The Bracelet and the Puppy

On the day my husband asked me what I wanted for my fiftieth birthday, he made a tactical error.

“It’s an important lifetime event, so the sky’s the limit,” he said.

I’d been pondering the upcoming big day for a while. I knew what I wanted. I also knew that Kevin wouldn’t be enthused about it. But, hadn’t he just said that the sky was the limit?

I seized the moment.

“Well, if you’re sure—what I want, more than anything in the whole world, is a dog.”

Without even pretending to consider my request, Kevin said, “You’re kidding, right? A dog? No. No way.”

And just like that, he shattered my dream. It burst into shards as sharp as bitterness, as painful as the denial of love. 

Now, what else might I like instead?

But I’d already turned away and left the room. I should have known better than to get my hopes up.

It wasn’t that that Kevin didn’t care about my feelings. He did. And it wasn’t that he disliked animals. He greeted the neighbours’ pets by name whenever he encountered them on his daily walks. As for puppies, he adored them.

But we lived complicated lives already, without the added intricacy of dog ownership. We had a wild-child daughter, Joss, who was trying to scrape together her last few credits so that she could graduate high school and get the hell away from her annoying family. We had a preteen son, Pete, who required a lot of patient nurturing. And, we had a psychotic orange cat that thought it owned the house and everyone in it. 

Kevin wasn’t wrong when he figured our lives were messy enough already. 

Still.

After he’d turned me down on my first request, Kevin asked me several times what I wanted for my birthday instead of a puppy. 

“Nothing.” I didn’t try to hide my petulance.

“Come on, Sal, you know a puppy would be madness.”

“Apparently. Anyway, I don’t care. Get me whatever you think is appropriate.”

On my special day, my husband gave me an expensive gold bracelet. It was packaged in an elegant gift box, and it was about the furthest thing from a puppy that he could have chosen. 

I looked at it with loathing.

Had I wanted a piece of jewelry, I would have appreciated it. I had no intention of wearing the thing, though. It was a sad reminder that he’d denied my request. Uttering a clipped and insincere thank you, I re-boxed the bracelet and shut it away in a dresser drawer. And there it stayed.

Months went by. Puppies still gamboled about in my dreams. I bided my time until Joss left for university and then did something underhanded by enlisting my son, who agreed that a dog would be an excellent addition to our family. Together, Pete and I launched an all-out campaign and eventually Kevin capitulated, after making it plain that dog-rearing would be our responsibility, not his. 

Elvis, the most glorious puppy ever, was nine weeks old when he came to live with us. He was a registered sheltie with a lofty pedigree. Somehow, though, he had bucked his snooty lineage and was more adorable mutt than high-bred aristocrat. He was a darling fluff-ball with sable and white colouring, expressive, almond eyes, and ridiculous, floppy ears. I fell in love instantly.

And we all lived happily ever after.

Not really.

For a while, things were chaotic. At first, we confined Elvis to the laundry room. There he rampaged, shredding the newspapers that I arranged optimistically twice a day. He loved to chew on the special pee pads that were advertised as being infallible for house training. He never got the hang of their real purpose.

Elvis chomped on other things, too, whenever he escaped from his assigned quarters. Shoes, table legs, carpet fringes, and anything else gnawable that he came across were fair game.

“Look at what your blasted dog has done now!” Kevin yelled on an every-other-day basis. 

“Elvis was just bored,” I said, cuddling the chubby, innocent-looking animal. “Maybe if you’d pay a bit of attention to him . . .” 

There was no point continuing. Kevin had walked away. 

 At that time in our married lives, I commuted daily to a job downtown. Kevin, who worked from home, seemed intent on doing his best to resist the charms of the foisted-upon-him puppy. This meant that Elvis spent protracted periods on his own, and although Pete and I were our dog’s steadfast buddies when we were around, our poor puppy led a rather solitary life. By now, I’d thought Kevin would have fallen for Elvis, but my stubborn husband seemed determined to keep his emotional distance. All the rubber squeaky toys in the world weren’t enough to offset Elvis’s loneliness, poor puppy.

It took a couple of months for Elvis to learn to do his business in the great outdoors. Once he was somewhat trustworthy and Kevin gave a grudging assent, we allowed our puppy full access to the house. This splendid period of freedom did not last long.  Our feisty marmalade cat, Zot, took exception to Elvis and for a time they waged all-out interspecies warfare.   

We soon realised that the only way of keeping both pets alive was to bifurcate the house. Accordingly, we erected a Game of Thrones-style Wall out of old baby gates. The Night’s Watch kitty got the upper floor and basement. Elvis, most definitely the Wildling, had the run of the family room and kitchen. In the no-man’s-land of the gated hallway there were often fierce dissing sessions of growls and hisses but both pets were afraid of the rickety, pleated wooden fence and they kept well back.

We thought that the Wall would stand for a few months. In fact, it would take Zot’s untimely death four years later for it to come a-tumbling down. As the rest of the family mourned the loss of our insane but awesome cat, Elvis romped through the entire house, enjoying his emancipation and missing Zot not one jot.

In spite of his unrepentant attitude toward Zot, Elvis was my darling. In his almost seven years on this earth he comforted, exhorted and entertained me. He played Frisbee with me in the park, throwing himself into the air with abandon time and time again to retrieve the airborne missile. He was the best brushed dog in the neighborhood and he accepted compliments graciously, sitting politely to let admirers pat him and tell him what a good boy he was. Whenever I was home, he stayed as close to my side as possible, teaching me what true devotion was all about.

Family dynamics are a swirling and mysterious brew.  Elvis’s presence in the household changed everything. Pete, who’d been my partner in crime in convincing Kevin that a dog was imperative, began to develop a robust dislike for Elvis. It was a mutual jealousy thing. I sometimes caught one teasing the other—Pete giving Elvis an undeserved poke or Elvis giving Pete a frustrated nip. In later years, Elvis patrolled the upstairs hallway and lunged in mock attack whenever Pete opened the door. Pete had plenty of opportunities to practice his nimbleness as well as his full range of expletives on a daily basis.

On the other hand, reluctant dog-owner Kevin gradually dropped his guard and developed a deep love for Elvis. I was amazed when Kevin started to take Elvis for meandering walks around the neighborhood. Purely for fun, Kevin taught Elvis a variety of goofy tricks—not the essential obedience commands that I used, but silly dog stunts. A favourite of Elvis’s was rolling over and over across a room until he was exhausted and his tongue dangled sideways out of his mouth in a cockeyed grin. On fine evenings, Kevin spent hours with Elvis in the back garden, where they sat quietly together and admired the flowers in perfect, wordless companionship. And sometimes, on rainy nights, Kevin would play his guitar in the basement and sing, and Elvis would croon along in a high-pitched howl. This seemed to amuse both of them endlessly. 

Two years after Zot the cat died, Pete left for university and Elvis, reveling in his new, only-child status, basked in the total attention that was his. He was now six years old and had reached that lovely age where he still had plenty of pep but no longer tugged on the leash or chewed up the furniture. He had his two favourite adults at his beck and call, a big house to guard, and more than enough outdoor exercise. For Elvis, life was bliss.

Of course, dogs don’t live forever, and when Elvis became gravely ill before his seventh birthday, we realized we had to say a premature good-bye. The kind staff at the veterinary clinic allowed us to be with him at the end, even though they warned us that  Elvis was so far gone that he wouldn’t know we were there. 

They were wrong. Elvis was wheeled in on a stainless steel trolley, his fur matted and his eyes dull, but as soon as we said his name he wagged his tail. His soulful eyes searched us out. 

“We love you, Elvis,” Kevin said, and Elvis seemed to relax. As we broke down in tears, our wonderful dog left this world in peace, beside the two people in his life who loved him most.

There was no burial. We didn’t want an urn full of ashes. Funeral rites would not have filled the gaping emptiness inside us.

I knew that, in spite of his initial resistance to getting a puppy, Kevin had loved Elvis just as much as I did. My husband’s heart had broken that last day, too, and so I asked him how he wanted to commemorate the life of our beautiful dog.

“I want to remember him looking vital and glossy and happy. I don’t want to picture him lying on that gurney,” Kevin said. “I can’t stand thinking about it.” He turned away, and I knew he was hiding his grief.

I placed framed photos of Elvis in different rooms of our house. Elvis as a puppy, Elvis singing with Kevin, Elvis walking proudly in the park with both of us. I tried to think of our dog in his glory days and not to let my heart break all over again when I recalled how he’d wagged his tail in his final moments when he’d heard our voices. Until that last week he’d always been strong and energetic, and that is the way I chose to remember him, in whatever kind of spiritual dimension I hoped he now inhabited.

A few months later, when I no longer looked behind me automatically to see if Elvis was following at my heels, I decided to retrieve the gold bracelet that Kevin had given me on my fiftieth birthday. It was right where I’d left it, seven years ago, packaged up at the back of a rarely opened dresser drawer. I removed it from its fancy box and draped it around my wrist. As I fastened the clasp, I felt my spirits rise in a sensation of peacefulness and completion.

I wear the bracelet often, in memory of Elvis and with a new, deeper appreciation for my husband. Even if Kevin had annoyed me by giving me jewelry when I’d wanted a puppy, he’d more than redeemed himself over the years by caring for Elvis, and by being a faithful partner to me through thick and thin. 

I knew he’d given me the bracelet with love.  At long last, its time had come.