Last night Charlie outdid herself. I made the kids dinner; fried chicken legs, cous cous and zuchini. They put their plates on the island after they finished and went back to watching tv instead of doing their homework, of course. I had left the kitchen for a few minutes and when I came back I noticed their plates on the island were clean-ish looking, completely empty. Where were the chicken bones? Where was the zuchini they never would have finished? Or the tiny granules of cous cous that slipped through their forks? I checked the compost bag by Cocoa’s cage in the very outside chance that the kids had scraped their plates, but I didn’t see anything. I checked the garbage under the sink too, but knew I wouldn’t find their scraps because right then I noticed that one of the bar stools was slightly pulled out from the counter. “Charlie!” I yelled. Hank looked up in alarm from where he was napping at the sound of my voice. Charlie was hiding in the tv room with the kids. She ducked her head and refused to make eye contact with me when I came in. Guilty. Though how a pygmy size corgi jumps from the ground to a bar stool is hard to imagine. If I hadn’t seen her with my own eyes spring effortlessly from the back of one of the upholstered chairs in the tv room to the ground, and then in one bound up to the other chair into somebody else’s lap, I would have accused Hank. But when I glanced over at him his eyes said it all, “I didn’t do it, I swear! I’m a good dog!” And yet there was a slightly guilty look to him too, as though he was involved by association. Though he would NEVER have taken anything off the counter, if something happened to drop he
wasn’t averse to eating it off the floor. There was no way Charlie could have swallowed four chicken leg bones in that amount of time, and I highly doubt she “threw him a bone.” Most likely she scampered down with as many as she could carry and either dropped some or couldn’t guard them all at once. Either way, now I had to worry that the bones would have splintered on the way down their throats, though clearly neither Charlie nor Hank was suffering physically. They were however cowering in fear of my reaction. I can remember my Mom yanking chicken bones out of our dogs’ mouths in a panic when I was a kid and yelling, “They could die!” So now I’m a little paranoid. Especially since I couldn’t find a trace of any bone anywhere in the house. Charlie probably just sucked the last of the meat off the bones and left the rest to Hank, like some aristocratic lady in the Middle Ages throwing her scraps to the floor. I couldn’t sleep that night, one ear open for the sounds of gagging. Not to mention that middle daughter had taken the dogs running after I specifically told her not to take Hank because I’d already run the dogs and I worried that too much exercise might trigger a seizure. Stumbling out of bed and down the stairs the next morning, groggy from lack of sleep, I saw remnants of the compost bag that I’d forgotten to put up strewn around the kitchen and on the dog beds, dirty paper towels, shells of hard boiled eggs, orange rinds, rabbit litter, and the cardboard containers that held the very chicken in question. Apparently the dogs were not the worse for wear. Hank greeted me with the same look of earnest innocence from the night before, not wanting to be blamed for the mess. And Charlie was uncharacteristically slinking around. Her normal morning routine is jumping all over me, even though I repeatedly say “Down!”, eyes sparkling, teeth bared in a big grin, forcing me to notice her, love her, and then put her outside where she growls at Hank and bites his jowels as they run down to the yard to do their business. This morning she was waiting by the kitchen door, eyes downcast in abject self-pity. It wasn’t until after I’d had my coffee and went back upstairs that I noticed the pile of vomit outside my bedroom door, consisting of small chicken bones and bile.
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