Dog House Read Online Free

thirty, after tenyears of living in apartments with no grass, no birds, no rustle of leaves (I swore I’d never live in one again), Millard and I found we could afford our first house. Rather, we couldn’t actually afford it. A bachelor uncle had died, and Millard’s mother, who had loathed me since I was seventeen and ensnared her only child, decided to use some of her inheritance to buy Millard—not me—a house. It was a homey Tudor in a prewar development—a little small, a little dark, with a one-car garage—but with a Japanese maple on the front lawn I could hardly believe was mine. Every leaf, every crooked bough, mine. I’d never owned a tree before, just as I’d never owned a kitchen or a fireplace, but after all those years in apartments, the treeness of that Japanese maple spoke to me of eight-year-old Barden playing in the backyard, of bikes in the garage, of Halloween, of neighborhood. And that’s probably why, in overwhelming and buoyant suburban joy, I decided that it was time for our son to own a dog. The all-American dream, right? A boy, a house, a dog? Our family’s moment to see Spot run?
    Besides, now that Millard and Barden and I were starting our Real Life. (Yes, I believed that people who lived in apartments didn’t live real lives. They were all just waiting in their various boxes—as I had waited—to be taken out and moved into their very own homes, with front and back lawns and a dog.) I needed that family dog to own and love till it got old, and thereby prove that my mother had been uncaring, selfish and an ill-treater of dogs. And children.
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    I’d made up my mind long before I was married to be a better mother than my mother was. To always know where my child was going after school; not to make his life a misery over minutiae like clean rooms and put-away toys; to be the kind of mother who cares that her son has the basic and necessary experience of owning and caring for a dog. On this cloud of maternal virtuousness, I wafted into the local dog pound, because where I grew up, that’s where one went to get a dog. (These days they’re “animal shelters,” an accurate euphemism that rolls a good deal more easily off the tongue than “pound,” while also not punching out the mind’s eye with harrowing images of impound-ed pups.) That’s where I found our adorable little beagle—all floppy eared, small, short coated (no grooming!) and flatteringly licky. But before I committed my family to its first canine relationship, I took the time to look up “The Beagle” in the library. I was very much more mature now, and I wanted to know something substantial about our dog-to-be before I got him home.
    Curled in a chair in my stuccoed living room with The Survival Guide to Beagles and Beagle Training and a mug full of tea, I came across the first of several characteristics that seemed mildly troubling:
    â€œSlowness to learn.”
    Was that dog talk for “dumb,” or did that just mean I’d have to learn to be patient? (I’ve read somewhere that patience can be learned. It’s not, as I’d always supposed, an inborn trait.) Next, I found:
    â€œSlowness to housebreak.”
    Now that, I thought, could create a problem for a well-intentioned dog owner—even a newly patient one. (Don’t forget, this was before everyone did crate-training. See p. 114) But, hey, I was a capable, fully committed adult now: a wife, a mother and a paragon of stick-to-itiveness where mammals were concerned (yes, I’d forgotten the monkey). I knew I’d be good—probably talented, even—at housebreaking. It had only taken me three years to train Barden. In fact, his toilet training had finally reached a point where the pediatrician had delivered a nice little lecture to me that ended with “But, Mrs. Prisant, I’ve never seen a man walk down the aisle who wasn’t