It's down in Vineyard, in the basement of a lively family (who don't mind me vacuuming at midnight) and our front door opens up to a big park and the mountains rising above a small string of city lights. The walk up to the car is greeted by fields, tall golden grasses, a few silos, a lake, and another string of distant mountains.
Because Kip was working and in the middle of intense chemistry classes I did most of the moving in our jeep. After dropping off one of the endless loads of things (how do you accumulate so much?) I was getting in my car to leave when I noticed the dog again. The dog. Her name was Daisy, and she walked ever so slowly, her arthritic body creaking in time with her protruding bones. She was very old. I backed my car out and she stood there in the middle of the road, as if to test this newcomer to her small town. I drove forward and she didn't move. Her pathetic attempt at intimidation was completely endearing, and though she didn't respond to my honks and I had to back up and completely drive around her, I was won over.
It was always a pleasure to see Daisy walking around outside our several windows, and one night she serenaded us for hours, right next to our bed room. She had belonged to the parents of Bessie, one of our landlords, and her younger brother. After the years they both moved away, and left Daisy to be fed and loved by the numerous relatives along the old farm road. She was literally the town dog.
Then one morning, a few weeks ago, as I was getting ready, a thought came into my mind. "Your going to run over the dog today." I laughed and thought that it was bizarre and dismissed it completely. Kip and I had lunch together and I ran outside to jump into my white Pontiac Grand Am. (Ugly, very ugly. And so low to the ground it couldn't run over a squirrel.) Daisy was wandering around the front lawn. I backed out of the little drive, put my car in drive and off I went. Only to feel myself crushing something beneath my wheels. I froze and then realized. Daisy! Jumping out of the car I ran back to her, where she as laying miserably in the road, and whimpering. She was trying to hold her paws above her head as if to cover her crying face. Ah. I just fell apart inside. I ran to get Bessie.
I could barley yell because I was sick and had lost my voice, so my screams sounded hoarse and desperate. She bolted out the front door and we stood there, watching Daisy crying in the middle of the road about her broken body. It was no use. We knew she would be gone soon. I ran down to get Kip.
"Kip, I need you outside."
"What's up?"
"I ran over Daisy!" Then I started to run back outside. He pulled me to him, gave me a big hug, which didn't help my emotional toughness, and then came out to help Bessie move Daisy off the road. We watched her go the moment she was touched.
I was crying, because, I just killed my landlords dog, the town dog, and I had really liked her. But the worst thing was that because I didn't have a voice my responses were all hoarse and it sounded like I was completely falling apart. Ha ha. So then I was laughing and crying.
We moved her out of the road, and Jeff and Bessie took her across the street where she was buried the field. Bessie had told me, as we were watching Daisy cry in her last moments, that they had been trying to figure out what to do with her, and had needed to put her to sleep before the snow fell. She was so old and sick, and deaf I then found out. No wonder she didn't hear my car, and just ran under my tires that way.
Jeff, from across the street, arrived just moments after she had gone. They all felt horrible that I had to be the one to run over her and were all wonderful about it. Unfortunately the kids would have to be told after school. They sent me off to work, and I told the secretary at the school that I had run over my neighbors dog.
"Oh! I bet you feel horrible. To have killed someone's dog!" She said a fair amount of "comforting" things, which only made me feel sick, but I did laugh.
Needless to say, I didn't go home until Kip got home from work at about eleven that night. As I was driving down the street I kept looking in the shadows, doing everything I could to not run over the dalmatian that wasn't even there.
