bones are terribly dangerous for dogs. They can splinter and puncture their intestines.

Ben pulled a bone out of Cookie’s throat but she went on gagging.

“Wasn’t anybody watching them?” Wuffie said.

“Can’s got a lid,” Grandpa Joe said. “Apparently the little bitches have learned to open it.”

Cookie started staggering around.

Ben stuck his hand down Cookie’s throat again and she bit him, sinking a tooth right through his palm. “Goddammit!”

“Do something! She’s choking!” Mom cried. Cookie was lying down now and her tongue was turning black.

“She’s got to go to the emergency vet,” Wuffie said. “Somebody help me with her.”

“I got her.” Felix knelt down beside Cookie and scooped her up in his arms. She was dribbling blood out of her mouth.

“I’ll drive,” Mom said. “I know where it is.”

“Call me when you get there!” Wuffie said, her hands to her mouth as they went out the door.

Ben looked at his hand and started running water on it from the kitchen faucet.

“I’ll get you some antibiotic,” Grandpa Joe said.

“Do you think Cupcake ought to go too?” Wuffie asked. Cupcake wagged her tail at the sound of her name, looking dopey and hopeful.

“I don’t think she actually ate any,” I said, because Wuffie looked so worried. “Maybe we ought to take her, though. Ben and I could go.”

“You really think we need to?” Ben asked. He rubbed some of Grandpa Joe’s antibiotic into his hand.

“Yes.” I got Cupcake’s leash and she danced around panting when she saw it.
Ooooh, ride!

“Dog looks fine to me,” Grandpa Joe observed.

“Joe, let them take her, please,” Wuffie said.

“Okay, sure. We’ll go.” Ben got his keys out of his pocket. When we got into the car, Cupcake tried to get in his lap and he shoved her at me. “Christ, what an evening. Hold on to her.”

The emergency vet is across the valley, a ten-minute drive. Ben didn’t say anything else till we got there. Mom’s car was already parked outside and we got Cupcake out of ours and went in. Mom was sitting in the waiting room with Felix, and he had his arm around her. They didn’t even spring apart the way guilty couples do in movies. Mom looked up and sniffled. “They’re working on her.” She looked at Ben’s hand, which was still bleeding. “What happened?”

“Bit me,” he said. “Apparently you didn’t notice.”

“Oh, poor little Cookie,” Mom said.

“It looked to me like she was having a seizure,” Felix said.

Mom said, “Poor little Cookie,” again, and Felix squeezed her shoulders and said, “Seizures aren’t painful, they just look scary. I’ve seen some.”

Then the vet came out. “We’ve cleared all the bone fragments but your dog is still having seizures,” she told us. “We don’t know why. She growled and snapped at my tech. We’re concerned at this point about the possibility of a failed rabies shot.”

Ben looked at his hand.

“We’d like your regular vet to hold her for a day or two,” the vet said, while Cupcake skittered around the waiting room and peed in the corner. She collared Cupcake. “I’ll just give Baby here a quick look, too.”

“I wouldn’t worry,” Felix said to Mom after the vet disappeared with Cupcake. “Stress can trigger seizures, and I’d growl too if I’d been through all that.”

Mom nodded supportively. At Felix.

“Good to know,” Ben said.

This was so not what I’d had in mind—Ben getting bit by a possibly rabid dog while Mom bonded with Felix over the crisis. My kind of plan works in the movies, but I should have known. If anyone knows the movies are smoke and mirrors, it should be me.

It turns out—after a week at the vet and a lot of worried phone calls and urine tests they made us collect because none of the techs wanted to walk her—that Cookie does not have rabies. That’s a plus, particularly for Ben, but what Cookie does have is epilepsy, apparently triggered by the stress of the turkey-bone incident. So now she takes phenobarbital to prevent further seizures, which it does, except for times of extreme stress like baths and additional vet visits. Then she lies down and foams at the mouth and twitches on the sidewalk. It completely unhinges Wuffie, who thinks Cookie is going to die each time, so Felix has started coming over to Wuffie’s to do things like bathe Cookie and take her for her checkups. Mom picks him up, or he walks there. All the way. He says it gives him time to think. I worry that what he’s thinking about is Mom.

I can’t wait for Christmas. The house will probably catch fire. In the meantime, there’s the Posadas procession.

10

The Monday after Thanksgiving, there was a drawing of the Posadas stable in my locker. The angels were leaning down from their sign with brooms, whacking at a donkey with Noah’s face that had just pooped on the floor. I couldn’t help snickering even though I knew Noah was right behind me. It looked just like him. Jesse is
good
.

I heard Noah’s locker door slam and shoved the drawing into my folder before he could start anything. I showed it to Lily at lunch and she cracked up, too. “You’re way too good at that,” she told Jesse. “You ought to be doing cartoons for the
Oak Tree
.” That’s our school paper.

Jesse gave her an evil grin. “None of my ideas are fit to print.”

Some of his drawings are just wicked, like the one of Noah, but a lot of them are sweet. He’s done two of me as an angel, and one as the Virgin from the Posadas parade. I’ve quit taping them up on my bedroom wall, though. There are too many, and Ben will start in on me or tell Mom or both.

I told Jesse I’d love a ride home after Posadas rehearsals, to make up for last time.

Father Weatherford has gotten nearly every store in the arcade to let us bring our donkey up to their door. City Hall will let us take the donkey down the sidewalk as long as someone goes along behind us with a shovel. Felix got assigned that job, which he doesn’t seem to mind any more than he minds bathing a dog who has fits or cleaning the fifty-year-old crud out of St. Thomas’s antique plumbing. I don’t understand that very well. Sometimes I think he’s trying to pay for something.

Jesse came early on Sunday to watch the rehearsal and brought his sketchpad. He drew the Wise Men and put in some camels behind them. Father Weatherford loved it, so Jesse gave him the sketch. Afterward we went for coffee and he gave me a drawing, too, of Felix leaning on his shovel under the pergola. The leaves of the trees give Felix a kind of shadowy halo and just the faintest suggestion of wings. When Jesse tore it out, I could see pages and pages of mazes in the book behind it, but now the mazes have little people in them. Some of the people have angels’ wings, too, and some of them have tails. Not devil tails, more like dog tails. It looked like something out of Hieronymus Bosch. Two of them have heads of wild, curly black hair, one of the winged ones and one of the dog-tailed ones. I hope Jesse’s okay over Christmas break.

The latest development is that Grandma Alice has decided to make a big dinner for Hanukkah and invite Grandpa Joe, which means that Wuffie and Mom are coming too, of course.

“I don’t think Joe’s said the prayers since he was twelve,” Ben told Grandma Alice, but he wasn’t going to argue with her. Me, I think it’s another ploy to get Mom and Ben together. I hope nobody chokes on a turkey bone this time. Wuffie accepted fast enough, for all of them. Without asking Mom.

But Mom came over without any problem, the first night of Hanukkah. She patted the Todal, who adores her and nearly knocked her over he was so excited. She said how good everything smelled and could she help, but Grandma Alice said she had it all under control, so Mom had to socialize with us like a guest, which she was pretending to be anyway. I asked if she was coming to see me in the Posadas parade.

“Of course. I wouldn’t miss it. Whatever persuaded Father Weatherford to use live animals? He must have nerves of steel. Or dementia.”

“So, do you want to see me, or just see if something awful happens?” I asked.

Mom grinned. “A little of both.” That sounded more like her old self.

“If it does,” I said, “I didn’t do it,” and then Grandma Alice said to come to the table.

The food report: Grandma Alice made matzoh ball soup, and latkes, which are these heavenly pancakes of shredded potatoes, fried in oil. You eat them with sour cream and applesauce, and they are even better than matzoh ball soup. Oil is the big symbol on Hanukkah, since it commemorates the time when the Jews got their temple back from the Romans and there wasn’t enough oil to light the holy lamps for longer than one day. The Jews poured in the oil they had, and it miraculously lasted eight days. So Hanukkah lasts eight days, but the big nights are the first and the last. And I would go anywhere for latkes.

Grandma Alice got out her favorite menorah, an antique silver one we gave her for Christmas last year. (Okay, I know that’s peculiar, but everybody in our family figures the more chances to give somebody a present, the better.) Instead of holding candles, it hangs on the wall and has little cups for actual oil and wicks. Ben and I hassled with it all day, making a backing for it so it wouldn’t get hot and set the drywall on fire.

Grandpa Joe loved it, of course. It’s very historical. Not to mention the possibility of its catching on fire. “Ben, I tell you, this is great,” he said. “Very traditional Old World. Where did you get it?”

“Antique shop on Fairfax,” Ben said.

“Joseph, would you like to say the prayers?” Grandma Alice asked him.

“Watch him,” Wuffie said.

“No lucky dogs,” Grandma Alice said. She shook a finger at Grandpa Joe. “The real prayers.”

“Sure,” Grandpa Joe lit the first cup of oil and rattled them off. In Hebrew.

Even Wuffie looked surprised.

“Some things you don’t forget,” he said, putting his arm around her.

“I thought you weren’t religious, Dad,” Mom said.

“You don’t have to be to remember prayers you heard your whole childhood,” Grandpa Joe told her.

“You imprint on things,” Wuffie said to Mom. “They stay with you. I’ve always been grateful to your father for subordinating his things to mine.” She smiled at him and leaned her head against his shoulder. I thought maybe she was reminding Mom that Ben had done exactly that for her when he agreed to get married in a church. But I knew that wasn’t a selling point with Mom. The thing Mom wants Ben to change for her is not religious.

I think Grandpa Joe and Ben, and even Mom, are kind of generally spiritual people. They’re okay with any path to God. But the specifics of religion, the actual ritual, matter to Wuffie and Grandma Alice.

After Grandpa Joe lit the first light, we sat down and scarfed latkes and soup and salmon, and challah that Grandma Alice baked herself, and ruggelah for dessert, these heavenly little crescents made with cream cheese pastry and cinnamon and walnuts and raisins. I swear I would be Jewish for the food.

Mom ate everything and hugged Grandma Alice. She didn’t hug Ben.

At dress rehearsal this Sunday we got to practice with the donkey, who is really kind of cute, although he smells. He has huge ears and big brown eyes. I have to sit on him sidesaddle, because I wear a long blue gown and a blue cloak with stars, like the Virgin of Guadalupe. Father Weatherford went all-out on costumes this year—no shepherds in their bathrobes. The Three Kings look like sultans with brocade robes and turbans, and the angels all have real feather wings. The wings scared the donkey, but after we let him sniff them he settled down.

I told Jesse not to pick me up this time because I was going Christmas shopping with Lily afterward, and she was waiting for me as we finished up. When she saw me coming on the donkey, she knelt down on the church lawn and crossed herself. “Looking holy!” she said.

“Knock it off.” I slid down from the saddle. “I’ll whap you with my halo” (which, thank the Virgin herself, we don’t have to wear).

Noah took the donkey into the stable and I dug the Baby Jesus out of the straw and laid him in the manger. The angels sang “O Holy Night” and the Three Kings unpacked their invisible camels and knelt down in front of us to present me with three of Noah’s mom’s jewelry boxes. They sang “We Three Kings of Orient Are” while Father Weatherford glared at them to make sure they didn’t put in the line about the rubber cigar.

Friday is the parade, and we’re going to do this with live sheep and camels.

Lily and I drove into Ventura to shop. I’m a total freak about Christmas. I love the decorations, the cheesy mechanical Santas and singing bears at the mall, the people who put eight reindeer, three wise men, four angels, and Santa in a helicopter on their roof and blow all the fuses trying to light it. I love all of it. Despite the fact that I’m convinced that this Christmas is going to be a complete disaster, I’ve been obsessing about what to give everyone. Mom is always good with a book of poetry, but I want something that will make her want to come home.