Fiction: Why There?

Her warm, puppy heart beat wildly in my palm. Was it fear? Did she think I’d turn her out, heartless mother that I was?

“You should have seen that filthy place!” My son said, knowing what a clean freak I was. The puppy burrowed into my chest. In on the con, I suspected. “I couldn’t just leave her there.” Said along with lavish promises of clean-ups, baths, and multiple walks per day. You know how long that lasted.

In a homage to Jourma Kaukonen, the American rock guitarist of Hot Tuna fame, my son dubbed her Yorma. Bless her rockin’ heart, she too loved her namesake’s music. Head resting on paws, hind legs tucked in, laid out like a sphinx on the rug in my son’s room, she would listen for hours, tail wagging to the bluesy rhythm beat. That is, when she wasn’t snatching the mail out of the door slot and depositing its drool-soaked missives onto my bed. Or… crotch-sniffing each and every male who entered our house, hybrid hussy that she was. I loved that dog.

Of college age, my son went forth in search of higher learning, directing me to take good care of his dog that I had walked, clothed (a sweater knit for our cold northern winters), marshaled to and from grooming appointments. And… lifted her blood-matted body up off the sidewalk, into my car and raced to the vet after a stray ripped a piece out of her belly, while my son shot baskets in the school yard. “She’s your responsibility now,” he said.

Now? I tried not to laugh. “I’ll do my best,” I said, with like gravitas.

Studies completed, he secured a job and an apartment in NYC. He wanted Yorma back. She was his dog after all. After the constant care I’d given her through the years? (His Dad pitched in now and again, but in essence it was me.) Nothing doing. Visitation rights, anytime. Take her for a sleepover? Book it now. But she lives with us. He groused but agreed.

We bought a summer home out on Long Island. A weekend getaway for us—and Yorma. Where we went, she went. This one Friday, I couldn’t make the drive out with my husband and took the bus instead. A long boring ride without him and the dog, but I read and dozed and read, and when we reached the synagogue at the entry to our town, I looked up to see the hind end of a dog ambling by. Hmmm. That looks like… But what would she be doing here, unleashed and alone?

Question answered when my husband picked me up at our stop: she’d run off hours ago while he was doing yard work. He’d driven all over looking for her.

“I just saw her! By the synagogue! Go!”

But she was gone.

Up, down and around, all weekend we drove through the town and the outlying wooded areas, looking, calling her name, posting signs on trees, alerting our neighbors. Where could she be? A pampered house pet like her, how would she manage on her own?

Sunday, we drove home to Queens in silence. I kept turning to the back seat, thinking I’d see her head out the window, ears blown back, catching the summer breeze. I felt an actual part of me had been left behind. But that was not the worst of it. The worst would be telling my son—chicken that I was, I’d put off the call till we arrived home. Though she went missing on his dad’s watch, it was a no-brainer that I would be in the wrong. It’s always on the mom.

“You lost my dog?!”

I tried to explain. He cut me off. I’d lost his dog and that was that.

He rounded up a friend with a car. It was getting dark; over a two-hour drive. He didn’t care. If he didn’t find her then, he’d sleep at the house and start looking again in the morning.

A few hours later he called. He had found her. At the synagogue, where I’d spotted her on Friday. On the lawn, jumping and prancing, tail a wag like all get out, soon as she saw him pull up and get out of the car.

I’d read that lost dogs can find their way home through magnetic fields. But the synagogue, miles from our home? Why there?

“She was praying I would find her,” my son said.

With that, I could not argue.

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