Heather Anne

There was a time--though I hardly remember it now--when Amy and I would lament the nights Margaret woke us up by scratching on the front door to let us know she had to go to the bathroom. Yes, my perfect, celestial dog, who descended straight from The Lord with a fully formed sense of mercy and justice, an intrinsic desire to please us, an innate capacity to discern our moods, a complete arsenal of tricks, and the absolute inability to piss on the carpet. Never mind that she snuggled me when I was sick, or let me cry crocodile tears onto her head when I was sad, or that she always alerted me five minutes before Gossip Girl was to start: I complained about her. The really stupid thing about our whinging is that even when we had to get up in the middle of the night to let Margaret out, the only thing it involved was opening the front door and letting her run into the yard, where she promptly and politely relieved herself, and ran back inside, looking appropriately contrite for having awakened us. Oh, how we took Margaret's perfection for granted, until we rescued The Beagle.

There was a boy named Howard at a summer camp I worked at once, and it was common knowledge that his mother had been on drugs when Howard was born. Nothing was physically or mentally wrong with Howard. In fact, he was kind of a genius. But every time one of the counselors would start to correct his behavior, his grandmother--who worked there also--would say, "Don't get on to him; his mama was on drugs when he was born!" One afternoon, at the Martin Luther King Jr. museum in downtown Atlanta, Howard ran out into traffic. I shouted at him to come back to the sidewalk, and his grandmother shouted at me not to shout at him. "He was a crack baby!" she said, as if that would cause a cab to bounce off of him ten years later.

When I got home from Europe, Scout became my Howard.

She'd already had her first heart treatment, and there are so many things she isn't allowed to do: she can't get her heart rate up, she has to eat loads of food to build up her strength, she has to rest to fight off the bad effects of the drugs. Amy had practically been awake for two straight weeks dealing with Scout. In addition to all the things Scout can't do right now because of her heart, there are dozens of other things we have to keep her from doing because she is a puppy. Leave your shoes on the floor? Devoured. Let her sniff the carpet for more than three seconds? Poop. Walk outside without letting her know you're leaving? She will wake up Canadians with her howling. For a few days, I let all this slide. "Her heart is unwell," I kept telling Amy. (A cab will just bounce off of her.)

Yesterday, as I was walking outside to get the mail, Scout darted past me out the door, weaving herself between my legs and barking to beat the band. I fell over into the bushes. "What the hell?" I said, as she stopped in front of me to continue wailing. "You almost broke my frikkin' neck." Margaret was sitting on the landing, just inside the front door, waiting for the command to come outside. She has two barks. The first says, "There is an axe-murderer in the front yard." The second says, "In case you missed it, the doorbell just rang, signaling that the pizza is here." She doesn't go anywhere without permission.

"You are perfect," I called to Margaret, as she sat inside and wagged her tail. "And you," I said to Scout. "You are kind of a moron."

The things we have to correct about Margaret are like: "Don't sit so close to the television, Sweetie. It's bad for your eyes."

With Scout, it's beyond the point where we are surprised or exasperated when she eats our things or wets our beds. With Scout, when she poops on the floor, the best we can do is: "Just... don't eat it."