That's Three

Her Dad’s favorite joke went like this:

A man is sitting in his favorite chair enjoying a beer. His wife is sitting in her favorite chair. Their little dog is sniffing around, stops and pees on the floor. The man points at the dog and says, “That’s one.” At dinner the dog jumps up to the table to try a grab a chicken bone off the man’s plate. “That’s two.” After Dinner, the man returns to his chair, but sees that the dog is sitting in his chair. “That’s three,” the man says calmly, grabbing the dog by the scruff of his neck, takes him into the back yard and shoots him with a 22 rifle. 

When he comes back in the woman is shrieking, “What did you do to my little dog?” The man leans his rifle against his chair, sitting down, he looks at his wife. “That’s one.” 

Oh, her dad would laugh at that joke. Kitara would laugh nervously along too.  She was daddy’s little girl. Her mom sat quietly, picking her cuticles.  

When she was seventeen, she and her Dad found her mom, weighing only 70 lbs., curled up on the bathroom floor, dead from an eating disorder. He came out from the bathroom and saw Kitara’s little puppy Cleveland, squatting down ready to pee on the hallway carpet, and he yelled, that’s three and grabbed the dog. Kitara is yelling, “no daddy.” He turned angrily and slapped her face.  “That’s one.” 

He continued out the door and Kitara covered her ears to try to block out the sound of the shotgun, but it was impossible.  She’d heard it too many times before. Stomping down the stairs, tears streaming down her checks, Kitara wasn’t sure whose death she was the most distraught about, her quiet mother who had been slowly starving herself to death, or her sweet puppy who didn’t have a chance in this cruel world.

“It wasn’t three,” she yelled at her Dad. Not that it would make a difference. During the 17 years of her life, her Dad had surprised her with 10 different puppies. Unfortunately, dogs had very short life expectancies in her home. Her dad’s favorite saying, “The only good dog is a dead dog.”

“Your mother is dead Kitara.  How can you be so selfish at a time like this.”

She went to her friend’s house until she graduated from high school. At 18 she was able to access the funds from her mom’s $50,000 insurance policy. She bought a van, threw a mattress in the back and hit the road. 

In northern California she worked in the orchards, picking fruit with mostly Zapotec laborers from southern Mexico. In the evenings, she attended a yoga teacher intensive. She liked teaching yoga. There was a sense of belonging and caring, but without any deep, messy connections. Between her Mom’s insurance money and what she could pick up teaching yoga in different nomadic camps spread around the country, she created a life for herself. Moving about the country, a carefree, yet solitary existence. She lived like a free bird, but not a free spirit. A broken arm from a fall on an icy parking lot in Colorado. Her van brokedown in Las Cruses. Drinking too much in Galveston. A rape in Mobile.

Wherever she sat up camp for a month or so, she would find an animal shelter where she could volunteer. It was impossible for her to have a dog again. It was simply too much for her heart to bear.

Five years later, Kitara had made her way all the way to the gulf side of Florida. It was fall, but there were no leaves falling like in the West. In the afternoons, thunderstorms crashed upon her and she took refuge in her van listening to Audible Books. In a small tourist town called Venus on the Tamiami Trail, she found a great RV park filled with snowbirds who loved her gentle yoga classes. Big bonus, it was near a Kill Shelter. 

Each morning, she arrived at 8am to walk the dogs, looking into their sweet eyes, giving them a little comfort before, well, you know. It was her penance. Her penance for still loving her Dad despite everything. And she did still love him. She refused to see him, but once a month he would call from Waldport, Oregon where he still lived on the small family farm.

It was stupid to stay in Florida so long, but she had met a man who had a sailboat, a wealthy and retired Argentinian, named Arturo, who was captivated by this sinewy hippy chick, liked caressing her inner thigh with his tongue. He was a good lover, plus he made her life so much easier. He was docked in Punta Gorda, a conservative worm hole of white haired snow-birds. She was having a good time, sailing in the evenings, eating raw oysters from the oceans. 

Every Wednesday, she continued to volunteer at the kill shelter.  

Then Ian came. Not another man, but a hurricane. She refused to evacuate despite Arturo’s pleading and instead kept her shift at the kill shelter. In the early morning, the hurricane increased in intensity, the wind tore at the roof; the lights flashed. Dogs whined from the metal pens.

She heard a knock on the door,

A man stood in the downpour with his eight-year-old boy and a young puppy. The boy had tears running down his face.  

“We got to leave,” the Dad explained. “We tried to stay with the animals, but the Myakka River overflowed and took out our trailer and the fence holding the cows. We barely got into the old Ford with this puppy.”  He looked down at his son, who was holding tight to the little black and white dog. “He’s right attached to this little puppy.”

“His name is Jangles,” the young boy whispered. Kitara was touched to see the Dad run a hand through the boy’s rain wettened black hair. 

Then there was another crash of lightening. The room went dark and for a moment they were frozen in darkness. Kitara found her flashlight. Shadow and light did an eerily dance about the cement walls.

“We got to get up to kinfolk in Tallahassee, but they don’t have no place for dogs.  We got to leave him here.”

Kitara pulled the dad aside while the little boy hugged his whimpering puppy. Kitara whispered so the boy couldn’t hear.  “You know this is a kill shelter.  If they don’t get adopted in 30 days, they are euthanized.” 

“I don’t have a choice mam. I got to get my boy to safety. My wife and his sisters left for Tallahassee yesterday. I thought the boy and I could wait it out with the animals.  Listened to those stupid SOBS on the radio saying it was going to hit Tampa.”

The little boy hugged the puppy. “Goodbye Jangles, when we come back home.  We’ll come and get you. I promise.”  The Dad mouthed silently, “We won’t be coming back.”

It broke her heart.  She knew that little boy’s ache. It was the broken record of her childhood.

After they left, Kitara put Jangles in a kennel. She gave him food and water, but he trembled, lying on his paws, too scared to eat.”

So, she sat on the floor, letting it shiver against her.

She knew no one was going to be adopting puppies after the hurricane. 

The newly completed paperwork with Jangles written on the top sat on top of the counter. She ripped it up and threw it into the trash. With the puppy in tightly in her arms, she ran through the rain, sitting him on an old sweater she kept in backseat. He would be scared, but safe.

An hour later, Max, her relief came. “It’s getting pretty crazy out there. Get yourself somewhere safe. They’re going to be shutting down the roads soon,” Max, a grizzled man of 40 would stay with the animals through the storm. Kitara smiled at him and spontaneously threw her arms around him.  His strong hands against her back felt like an affirmation that she was doing the right thing.

She and Jangles drove in the slow snake of traffic through Alligator Alley, rain pouring down, wind howling. They slept in a Walmart parking lot outside of Hollywood, on the Atlantic side. The storm was the exclamation mark she was waiting for; Jangles the reset button that was bringing something new into the fabric of her life.

A day later, with Florida still gripped in chaos, panic and destruction, her Dad called. 

“You’re not still in Florida are you baby girl? “

“That’s exactly where I am.”

“Come home where it’s safe.”

“My van is home.”         

Finally, he got to his real reason for calling. 

“I’m sick Kitara. My kidneys. They’re shot.”

Kitara takes a deep breath, sees him lifting her up above his head as a small girl, “Who has the best damn little girl in the whole world?”

“Maybe my little girl will give the man who gave her life one of her kidneys so I can keep kicking around a little bit longer.”

“Dad. I’d love to come, but I have this dog now.” She could hear Dad cluck in disgust, but she continued. “It’s just a little puppy and it’s scared.” 

“Leave the damn dog for Christ sakes and fly out here. You’ve always been soft in the head when it came to dogs.”

“Well, I guess I can come,” she fidgeted with her nose ring as she talked. “It will take me awhile.”

 She shutdown her cell phone and tucked it back in her over-the-shoulder purse. “Jangles, what should I do?” He looked up, a heavy, nervous look on his face. 

“I guess it’s time to go for a drive.”  Jangles cocks his head to one side, listening, his forehead wrinkled in curiosity.

Over the years, when he called her, he’d tell her how much he missed his baby girl. Living alone and on social security and a small military pension. The animals were all gone, sold off after her mom had died.

They shared the same B negative blood type. As kin, she was the most likely match. 

His only chance at continuing to live was nestled in her right side, under her skin, an organ the size of her hand. He had given her life, so did he technically have a share of her? It felt like it.   

She drove with Jangles slowly across the country, while her dad waited on the dialysis machine, his kidney slowly ceasing to clear his blood of toxins.

In Louisiana she stopped in Shreveport, sleeping in at a truck stop overlooking the Red River. As she walked with Jangles along the slow waters slugging through the city, she thought about life’s journey, not just her life’s journey, but her Dad’s and every person’s life journey and what caused it to take the direction that it does. 

When she was in the heat of Texas, staying in a roadside motel in Paris, she wondered if after she saved his life, if he will become a better man. If he would have one of those life changing epiphanies. Afterwards, they would grow close, she would have the kind and loving Dad she always longed for. 

Looking over the grand canyon she wondered what we owe our kinfolk for giving us life. She wondered how our brokenness connects the generations. Can the one who caused you pain also help you heal?

In Northern California, shadowed under the mighty redwoods, she longed to have her own confused soul soothed by healing him. 

Finally, seven days later, she was in Waldport.  She would sleep in her van on the family farm before heading down to the hospital in Portland.  Jangles ran crazy through the overgrown under story of the yard.  She loved watching him, but felt there were too many four legged ghosts haunting the place.  It was strange to be back, sitting on a front porch chair, watching Jangles leap and spin through the grass and small trees, Kitara found herself humming, “What’s love got to do with it?”

 Kitara left Jangles in the care of a doggy daycare while she went up to the hospital, trying to assure his sad eyes that she would be back for him. Poor guy. What if she died during surgery?  He’d be left all alone in the world.

At the county hospital she did the required blood and tissue tests that confirmed she was best possible match for a transplant.  

“You two are so much alike, biologically that it. It sets us up for an excellent outcome for your father,” the surgeon explained, smiling, pleased with himself.  Her father was silently crying.  She had never seen him cry before, maybe he was evolving?  He seemed a stranger to her, but there was not another human being in the world whom she was more tied too. 

Kitara didn’t know how to feel, but she understood her mother’s constant loss of appetite. Being so close to her father made her stomach pitch and turn. 

Later in the day with Jangles in the doggy care center again, she went back to the hospital to say good night to her dad and hear the final instructions from the hospital.

“Baby girl! I knew you’d come through. I knew you wouldn’t abandon your old man.” 

She remembered the closeness she felt with her mother when she was still alive, as if the umbilical cord, now invisible, still attached them together. But her Dad always had something more powerful, a magical chain wrapped around her, that could not be seen, but felt as if it were an iron shackle.  “So glad you’re here baby girl.  You’re going save my life.” He clung to her hand., with his weathered, veined one. 

“So weak. so pathetic,” she couldn’t help but think, but her chest felt tight. His eyes held hers, beseechingly.

A female counselor named Mauve, not much older than she, with dyed purple hair and a casual chatty way about her, explained the risks and asked sincerely if Kitara was prepared, if she understood exactly what she was undertaking. Kitara nodded, as she absently signed the paperwork. It was all set.  The counselor even found temporary housing that would accept Jangles and a dog sitter for when she was in surgery and throughout her recovery.  

The night before the surgery, she came intending to surrender herself to the hospital. She walked into her Dad’s room. He had lost so much weight his body looked like a rope underneath the cover, but his face was bloated and pale. 

His fingers twitched. He was struggling to breath. 

Words came haltingly, broken from his dry lips. “Little girl. I’m so glad you’re here.  We are going to have good times together now.” A thready and weak chuckle, faltered into a cough. 

Kitara smiled at first, nodding, and reached for his hand, moving close to his ear thinking she’d give him some comforting words, maybe even a kiss on the check, but that’s not what happened.

The words that had long been collecting in some gaping wound deep within finally released, “I’m not going to do it Dad. You’re not getting my kidney.” 

His expression shifted from the soft relief to fear, “What? I…I… What are you talking about little girl.”

“Daddy, I’m not giving you my kidney.”

“I don’t believe you. Why are you saying this? Everything is arranged. When his eyes teared up, she looked away and out the window. She felt a strong urge to bolt from the room before she lost her nerve.

“But why?” he asked. 

She took a deeps breath, but waited before speaking, letting the space between them fill with hard silence. Finally, she leaned in and whispered in his ear, “That’s three Daddy.” 

She patted his hand, looking into his eyes.

 “That’s three Daddy,” she repeated.  His eyes seemed to dim and then slowly close.  In synch, they sighed into understanding. She got up then, rather abruptly and left his room.

She and Jangles drove two hours to slept on the beach that night, the back of the van left open so she could hear the surf. Jangles’ body gave off a nice warmth and she rested her face close to his fur, comforted by his musty puppy smell. 

Around 9pm, she saw the number for the hospital light up her phone.  She let it go to voice mail. A week later, her Dad was cremated. The funeral home gave her his ashes in a wooden box. With Jangles by her side, they drove back towards Waldport. Halfway there, they turned down a lonely country road. There, in the middle of the hardened dirt, she dumped his ashes. Jangles watched her curiously, sniffing at the grey pile. Had there been a few cigarette butts, it could have been the contents of an emptied ashtray.

She brushed off a bit of ash that had drifted onto her hands and turned to her little puppy.

“Come on Jangles. Let’s go home boy!”