Spelling It Like It Is by Tori Spelling Read Free Book Online Page A

almost fully grown and still under twenty pounds. The pictures showed him wearing sunglasses and a dog sweater. He was already comfortable wearing clothes! I had to have him. He was going to fit right in. And at four hundred dollars he was much cheaper than the other listings I’d seen, which had micro-minis costing thousands of dollars.
    I called the owner right away. At first she said that they had another buyer. I immediately got competitive. When she told me that Hank slept in bed with his owners, I told her that we had a European king and thousand-thread-count sheets. He would love it at our home. (Of course, it’s the cotton staple length that matters, not the thread count, but I couldn’t go into it with her.)
    The owner seemed swayed by my passion. “Can’t you come do a home visit? We’ll pay more!” I added. I drive a hard bargain.
    She agreed to bring him over.
    In the photos on Craigslist, Hank was tiny and adorable. When he and his owner arrived at my house, his size surprised me.
    “He looks twice as big as he did online,” I said to the owner.
    “Yeah,” she said. “Those pictures are a little old. He’s nine months old, though. He shouldn’t grow much more.”
    She had a very sweet scrapbook showing Hank’s first months on Earth. Here was an article from his local newspaper showing him at some event. Here he was wearing a party hat. Here he was dressed up for the holidays, posing on Santa’s lap. Hank’s owner seemed very attached to him—she agreed to sell him to us, but she teared up when it came time to say good-bye. Yet for all her love of her pig, she was moving to a place that didn’t take pigs. It seemed a little odd, but I’m not one to question.
    That night Dean started to set up a dog bed for the newest member of our family, but I put my foot down. The owner had said he was used to sleeping in a bed. I had promised. “He sleeps in our bed,” I said. I picked up all forty pounds of him and carried him up our spiral staircase. As we ascended, he let out a huge squeal that echoed throughout the house. I should have taken it as a cry of warning, but soon enough Hank settled in between me and Dean, his head nestled in a down pillow, and went to sleep.
    In the middle of the night a noise woke me out of a dead sleep. I had no idea what it was, but it sounded like the room was flooding. I sat up in bed. Hank was no longer tucked between me and Dean. He was gone.
    I stood up and crept forward. “Hank? Hank?” In the dark I couldn’t see him but I headed toward the sound of gushing water. There he was, facing the corner, pissing. Only then did I remember that the owner had warned me that pigs like to pee in corners of rooms. I wanted to say, “Hank! Stop!” He needed to be trained not to do this. But I was afraid that if I interrupted him, he’d turn and spray pee everywhere. Instead, I stood, watching silently as my not-so-micro-mini pig peed on and on. He must have peed for five minutes. By the time he was done, there was a fully soaked circle, two feet in diameter, in the corner of our plush cream wall-to-wall carpeting. I had insisted on cream, even though Dean worried the kids would destroy it. The prospect of corner-peeing pigs had not entered the bedroom-carpet negotiation.
    When Hank was done, it wasn’t a job for a few paper towels. It was a job for several long-staple Egyptian cotton bath sheets.
    As anyone other than me would have realized from the start, Hank was not a micro-mini, if such a thing exists. He wasn’t a mini. He wasn’t even a potbelly. He was a full-on slaughterhouse pig who would grow to be well over two hundred pounds. Months later, I texted the seller. I wanted to tell her that Hank was going to appear on our show and that he was going to be on the poster promoting it. I thought she’d want to know that he was semifamous. When I sent her the photo, I added, “And by the way, as you’ll see, I don’t think he’s a micro mini.”
    All she said was,