All Three
Vallie Lynn Watson

Little Dog

Neither of them had real jobs when they married, and one night, two months in, her husband called the restaurant where she waited tables and said he had a surprise for her at home. She knew, without him telling her, that it was a dog, their first together.

He’d been at a gas station up the road, saw two kids kicking a skinny blonde mutt, asked inside. The guy at the register said to take her. Veronica and her husband put her in the kitchen the first night, where she cried like a human, and sometime after midnight moved her to their bed. She wouldn’t lie down, just sat and watched them sleep.

Big Dog

A year and a half in, he surprised her with the big dog, the seventy-pound hound that the shelter people said wouldn’t weigh more than twenty pounds. Veronica and her husband had just started counseling. The big dog smiled only at Veronica, and turned her back when Veronica paid attention to anyone else.

When the big dog was about six months old, Veronica and her husband had separated but took the dog to surgery together. She had two extra claws on each of her back feet that kept getting caught on blankets and such. After the surgery, the vet told them that he’d found several more miniature claws behind the two visible extras, that he removed seven in all. Veronica and her husband couldn’t stop laughing, and went home together.

Bad Dog

She got him two weeks before her parents died. Dylan helped her pick out the dog and they walked him every afternoon. She put him to sleep when her husband was in rehab the first time. She’d spent the morning stretched out on the kitchen floor next to his crate, patting his head until he finally growled feebly at her. She knew that was the last bit of spirit he had. It was the only day she missed her husband, and she gave the cremator a picture of her husband holding the dog, to be burned.

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