Caroline in Paris

“Juliette goes to get spayed tomorrow,” I told Chrystine. I mean…I told Chrystine yesterday.

“To which vet?” she asked.

Now, she’s asked me for our vet’s name and location about twenty times since Jalouse died, so I figured she would know what I meant by “To the same one.”

She didn’t say anything; I know what she thinks about the whole thing anyway. I started with, “It wasn’t his fault.”

She shrugged.

“If I go somewhere else,” I went on, “it would be like saying that it was his fault.”

She looked unconvinced.

“And mine, a little, too, because I chose him.”

I’ve said it. Happy now?

This whole time I’ve been weighing the pros and cons of getting Juliette spayed at all. How much trouble could heats really be? What’s the cancer risk, in hard numbers? And then there was where to get her spayed, which…well, you know the questions there. In the end we decided to go with the vote of confidence, because God knows our vet will never want to call here with bad news again, and I like having motivated people on my side. The luck thing played in, too: he’s already had his bad luck for the…for the decade? Maybe not quite, but at the very least for the year, and that’s all we need. Some other doctor could be coming just to the end of his luck-cycle, which is a risk I just couldn’t take.

But that wasn’t it, or at least not all of it. I get that now. Because this morning I walked Juliette to the clinic, and all that I could think the whole time was that I’m risking my third dog’s life just to prove that I didn’t kill my second dog.

I came home and I cleaned the oven. I did Step Two in my Three-Step Stock (patent pending). I stripped the chipping polish off of my nails, scrubbed the kitchen, and ate about my own weight in three-year-old comté while Jolie stared, stomped, and huffed at me. I suspect that she was just bored, but who knows? She’s killer smart, and I don’t mean “for a dog,” either.

Maybe she knows what I did.

Juliette is fine, by the way. She’s waking up as I type; the vet just called. It feels like a weight has been lifted; like a dead engine has sparked and started to turn again. And I’m starting to feel better–about the world, about our luck. About the way that things will begin to work again. But not about myself just yet.

Maybe that comes later.