Gizelle's Bucket List

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  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part I Enchanted

  1 A Big Puppy

  2 Sisterhood

  3 Making Lists

  4 Manhattan

  5 Times Scare

  6 Working Girl

  7 Meet a Boy

  8 The Dog Park

  9 The Limp

  10 Road Trip

  11 The Discovery

  Part II The Bucket List

  12 The Dock

  13 A Dog’s List

  14 The Leaves Turn

  15 A Snowfall

  16 Let Go

  17 Run

  Epilogue: Carry It with You

  Acknowledgments

  About Lauren Fern Watt

  To my dad for teaching me to “hang in there”

  Author’s Note

  While writing this book, I referenced personal journals, spoke with family and friends who appear in the story, and reflected on my memories of growing up with my very large dog, Gizelle. The book spans around seven years of my life, so by necessity events essential to this narrative were chosen, and other events were left out. Some names and identifying characteristics of individuals in this book have been changed.

  Prologue

  The alarm rang from my phone and I reached over to hit snooze. I snuggled my head back into the pillow and it beeped again. With one eye barely open, I thumbed at the screen. “Shit! Shit! Shit!” I jumped out of bed, grabbed a running shirt from the mountain of clothes, threw on my Asics, and bolted out the door.

  I ran to the Astor Place subway, took the train up to Central Park, and sprinted to the registration tent. Out of breath upon arrival, I was met by a woman with long red fingernails and a raised eyebrow. “Hon, you are twenty minutes late.”

  “But this is one of my qualifying runs for the New York City Marathon.” I pleaded. “I only have to complete this race. Please, please just let me run.” She placed her hands over the plastic bin of bibs and pinched her lips together. “That race is gone.”

  Backing out of the tent, tears filled my eyes. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Don’t cry. Not here, Lauren. Not in Central Park. But there was no stopping it. Once I blinked, the tears came flooding.

  Head down, I wandered across the park to Bethesda Fountain, the spot where Gizelle and I liked to watch the rowboats in the pond. She’d been having trouble with her back left leg. The stairs of my walk-up apartment building were too much, so two friends with a one-story house in Maine had offered to babysit for a few weeks. This made it possible for me to return to the city and carry on with work, but it was lonely in the city without Gizelle. Caitlin and John said she was doing well and staying off her paws. She was taking her medicine with ease. She would come back to New York as soon as she was well . . . at least that’s what I hoped. But then again I wasn’t so sure. Every time I thought about her limp, this horrible fear came over me.

  I took a deep breath and wiped my face with my shirt. Okay, Lauren. Just because you missed one race doesn’t mean you can’t have a race of your own instead. You can still run your miles. I shook off the tears and started running. I ran up the stairs and through the elm trees, imagining Gizelle’s giant paws tapping at my side like they always did before she’d developed that stupid limp. I continued around the duck pond, circled the Alice in Wonderland sculpture, then broke out of the park to Fifth Avenue.

  I kept running. The heat from the concrete rose up to my legs. It would have been too hot for Gizelle to run today, but that didn’t stop me from still picturing her by my side. When I closed my eyes, I could almost hear her paws tapping next to me. Faster and faster I ran down Fifth Avenue, dodging the crowds of busy Saturday traffic in Manhattan, feeling better with every stride.

  I made my way over to Seventh Street, crossed Avenue A and considered running another mile or two to the East River Promenade, but instead stopped in front of my apartment. I exhaled and dropped my hands to my knees. Exhale. Exhale. Exhale. I took my phone out of my running armband. It was then I noticed the three missed calls. There was voicemail waiting. It was from Caitlin. She said to call right away. It was about Gizelle.

  I climbed the stairs to my apartment out of breath. Maybe Caitlin is calling about her food or her prescriptions? The vet had called in some of her meds to be filled at the Rite Aid in Kittery. Maybe there was a problem picking it up. My face was flushed from the seven miles, my Asics were still on, and my heart pounded. I opened the door to my apartment and Gizelle’s empty dog bed and stared at my phone, trying to work up the courage to just call. Just call, Lauren. It’s fine.

  How quickly Gizelle had come into my life, a summer day in Tennessee six years before. Back when my parents were still together, before I moved to New York City, before I started running. How quickly Gizelle had become my new best friend, but so much more.

  I dialed the number.

  PART I

  Enchanted

  1

  A Big Puppy

  We promised ourselves we were just going to look.

  Mom and I were sitting in the parking lot of CVS on Franklin Road. It was 10 a.m. and humid already in Brentwood, the suburb of Nashville where I grew up. The windshield faced a line of trees and we were facedown in the The Tennessean classifieds, shopping in our favorite section. The puppy section.

  We had no business browsing in the puppy section that day. Back home we already had two dogs, Yoda and Bertha, not to mention a slew of other critters and this other unsolvable family problem I doubted the new puppy would know how to fix.

  “Lab?” I suggested, biting into my everything bagel.

  Mom shook her head, mouth full, too. She gave me a thumb up in the air. Bigger!

  “Coonhound?”

  “Ehh.” She thought it over. “Isn’t a coonhound UT’s mascot or something, sweetie?” She was right. The droopy-eared, jowly coonhound was the mascot of the Vols, the football team at the University of Tennessee where I’d be starting as a transfer sophomore in the fall. Would purchasing the mascot be a little too smells-like-team-spirit for the new girl on campus? Having the same thought, our eyes met and we both smiled.

  Ever since I’d come home this summer, Mom had developed a new hankering for facetime in the mornings, suggesting a Starbucks/Bruegger’s bakery hit-and-run a few times a week: bagels to go and some super-sugary coffee thing. Then we’d park the car in an empty parking lot somewhere just a few miles from a proper kitchen table in our own house, this way we could “talk.” Just the two of us.

  And in my mother’s case, our talks usually consisted of her apologizing and reminding me she was “totally 100 percent fine.” Then she would look down at her lap, waiting for my usual: “It’s okay. It’s fine! I believe you.” And then we would move on—even though it wasn’t okay, and I wasn’t sure what I believed anymore.

  My mom was my best friend; of course I wanted to believe her. She wrote me notes in my lunchbox until I graduated high school (sometimes including glitter confetti), told us mermaids were real, bought my little sister, Erisy, and me clothes we didn’t need. “Don’t tell Daddy,” she’d whisper in her soft, high, lilting voice (the same voice she passed on to me), before hurrying us to our rooms with shopping bags. She approached all things as if they were supposed to be fun, and if there wasn’t anything exciting about some detail of life, she’d create it.

  * * *
>
  And on this particular Saturday morning, Mom’s face lit up with puppy fever. We were sitting in our parked car. Stopped. But it felt like we were in motion. My Frappucino was sweating in its cup holder, the wheels in Mom’s head were spinning, no doubt wondering what she could do to make up for last night. She turned her head and looked at me.

  “Know what I wanna do today?” She leaned in and smiled. “We need to get another puppy.”

  She took a sip of her Grande coffee. “I really want to get you a big dog. We’re big-dog girls. You’re such a big-dog girl, sweetie.” I didn’t even know what it meant to be a big-dog girl, and I didn’t care. I placed my bagel on the dashboard, left the Frappuccino melting, and ran into the CVS to fetch the newspaper.

  We spread the classifieds across the front of the car, draping the grayish-white pages over our laps and onto the dashboard.

  German shepherd?

  Active and sporty, that would be nice. But would a shepherd get along well with our other dogs? We had to consider Yoda and Bertha.

  Goldendoodle?

  Beautiful dogs, but we were thinking, like, a big big dog.

  Great Pyrenees . . .

  Oh! Definitely big, but would that be too much fur?

  Boxer?

  We knew boxers intimately, had loved and lost two when I was younger.

  And just as we were about to call the number on an ad for a husky/lab mix, Mom slammed her finger down onto the newspaper, crinkling it further into her lap.

  “ENGLISH MASTIFF PUPPIES!”

  * * *

  There’s this saying in the mastiff world, “What the lion is to the cat, the mastiff is to the dog.” Mastiffs are powerful, gentle, and known for their loyalty. They also happen to be known as the largest dog breed on earth. One Old English mastiff with the name of Aicama Zorba set the record for world’s biggest dog at nearly 350 pounds. That’s the size of a small donkey. So it’s no wonder ancient Greeks and Romans used the mastiff as a war dog. The mastiffs even fought in the Colosseum, next to the gladiators.

  Mom put the phone on speaker as it rang. I was so excited I was practically holding my breath, hoping someone would pick up.

  “Hello?” A woman answered. She sounded very Southern. The word “hello” sounded like “yellow.”

  Mom asked if they had a girl.

  Yes.

  She asked if they had a brindle.

  Yes.

  Then Mom asked if we could come look (look) at the puppies today.

  Yes.

  Like, right now?

  Yes.

  So against all reason and good judgment we hopped on I-65 to look.

  * * *

  Our home had always been something of a zoo. Growing up, my brother, sister, and I had every kind of pet a child’s heart could desire: furry ones, feathery ones, slimy ones, ones with shells, even one that went oink.

  If there is an animal-loving gene, I inherited it from my mother. Apparently, when I was little, I would run to the sidewalk after it rained and rescue worms by putting them back in the soil so they didn’t dry up. This may sound extreme, but I had nothing on my mother’s history with animals.

  When Mom was a girl (she tells me) she ordered crocodiles from a catalog and put them in her father’s bathtub.

  “Can we order crocodiles?” I used to beg.

  “No, sweetie. It’s actually not very nice to the crocodiles. I didn’t know better then.”

  I don’t think it’s much of an exaggeration to say my mother had been bringing home animals for over fifty years. Mostly without asking. That’s actually how we’d gotten our two dogs, Yoda and Bertha—on a whim, from the newspaper. Yoda was our Chihuahua at the time. My older brother, Tripp, referred to her as the rat. Sure, she was not much bigger than a guinea pig, and only had five teeth, but I loved her. Yoda’s principal canine companion was Bertha, our English bulldog, who looked more like a beached elephant seal mixed with a pig. She had a funny pink tail that curled into her bum like a cinnamon roll, so my brother, sister, and I named it the Cinnabum. At some point she got the nickname Fatty, and that nickname never went away. Fatty preferred not to exercise, had the worst table manners, and snored loudly enough to wake the neighbors. Still, on summer evenings over the sound of the cricket wings chirping from the forest of our backyard, I was known to sit and gaze at Bertha, and sing “You Are So Beautiful” to her. Fatty was Dad’s favorite.

  * * *

  You know the couple who gets pregnant, believing somehow that having a baby will save their marriage? This may have been Mom’s thinking in us getting a third dog that day. A new dog is a fresh start! It’s starting over.

  So here we were again, starting over . . .

  Two hours later we turned off the exit in Sparta and drove up a long dirt road to a little white house. There was a deep bark booming from the backyard.

  A woman opened the screen door.

  “Y’all here for mastiff puppies? You can come ’round this way,” she said, pointing around to the back.

  We followed her to the rear of the house, that deep bark getting closer. A long string of deep, sharp woofs with pauses between each one.

  I started to wonder if this was a good idea after all. I felt a twinge of anger at having been convinced to come on this possibly ridiculous trip. Did Mom really think she could just slap a Band-Aid over her messy slurring drunkenness from last night with a puppy? A puppy is a huge decision. A family decision. Shouldn’t we talk to Dad about this? A wave of guilt washed over me as I imagined my parents ignoring each other even more because Mom and I had brought home another animal.

  We entered the yard and Mom clenched my hand with excitement. The barking grew louder. “Oh, that’s just Dozer!” The woman swatted a fly from her face, “Don’t mind her barkin’; she’s gentle as butter.” But this was unlike any bark I’d heard. It was big and loud and ominous, as if she knew we had arrived. My stomach sank. We walked farther until we reached a little pen made of chicken wire.

  “There’s two boys an’ two girls left,” the woman told us. Inside the pen was a tangle of four adorable mastiff puppies. Their heads were the size of big grapefruits and their coats were streaked with splotchy black stripes. Underneath the stripes, two were chocolate brown, and the other two were shaded a little lighter, closer to the color of sand. The dark coloring on their faces created the appearance of black masks, and one had a little white patch on her chest. They trotted through the grass with round bellies and thick tails and pawed at each other playfully.

  I lifted my legs one by one over the wire, sat in the grass, and tried to relax. Mom joined, legs crossed next to me, and as the puppies climbed all over us, Mom’s mouth broke into a huge smile. We pianoed our hands under their bellies and let them chew on our shoelaces. Mom buried her nose into their backs, kissing their heads and telling each one it was the cutest thing she’d ever seen. I took a deep breath. Slowly, I felt myself softening toward my mother. Maybe this adventure wasn’t such a terrible idea after all. The grass was dry like hay but sprinkled with yellow dandelions. When I close my eyes and remember that day, I can see them. Yellow dandelions and a brindle puppy. My puppy.

  The lady bent over to pick up the puppy, turning it on its back to check for its parts. “Here, this one’s a girl,” she confirmed, and plopped her in my lap. I held her out in front of me with my hands under her armpits. Her skin was too big for her body so it draped over my fingers, and to me this one was so obviously a girl, I couldn’t believe the woman had to check. I stared into her eyes and she stared right back. Her wrinkled black forehead and downturned eyes gave her a concerned expression, making her look a tiny bit sad, but I knew she wasn’t, because her tail was wagging. She was prettier than a Gerbera daisy. The puppy reached out her wrinkly neck and nibbled my nose. She did this gently—delicate and deliberate—so her sharp teeth didn’t even hurt.

  Mom squeezed my knee. “Lauren. Oh my gosh. We have to get this puppy! Isn’t she incredible? Do you want her?” She searc
hed my face for a response. Dozer was still barking, and from the corner of my eye I could see her behind a metal gate ten or so yards away. Her head was as big as Darth Vader’s, and when she barked, frothy slobber flew from her mouth and globbed on the fence.

  I held the puppy’s warm body to my face and she licked my cheek. That peculiar smell of puppy breath was enough to unzip me. All I wanted was to say yes.

  “Mom, I love her.” This was true. But there was a part of me that wanted to say, Let’s think about this. Still, I knew if we didn’t leave with this precious puppy today, I would never see her again. My mother’s eyes were lit with desperation. “I want you to have her, honey. It would make me so happy to get her for you. Let me get her for you.”

  I didn’t really understand my family’s dynamics back then, and, frankly, at that point, puppy in lap, who even cared if I was being manipulated? I could have called and asked Dad, but Dad would tell me that impulsive pet buying from the newspaper didn’t sound like the best idea. (Rightly so, please don’t buy puppies impulsively like this. Also, please consider adopting.)

  The warm puppy nibbled my nose again and licked my eye, and then licked me again on the mouth. So I swallowed my worries back down and shut the door to the part of my brain that was saying Think of the consequences!

  “Yes! Let’s get her!”

  Mom gave the woman $150 cash, then quickly drove to a gas station ATM to take out another $250, and then wrote a check for $300 (we paid for a lot of impulse purchases in this way). I tossed my new friend over my shoulder, thanked the woman very much, gave one last look over to Dozer, and we drove back to Brentwood, one large family member bigger.

  “What should we name her?” Mom asked when we were back in the car.

  I wanted her name to be something sweet and girly, not like the tractor name they’d given her mom.