Lily and the Octopus Read Online Free

awkwardly and disappears.
    I watch as ice sluices down the side of my new glass in slow motion.
    It.
    Cannot.
    Have.
    Her.

Friday Night
    F riday nights are my favorite nights. You wouldn’t think a twelve-year-old dachshund would be good at Monopoly, but you’d be wrong
there. She can stack up hotels along one side of the board like nobody’s business and usually does so with little commiseration for others who might not be able to afford her upscale rents.
Me, on the other hand, I like the first side of the board. The one with the deep purple and light blue properties with vaguely racist names like Oriental Avenue. Something about the color palette
on that side of the board calms me. Lily is colorblind; she doesn’t undertake any such considerations when buying property. Also, I never feel too aggressive building hotels on those
properties if I’m lucky enough to get the monopoly. The rents are reasonable and people are usually flush from having just passed Go. I guess I just don’t have the killer instinct.
    Lily always makes fun of me when I want to be the wheelbarrow or the shoe. She considers these the game pieces of weak, feckless players. She always wants to be the cannon or the battleship or
the “shot glass.” (I haven’t had the heart to tell her she’s been playing that piece upside down and it’s actually a thimble. She would be furious if she ever found
out.)
    Tonight our hearts aren’t really in it, but it’s what we do on Friday nights, so we go through the motions. I might have suggested we just skip it and do something less involved,
like watch a movie (although Saturday nights are usually Movie Night), but I’m feeling some guilt from having left earlier today for therapy and dinner with Trent. As always, I have to roll
the dice, move her game piece, conduct the transactions, buy her houses and hotels, and be the banker—because, well, she’s a dog.
    Double fours.
    “That’s doubles two times in a row. One more time and you go to Jail,” I say. She lands on one of the green properties. “North Carolina Avenue. No one owns it. Do you
want to buy it?”
    She shrugs. She is a shell of my usual Monopoly partner, both of our minds elsewhere. But while I’m putting on a brave face (maybe it’s the vodka and Valium), she’s just
warming a chair. I look across at her. As always, I put a pillow on her seat so she can see above the tabletop, but tonight she looks smaller to me. Maybe she was always that small—I
don’t think she’s ever weighed more than seventeen pounds—but her presence in my life has always been outsized.
    “Do you not want to play? We don’t have to play.” She sniffs at her pile of money. When she bows her head I can see the octopus, so I look away. I’ve decided not to
engage it, to look at it, to talk to it, to even acknowledge it, until our vet appointment on Monday.
    We’ll see how long that lasts.
    “Tell me again about my mother.” This is something Lily likes to hear from time to time. It used to bother me, her curiosity about where she came from. I guess maybe I was feeling
some remorse about tearing her away from her dachshund family when she was only twelve weeks old, away from her mother and father and brother and sisters who later came to be called Harry and Kelly
and Rita. But now it’s a story I like to tell. It’s a story about beginnings, and heritage, and our place in the greater world.
    “Your mother’s name was Ebony Flyer, but people called her Witchie-Poo. Your father’s name was Caesar, after a great Roman general. I only met your mother once, on the day that
you and I were introduced.”
    “My mother’s name was Witchie-Poo?”
    “It was a beautiful day, the first week of May. Spring. I drove hours into the country to this old white farmhouse with clapboard siding and peeling paint, my heart in my throat the whole
way. I was so nervous! I wanted you to like me. The place sat a ways back from the road and the lawn was