Pocket Full of Posies

Nineteen

  Puppies are a funny species. I separate the species of puppy from the species of dog. They’re not the same animal. At all. I remember when Bugsy was little I used to spend hours on end training him. A few times I would get beyond frustrated that he just wasn’t learning, though, and just burst into tears and go crying to my aunt or uncle. If I caught Aunt Nelly in a bad mood, though, she was very unsympathetic.

  “You wanted the dog, Marley,” she’d tell me.

  My uncle, though, was different. He would sit me down, dry up my tears, and explain calmly, “He’s just a baby, Marl. You have to train him to not do the things you don’t want him to do.”

  “But I can’t!” I would cry. “He just isn’t learning!”

  “Think of it this way—if Carson put something small in his mouth and I didn’t make sure he knew not to do that again, what do you think would happen?”

  Carson and Joey were still pretty little at the time I was training Bugsy and I catered to their every need. Uncle Harmon knew this and used it against me quite often. “They would keep doing it.”

  He would nod patiently. “So it’s your job to make sure he knows not to do it. It takes a while, honey. No one said it was easy being a parent.”

  This is what I was trying to tell Carson and Joey—using Mae as an example.

  “Mae’s not a baby!” Joey cried out in indignation. He seemed offended I’d even try to defend Maisy. She did deserve his wrath, I had to say. Well, it was kind of both their faults. Maisy was too destructive to be left unsupervised around the house so the boys would have to keep her in their room if they were doing something else and/or lock her up in her kennel. Well, they kept her alone for too long and she got pissed. Joey left his kindle on the bed carelessly and it was the perfect target for Maisy’s teething mouth. The kindle didn’t have any physical marks on it—the case received the brunt of her fury—but she did external damage and now only the top half of the screen worked.

  He was not a happy camper.

  Carson, of course, was defending Maisy relentlessly. It wasn’t his kindle, so he didn’t see anything except Joey yelling and raving around the house crying what a horrible animal Maisy was.

  “You left it out for her to get,” Carson pointed out unhelpfully. “I don’t see why you’re so mad at her.”

  Joey whirled on his twin with clenched fists and rage in his eyes. “How ‘bout I just leave your DS for her to get, huh? Then we’ll see if you still love her!”

  “Joey…” I tried to intervene for the hundredth time. You know how young boys get when they’re mad, like how they repeat themselves? Joey was that kind of mad. He couldn’t think of anything else to say so he just kept reiterating himself.

  Now, he promptly ignored me.

  “It was your fault!” Carson tried for, again, the hundredth time.