Sometimes I couldn't believe the things I heard myself saying. "Put that down. You're going to poke out someone's eye. I mean it now. You know better than that." Or I might come home from work and not find so much as a trace of him. "Oh, great. Where are you, under the bed? If I were you, I'd come here this instant and tell me what you've done."

I'd hear myself and I'd think, Well, you've become one of those people. "Sam's only a dog, Frank," my wife Ann liked to say. But she didn't believe that any more than I did. She was just taking the high road. Leaving the discipline to me.

Oh, Sam was smart. I swear he understood English, and not just a few words, either. Not just Come or Stay. I think he understood almost everything we said. It sounds so darned foolish, I know. But I'd lived with him so long, I behaved as though it were true, a proven fact. I suppose that's why I went into the other room to call the vet's while my wife played with Sam in the kitchen. I didn't want him listening. I placed the call from the bedroom. I said,

"I want to bring Sam in tomorrow, Sharon. I want him put down. It's time now, I think. He's not in any pain. None that I can see. But it's just like you warned me: he's not getting any better. He's getting worse, if anything. I want to be there, by the way."

We made all the arrangements ahead of time. I had them work it out to the penny. It's strange how I knew ahead of time that I couldn't do this unscathed. I've buried both of my parents, and a few of my friends. I lost some very good friends in the war. I don't know how many funerals I've been to since I became an adult. Too many, I know. And at all those funerals, I've never once shed a tear. It's amazing, isn't it? I mean we're talking about a dog.

We were newlyweds when we got him. We were both still in school. This was in Boston, in the apartment on Marlborough Street. What a place! What a neighborhood! It's gentrified now. A series of condos. But it wasn't back then. Pimps and junkies and whores. It's amazing we survived it. I was waiting tables at Legal Seafood at night, and I didn't like leaving Ann all alone, not in that neighborhood. So I sent her out after a dog. And I told her what kind. A big dog, a female. I had a wife to look after now. If you have a female spayed, they're more territorial than the males, and better protectors. So, a female, I said to Ann, I have a loved one to protect, and big, and short-haired, because Ann's allergic to just about everything. After that, I said, it's up to you. Oh, and a puppy. No more than six months. With a big dog, you have to get them early or you'll never make them mind.

You should have seen what she came back with. I should have known then it would be the story of our marriage. She came back with Sam, a long-haired male that was a year or two old if he was a day. She blamed it on the girl at the animal shelter. Ann claimed they told her he was a puppy, but what are the chances of that? His paws were the size of dimes. She'd grown up around dogs. Her parents had Danes. What are the chances she thought Sam was a puppy?

Sometimes, when Ann wasn't home, when Sam was all alone with me, I'd test him. I'd give him three or four things to do in sequence. "Go into the kitchen, get your ball from the corner, then take it into the bedroom, then come back here to me." The first time I told him to do something like that and he did it—well, it was something, believe me. He was one smart little dog.

******************************************************************************************

When I got off the phone with Sharon I realized Ann had been eavesdropping. "I just can't bring myself to do it. You're going to have to do this one alone. Can you forgive me, Frank? This is going to have to be one time when I just can't stand at your side."

I didn't know what she was talking about. It seemed to me that it had been years since Ann had stood by my side. But if that's what she wanted to believe about herself, well then, okay. Fine, sobeit: Ann was the sort of woman who stood by her husband's side.

She said, "I'm trying to imagine tomorrow morning. You'll drive away and then Sam will be gone. You'll be gone, Sam will be gone. Haven't you noticed? Everything about this marriage seems to be going away."

She shouldn't have said that. She should have stopped to think. I would have seen it myself, had she given me a second. Sure, Sam. He's been with us since we were newlyweds. The marriage. Neither one of us had put it into words before. Not those words: this marriage is falling apart.

It was just too perfect. I didn't buy it. Everyone who knows us thinks Ann is the smart one between us. And she's not stupid, there's no doubt about that. But she isn't as smart as she seems. She's just quicker than I am, always there with a witty reply.

Once, sitting in a psychology class at B.U., Ann's professor caught her knitting. "Mrs. Chambers," he said, "are you aware that knitting is a sublimated form of masturbation?"

"Professor," said Ann, without looking up, "when I knit, I knit. When I masturbate, I masturbate."

It's an old family story, one she loves to tell to prove how quick she can be in a tight situation. So that's how I answered her. "When I knit, I knit," I said. In other words, Sam's fifteen years old and it's time to put him down. Period.

Ann once said that nothing's anymore sad than a childless couple. I said, "There are lots of things more sad, believe me."

"Name one," she said.

We were walking along the Santa Monica pier. It was her birthday. Her twenty-eighth. We'd just eaten at a French restaurant in Westwood she'd been eager to try. La Chaumiere. We'd paid $160 for dinner for two. On our budget, a fortune. "A hundred and sixty dollars for dinner for two," I said. "And that's not counting what valet parking cost."

"Right," she said. "Right."

We'd agreed when we married that we didn't want children. Later she'd say that I was the one who said he didn't want children, and she'd just gone along. She'd thought I would change. I hadn't been out of the Army long. She thought it had something to do with that, my not wanting kids.

That's the night it started, her twenty-eighth birthday. Who knew she'd have such a longing? Who could have guessed what it would mean to her, to Ann, to the both of us?

There were arguments, what arguments, before we finally called it quits. They were the only arguments with Ann that I ever won. With all the facts on my side, how could I miss? This time, at least, all the facts were on my side. "To begin with," I'd say, "we can't afford a baby. I mean we can't afford to lose your income."

"You can't tell me you wouldn't love your own child."

"Look, Ann, I teach high school, right? I teach Biology, a course all the kids dread. Mine's the course that no one wants any part of. I see them in the raw. I spend my days with these kids who grew up in broken homes, in two-paycheck families. Latch-key kids, you know? It just doesn't work. I'm sorry, I wish it did. I was all for Women's Rights—well, you remember. But this just doesn't work. Someone has to be waiting at home when they get there."

Anyway, that's how I'd go on. And I meant it, every word. I wasn't just taking a position. But she never really appreciated that. All of her friends began having babies. Everyone seemed to be having babies all of a sudden. Even on television—every show seemed to have someone who was having a baby, or someone who was wanting to. All of these women. All of these shows. All of these biological clocks.

I've had it up to here with the Women's Movement, I really have. I'm sick of hearing about their biological clocks. I'm sick of hearing about all their prerogatives, and all of their rights. Why doesn't someone start talking about all of their responsibilities? I never said that to Ann, though maybe I should have. I thought it would make things too easy for her. It would allow her to dismiss me as another unevolved male. Maybe I should have just come right out and said it. There's nothing sane about a need like that though. It's way beyond reason. You're wasting your time in discussing it.

******************************************************************************************

I brushed my teeth the next morning. I took a shower. I put on my clothes. I did all the things I normally do. Everything was going to be normal. Normal was the watch-word. We weren't going to make a big deal out of this. Sam would smell it, he'd know it, we'd make his last few hours alive a torment. The only thing that was going to be different was that he and I would be going off together.

"You know I'm going to want his collar," Ann said, putting her head in the garage. "Don't you forget it, either. Don't you dare forget it."

Like I could. Ann followed us down the driveway. I thought she was going to pet Sam or something. I put the car in Neutral. I owed her this much, he'd been with us so many years. One last touch.

"Frank," Ann whispered, putting her face next to mine. "When you take him in. Don't carry him, okay? It humiliates Sam when you carry him."

I promised her I wouldn't. I looked over at him. He got down off the seat, and curled up on the floor of the passenger's side, just like he was supposed to. "Right," I said, "I'll put him on the lead. I always put him on the lead, all right?"

"All right. I'll see you tonight. Come home early,okay?"

"Right," I said. I backed out, and then headed for the vet's.

The freeway traffic is heavy where we live, but this day it was bumper to bumper. The car behind us began to honk, then another. Maybe it was the sound of the horns that did it, or maybe it was me, for I wasn't sure that I could go through with this. Sam started acting up, whatever it was. He started acting a nuisance, jumping on the passenger seat, getting in my way each time we pulled forward. I looked at my watch. I still had an hour I had to fill, but I wasn't going to do this for an hour. What if I couldn't put him to sleep after all? A lot had been happening in my life. At work. With Ann. What if I didn't have it in me? What would I say to Ann?

I took the first exit I could and began taking sidestreets. I didn't care where I was headed. Anything to get off that freeway, you know? Any street where the traffic looked light.

Before long I was headed in a direction I hadn't gone since we moved here. When we first moved to L.A. we used to drive this route at night, out toward Rancho Bernardo. We'd ride up and down through the streets where the other half lived and pick out our house, the one we were going to live in. I'd forgotten how beautiful the houses were. That's where Sam and I began that morning. We went through all the old sections, then on to the newer ones, the ones with their own security and Spanish names, or Estates in the names. We wound up in one called Jardin De Placeres Terrestres, a favorite of Ann's. You had to sign in at a guard house. We use to make up the most ridiculous identities. No one checked. Paul Winchel, Ventriloquist. Edith Piaf, Chanteuse. What did it matter? We were just starting out. You know how it is at that age. We could have been anyone. This time I said I was from Sharon's office, returning a pet to its owner. I said all I had was a street address, that the house was at the end of this block. He took my name and waved me through.

They must seed the earth with the kind of grass they use for golf courses. That's the only thing I can think of. They surely sod the common areas, and then sow this special grass seed. For you don't often see lawns that look like that, not out where we lived. Or homes, either. We always wondered who lived in those houses. What did they do for a living? How big must their families be to need so many rooms? We'd make up professions. This one must be a Mafioso. Charlie Manson owned this one. This small one belonged to the Pope.

"Friendship Walk" Photograph by Brian Ferguson

The sprinklers were just coming on. All around us water was coming up from the ground. The coastal sun is hot, even in the cool months of the year, and you could see it now in the sky, full and hot. The sun, the water. Four or five feet above the grass there was a mist in the air. I wondered why I'd never noticed that before. No traffic, no noise. Not so much as a word. It was such a beautiful morning. I mean that was the thing, you couldn't have asked for a more beautiful morning.

# # #