A Canine Life

It is a cold, preternaturally dark December 24^th, a moonless Christmas Eve in Laguna Beach, California. Aldo Esposito is enjoying a Stella Artois and gloating over a football match between his beloved Las Vegas Raiders and their arch-rivals, the Kansas City Chiefs. During commercial breaks he is showing his youngest stepson, Giovanni, how to compose messages on a tablet. The stepfather, who usually allows his wife to help with matters related to their children’s homework, does not appreciate feeling unfocused. Looking after his stepson while the woman of the house is doing a last-minute errand is distracting him from the game, and the game is not allowing him to give undivided attention to Gio. 

Aldo believes the best way to approach everything from business to relationships is to economize, to get the largest returns from the most efficient methods. Economizing is different than multitasking. Although he’s not sure how it will pan out when Gio’s third grade teacher is giving the child English lessons, during the time between downs, Aldo teaches his stepson textspeak.

“So, no commas, periods or question marks?” asks Gio during the break between third and fourth down.

“That’s right. And the fewer letters you use to write words, the better,” replies the dad.

“What do you mean?”

“For example, the word ‘thanks’ the way you learn to spell it in school has more letters than when it’s spelled ‘thnx.’”

“Oh, I see. Less is better.”

Play begins again. Raiders have the ball and they’re at the 20-yard line. Eyeing the game, but not wanting to interrupt a conversation he deems priceless, Aldo says, “That’s my bambino, less is better unless we’re talking about money. You can never be worse off when you have more green paper.”

Giovanni repeats a motto his stepfather has taught him, “Benjamin Franklin is our favorite uncle.”

“That’s right,” assures Aldo. The ball is snapped back.

“What about uncle Michael?” Giovanni asks, referring to his mother’s brother, currently in jail for a spree of crimes including burglary. The Raiders quarterback sees a wide receiver in the end zone.

“Do you ever remember Mikey giving you a hundred dollars?” asks Aldo. The quarterback makes his pass. It glides through the hands of a vigilant linebacker and is caught and cradled by the wide receiver.

“No,” says Gio, who can’t remember his uncle ever giving him a present.

“Touchdown!” yells Aldo, startling Giovanni, who cups his hands around his ears, then retreats to his room with his tablet and begins writing texts to his mother.

*

The headlights of a black BMW sports utility vehicle illuminate an avenue in the posh community where the Espositos reside. The street is lined with high six and low seven figure homes as well as trees that are botanically stylish. Driving ever so slightly under the influence, Chiara Esposito takes additional sips from the glass of Prosecco she holds in her manicured right hand while maneuvering the grey-leather bound steering wheel with her left. I can’t risk this again, she thinks, but I’m feeling so miserable. As she imbibes the Italian sparkling wine, she is careful not to spill any of it on her Dolce and Gabbana suit. The iphone 13 she bought at the Apple store last week chimes, signaling the arrival of a text, and prompts her to insecurely place the crystal flute stem glass in the car’s drink holder. The text is from her youngest son. Giovanni. 

wr r u mom

Chiara has left the house to pick up a warm, cuddly gift she has had on hold for five weeks. She’s Jewish, but in opposition to her parents’ wishes, she married into goy family. Since marrying, she quit observing Hannukah and now celebrates Christian holidays. She hopes video of a two-month-old Australian Blue Heeler pawing about the base of the Christmas tree will generate more likes and comments than did moving images of last Christmas when the highlight was Gio riding his first bike.         

i’m at nonna’s

Chiara uses the term her mother-in-law tenaciously insists her grandchildren use when addressing or referring to their Italian grandmother.  

wenl u b bk

Her son’s technological precociousness simultaneously alarms her and makes her giddy.

i’ll be home soon 

ur nt drnkng r u

Six months ago, Giovanni was sitting in the back seat of a white Mercedes Benz coupe when his mother was pulled over for driving under the influence. Both son and mother cried as they were driven to the city jail in separate patrol cars. The cops at the station tried to calm the disconsolate eight-year-old until his grandmother retrieved him from police custody. Waiting for her septuagenarian father-in-law to post her bail, Chiara spent a Dantean six hours in a cell with an acne-scarred and malodorous tweaker who wouldn’t take no for an answer when she asked to stroke Chiara’s bounteous amber-highlighted chestnut locks. According to Chiara, the white Benz had acquired “bad energy” as a result of the arrest and the resultant trauma. With her father-in-law’s blessings, and the money made by Aldo at his family’s business, Chiara traded in the Benz for a BMW SUV.

what did mommy promise

The thirty-eight-year-old mother keeps her word to her boys. When she vows not to pick them up from school late, she makes sure to be waiting for them fifteen minutes before their last class. When she gives her word to take them to Gelato Paradise after they have a physically demanding day at junior guards, she treats them to double scoop cones. When she promises to confiscate their PlayStation if they exceed the allotted amount of daily time, she does so without so much as a warning. She has found keeping her oath to not drink much more difficult.

Chiara arrives at her destination in Lynwood, a neighborhood not nearly as privileged as her own, thirty minutes after she departs from the driveway of her comfortably spacious home. When parking the car, she tips back the last of the now warm Prosecco and while doing so sees the impressive two carat diamond Cartier ring her second husband bought to secure her hand in holy matrimony. The sight causes her to inhale deeply and brings tears to her eyes. 

Her brother, Michael, is in jail awaiting a hearing that will decide whether or not he will spend another ten years in state prison. He is a diagnosed schizophrenic, and Chiara doesn’t believe he should be incarcerated again, but she doesn’t want him released, either. One of the six charges Michael is fighting is an assault on her husband, Aldo. In August, Michael attacked Aldo in the Esposito family home, leaving him with a broken nose and a sense of betrayal and creeping insecurity. Michael’s reason for the attack? He claimed Aldo was endangering the lives of his own stepchildren. More precisely, Michael made the unfounded and crazy assertion that his brother-in-law was interacting with an unidentified homeless man who was planning to sequester the kids. Her brother’s claims were preposterous, but he was in the throes of an acute delusional and hallucinatory episode when he committed the offense. 

Taking a tissue from a packet in the side door compartment, Chiara unceremoniously clears her nose, wipes the tears from her eyes, removes a travel crate for pets from the back seat of the BMW, walks unsteadily to the front door of the Australian cattle dog breeder’s house and rings the doorbell. 

Wobbly from wine, Chiara squeals “Merry Christmas, my sistah!” before Linda, a single mother of three and a prize breeder, can answer the door. The last thing Linda wants is to deal with a drunken customer on Christmas Eve, but yesterday she heard from Chiara’s real sister about the drunken habits of the woman now knocking on her door and slurring, “Linda, sweetie, are you in there? It’s Chiara!” 

Linda is concerned the outburst on her porch will attract the wrong kind of attention from the neighbors. She could imagine that the Hendrix boys across the street might just want to take a Christmas joyride in a loud, obnoxious, formerly Jewish girl’s black BMW. They’re the neighborhood’s resident roughnecks and they’ve done worse with no provocation. The thought actually brings Linda a sense of satisfaction, but since she still has business to conduct with this prima donna, she reconsiders and opens the door.

Linda guides her customer into the spare room where she has set up the cozy holding pen for the infant dogs. Of the litter of six, five remain. Chiara’s sister, Maria, picked up one of the puppies the previous afternoon. Chiara approaches the pen, looking for the brown-eyed Blue Heeler which she has already paid $1,000 for. 

“I’ve got bad news for you,” Linda says to the previously Hebrew princess. “Jumma is now your sister’s dog.” 

“What? I don’t understand,” says Chiara.

“Yesterday I needed the money to pay my father’s rent. It was overdue and the landlord told me if it wasn’t paid for, he was going to serve my dad an eviction notice. Your sister happened to call and told me about your problems, she said you were reconsidering your purchase. She also explained that if I gave her Jumma, she would immediately bring over the balance of what you owed me,” says Linda.

“But I didn’t get a voicemail or text from you.” 

“I prefer direct communication when dealing with people I’ve been told are potentially undecisive customers.”

Linda was told by Maria that when drunk and under pressure, Chiara lacked a backbone.

“Pay me $3,000, and you can take Iris,” says Linda, bending over the pen and picking up a pup with a red coat and ocean blue eyes.

“But I wanted a blue Aussie.”   

“You should be happy I’m selling you one of my prize dogs at all,” says Linda. “I do what I can to make sure they go to proper homes.”

Doubly slighted, first by Maria’s duplicity, now by a self-righteous dog breeder, Chiara says, “Please, don’t judge me.” 

“I’m not,” says Linda, “but you have issues.”

Chiara wants to lash out indignantly, speak her mind to the woman offering her a tiny animal she had no intentions of buying, but instead she reaches into her Yves Saint-Laurent purse, pulls out an envelope containing the balance she owed for Jumma, and holding back tears tells Linda, “I’ve only brought $1,000.”

Linda, sensing the fragility of the situation, and remorse for being so judgmental, tries to soothe Chiara’s dejection by accepting the cash, but hands over the rare, blue-eyed Red Heeler puppy on the condition Becca return the day after Christmas with an additional $2,000.

Before the jilted dog buyer, cheated of the puppy she believed was the most handsome of the litter, can summon another plaintive phrase or response to elicit sympathy, she gently takes Iris from Linda’s insistent hands.    

Still doing her best to refrain from sobbing, Chiara brings the delicate little creature’s countenance close to her own, peers into her azure-oceanic eyes and says to no one in particular, “She’s beautiful.” Chiara kisses Iris, and the puppy responds by licking tears off her new owner’s face. 

Linda doesn’t believe it’s a good idea for Chiara to drive home, but the dog breeder doesn’t stop her discontent customer from placing Iris inside the travel crate and stepping outside the spare room where the pen now holds only four puppies.

“Would you like some coffee?” Linda asks the inebriated woman.

“Sure. You don’t mind if I sit in my car outside your house for a little do you?”

“Not at all.”

Linda provides Chiara with a steaming cup of French Roast, “You can keep the cup.”

As she sits in her Bavarian Motor Vehicle and sips coffee, Chiara weighs the pros and cons of confronting her sister, Maria, about the theft of Jumma.

After ten minutes of deliberating, she dials her sister’s number. The phone rings thrice and Maria answers.

“Hey Chiara…”

The cheated sister interrupts the cheating one, “Maria, how could you?”

Knowing full well the matter her sister wishes to discuss, Maria ignores the accusatory question, and attempts to divert Chiara’s approaching train wreck.

“I’ve got good news,” says Maria, “Matthew won his boxing match this afternoon.”

A boxing match on Christmas Eve seems inappropriate, but, then again, Matthew has in many ways become an inappropriate kid. He is fourteen years old and is using his newly acquired boxing skills to bully his schoolmates. Matthew’s closest cousin and Chiara’s eldest son, Nicco, is one of the freshmen at Laguna Beach High School who has become a victim of Matthew’s verbal harassment—a mode of misconduct he buttresses with pugilistic threats.

Although Maria rarely put hands on her during their youth, Chiara sees the unjust dynamic that existed between the sisters reproduced in the relationship between Nicco and Matthew.

“You stole my puppy!” gasps Chiara.

Maria is an administrative nurse for what can best be described as a luxury hospital and has built a career on the nerve it requires to keep cool in the face of calamity. 

“There’s no written contract guaranteeing you ownership of Jumma. You were stingy enough not to pay for him in full. Always cutting corners, procrastinating. You seem to personally espouse your husband’s business philosophy. It’s a miracle you’ve managed to hold on to what money he’s made. You’ve never been able to see how precariously comfortable your life is, Chiara. Jumma’s the one creature comfort I couldn’t let you keep.”   

Chiara’s blood comes to a boil, but as always, and contrary to the usual biochemistry of inebriation, under the influence of drink, she bows out of confrontation. Chiara began drinking as a means to keep her irascible temper under control, but when under the influence she is subject to a variety of new character flaws, lack of resolve to stand up for herself the foremost among them. 

Feeling defeated, she calls Aldo. The football game went into overtime and finished with a field goal made by the Kansas City Chiefs. Chiara lets him know she is on her way home. As she is prone to do when intoxicated and alone, she stews in self-pity. When she is two miles from her home in the hills, she can no longer stomach her malaise. After a lightning flash and a thunderclap, rain begins to arrhythmically pitter pat on her windshield.  She vomits, more due to nauseating melancholy than drunkenness. Fortunately, there is a grocery store bag in the BMW that serves as a receptacle for the upchuck of Prosecco and coffee mixed with bile.

Against better judgment she begins driving the last stretch of road home. She reaches 55 miles per hour in a residential zone that legally proscribes less than half that speed. Her dejection is such that she begins hysterically crying. Between sobs, she says, “God, I wish I were sober. I wish I could be truthful with my boys. I wish I could make peace with my brother. I wish I could stand up to my sister. God, if you allow me to change, and you allow this puppy to bring some much-needed happiness to me and peace to my family, I’ll make sure she’s the most spoiled dog in the world.”

The rainfall becomes torrential. The windshield wipers don’t work fast enough to prohibit the downpour from obscuring the glass separating the inside of the car from nature, incomprehensible and unforgiving. As she wipes tears from her eyes, Chiara is momentarily distracted. Before her hand returns to the steering wheel, she sees a rain-obscured form on the road. It is moving through the onslaught of rain in the opposite direction of traffic, as if intending to collide head-on with the BMW. Chiara has to brake hard to avoid running the canine figure over. As she suddenly halts the vehicle, Iris’ holding cage slides off the passenger’s seat onto the front floorboard. Chiara snaps forward, her nose hits the center of the steering wheel, summoning an instantaneous honk from the car’s horn and blood from her left nostril. Her body then springs back to an upright position.  

After sitting stunned for what feels like a short eternity, the downpour ceases and becomes a light sprinkling. “Shit! Iris, baby!” blurts Chiara. She is inundated with dread at the possibility of the puppy being injured. Before she can reach to pick up the travel crate containing an ominously silent Iris, Chiara sees in the car’s headlights a coyote, defiantly glaring into the car. Into Chiara’s eyes. Into her very soul.

The coyote raises one of its front paws, rears its head, purses its lips and commences to howl. In a state that is best described as suspended between relief and terror, Chiara is momentarily hypnotized by the beast’s lugubriously auspicious cry. Chiara’s dreamlike state is broken by the vocalizations of Iris, unmistakably those of an infantile dog. As Chiara goes once more to Iris’ assistance, the Blue Heeler puppy begins to accompany the coyote with a piercing mewl that awakens her new owner from her trance of despondency.