I was the youngest child of four children; ten years younger than the oldest boy in fact. I got the butt-end of my parent’s fun years because they were getting older. I missed out on the dogs that my brother’s had and caught the butt end of the litter of rabbits they had. I had always wanted a dog. My mother however, had learned from three other children that dogs were going to end up as her responsibility, so it was no more dogs for her.
Still, I asked, and asked, and asked to no avail. Finally, one day when I was in high school, my father called on his way home from work. I was busy getting dressed for school. My dad asked my mother to put me on the phone.
“I got you a dog,” he yelled into the phone. (My dad always yelled into his cell phone just in case you couldn’t hear him and he always assumed you couldn’t, because he always yelled).
“You did?!” I was ecstatic.
My mother leaned up against the wall, pissed off to say the least.
I hurried and finished getting dressed for school until I heard that truck rambling around the corner. I ran out into the backyard, excited to say the least. How was I going to concentrate on school knowing I had a dog at home waiting for my undying affection!
I ran outside as my dad climbed out of the truck. “He’s in the back.”
It never dawned on me that I couldn’t see the dog, or that the dog wasn’t running around in the bed of the truck, like I’d seen so many dogs in the backs of trucks do. I just assumed it was a puppy, and maybe it was just lying there, chilling.
I ran around to the back of the truck to find a dead dog with rigor setting in. There was a lump in my throat, and I was fuming to say the least.
“This is a dead dog. That was not funny!” I said, angrily.
“Well, he was alive when I hit it. I told myself that if he survived the ride home, you could keep him, “my dad said. He had a slight smirk on his face.
Even my mother was upset with that one. “That wasn’t very nice,” she said.
I huffed back into the house, angry.
I would never get a dog.
I still haven’t. I should’ve called PETA on my dad, but I was too chicken.
