A Dog’s Life

Warning: Ending Foretold

I spin the lazy Susan in the corner cabinet of the Ithaca kitchen, scoop out Annie’s Iams dinner, pour it into the silver bowl she’s eaten out of her whole life. I set it on the plastic placemat, the one my daughter Isabel used when she was a toddler, the one a nine-year-old Isabel willed to the yellow Lab puppy she named Annie the day we brought her home from an Amish farm on Seneca Lake.

I don’t hear Annie get up, don’t hear her bound into the kitchen, tail wagging, jumping up and down at the first sound kibble hitting the bowl like she’d done every day of her life. Annie lays plopped in the living room in a ray of evening sun that twinkles, jewel-like. The amber light dissolves into her yellow fur.

“I just wanna lay here, watch TV with you,” she seems to say.

“Huh?” I think. “She’s not getting up for food??”

I grab my cell phone, text Isabel in L.A., where she’d moved last fall for her first job after college.

“Annie’s not getting up for her dinner!”

“Omg, what?”

“Don’t know. She’s been fine. Just pants a lot on her walks, doesn’t go as far.”

“She’s kinda old. How many years now?”