A Three Dog Life by Abigail Thomas Read Free Book Online

place on the Yucatán Peninsula where time stops, or at least the importance of telling time. You get up at dawn, eat when you're hungry, go to bed when it's dark. The rest of the time you lie in the sun, float in the water. There were pelicans smashing into the water in their ungainly fashion; one afternoon five impossibly pink flamingos flew by, everyone suddenly got to their feet, shielding their eyes against the sun, like a stadium full of people rising to watch a grand slam. Later I saw two other birds, and I knew what they were right away although I had never seen one before. By the time I got out my camera they had imbedded themselves higher and higher in the blue sky until they were specks. I snapped a picture but you'd never know. They could have been anything up there.

III

Learning to Live Alone
    I'd had my new car three days when I backed into a tree, smashing the rear window and denting the frame. The tree (ghostly in the fog) was in a hardware store parking lot, and in the car were two new garbage cans. I drove home in shock, little bits of glass tinkling in the back and no doubt dropping on the highway behind me. I pulled into the driveway of the house I'd just bought, pressed my head against the steering wheel, and waited. What was I waiting for? I was waiting for a big man to show up and fix everything. Did I mention it was raining? That the odometer had 311 miles on it?
    When nobody appeared I went inside and called my children. My daughter Jennifer, perhaps speaking for them all, said kindly, "Mom, you really have to learn to drive." There seemed no point in insisting that I did know how to drive. She suggested I call the car dealer.
I did. The car dealer said, "Ouch," and suggested the auto glass company. The auto glass company suggested the bodywork man, the bodywork man said call the insurance company, which I had not yet thought to do. The insurance lady said, "Oh, let's not tell them about this. They will drop you like a hot potato." They hadn't wanted me in the first place, she assured me, a sixty-one-year-old woman who had never had car insurance, who had driven a total of zero miles in the past three years, and lived in New York City.
    In the old days my husband, Rich, took care of the car. He got it inspected, changed its oil, even had the tires rotated. Had he been here I could have wailed to him about the foggy evening and the nearly invisible tree, he would have let me go upstairs and get under the covers while he took care of everything. But he wasn't here. There was just the bald fact: I had backed my car into a tree. Nothing else was relevant, the weather, the humble purchases, the small parking lot, nothing. I had backed my car into a tree, and accepting this seemed to require less energy. It turned out to be easy to open the Yellow Pages and to my delight I discovered myself capable of making the phone calls to arrange the repairs and a couple of weeks later I had my car back, almost as good as new. This small accomplishment was thrilling. Perhaps I was at last becoming an adult.
    The word
capable
has always conjured up a long reach and muscled calves, perhaps a hearty laugh to go along with it—capable knew what to do with a jack, could change a fuse, rewire a lamp, but it didn't have a feminine or sexy ring to it. In the face of mechanical crises—flat tires, no hot water—I always went belly-up. Why? Because I could get away with it. Not that it's any great shakes, but I don't need a fainting couch anymore every time the house makes a terrible sound or the radiators go stone cold. If the furnace has gone off again, I flick the cellar light on, march resolutely down the stairs, stride over to my Buck Rogers spaceship of a furnace, turn a valve, and keep my eye on a glass tube that needs to fill, but not too much. Too much will result in water cascading through the ceilings. I have to do this or my pipes will burst. If I took to my bed, I might wake up in the soggy ruin of