Blog

Blog, August '08

Vacation

By Shelley Mickle

My best friend has gone on vacation and left me her dog. I don’t much like her dog. He is little and yippy with white wiry fur, and his teeth don’t meet in the center. But the real truth is, he reminds me of my high school math teacher. He sits down there on the floor looking at me while I fix his dinner, and everything on his face is saying, “You can do better than this.” His name is Charley, the same name my math teacher had, too.

The day my friend flew off to a dude ranch in Montana, she drove Charley over to my house and left me with a list of how to care for him. She was so afraid he would grieve over her leaving that she made him a tape. I was told to play it when he seemed agitated, and he would think she was there with him, and everything would be all right.

Well, to me, Charley looks agitated all the time. So right off, I started playing the tape. By the time I’d played it twenty-three times, I thought surely Charley would calm down. But instead he kept running around the house rooting under the couch and in all the closets and outside behind every tree and bush, looking for my friend.

A few days of this and I couldn’t take it anymore. I burned the tape right in front of Charley. I hid all the pictures of my friend, and I wouldn’t even say a word that sounded like her name. Then I shut Charley up in the laundry room and went to the kitchen to call her.

“I’m having trouble with Charley,” I said.

“Why?” she asked me.

“Well, he misses you,” I said. “And he also reminds me too much of my high school math teacher. I’m starting to have bad thoughts about him.”

“Oh, for heavens sakes,” she said, “put him on the phone.”

When I went to get Charley, I found him in the clothes hamper sniffing through the socks. I carried him to the phone and put the receiver over his ear. In a few minutes, he wiggled loose and calmly sat down at my feet and looked up at me.

I put the phone to my own ear. I was so afraid my friend was going to tell me to just suck it up and stick it out that I shut my eyes so I couldn’t even see Charley.

But instead she said, “Okay. Put him on the next flight out of there. But I swear to goodness, sometimes the thing you most need a vacation from just up and follows you.