Williby lived a very long and happy life but there was no denying that it was time to wrap it up. He was a 14-year-old lab/mutt mix who Tina had bought for $50 outside of a grocery store parking lot when she was blindingly hungover her freshmen year of high school and incapable of making good decisions. Tina’s family lived on a 200-acre farm in Missouri and no one cared if any of the five siblings brought home an animal as long as they remembered to feed it and it didn’t give anyone lice. Williby had a wonderful, happy, healthy dog life. Now he was blind, deaf, incontinent, and bared his teeth at everything that came within six inches of his face. He was ready to cross the rainbow bridge.
“Yeah, I have to put him down,” Tina mumbled into the phone to her sister Samantha, sitting on her cold stoop while waiting for her Pad Thai delivery. She’d moved to Brooklyn to work in the film industry two years prior and had no time or interest in cooking. There was a lot of take-out in her life. Since Williby had started snapping and biting at everything that moved, this (the stoop) was the only location that the owner of “Thai Me Up,” Mr. Bun, would deliver. This setup took a lot of negotiating.
“No noodles worth dog bite!” Mr. Bun shouted into the phone when Williby made a mad dash past Tina at the open door, latching himself onto the delivery guy’s leg. Luckily, it was winter, the guy was wearing snow pants and didn’t seem too fazed by the ordeal. But if Tina wanted summer rolls, she was going to have to wait for them outside in the cold.
“Yeah, obviously,” was her sister Samantha’s not-super-comforting answer from her own living room uptown. “This is like, a decision six months too late.” Then, maybe feeling a small pang of guilt, she replied, “I’ll take care of him for you. Quick twist of the neck. Just like we used to with the chickens.”
Tina was APPALLED. “WHAT? NO.”
“Ok, ok,” no one had ever accused Samantha of being the sentimental type, “I’ll go with you to the vet.”
A brief wash of gratitude for her sister swept over her. Then Tina heard the unmistakable sound of a toilet flush.
“Were you talking to me while you were peeing?” Tina had spent her life reminding Samantha that even though she had (sort of) been raised in a barn, she didn’t have to act like it. Especially now that they were both young professionals in New York City. Sometimes, she found it hard to believe that her sister managed to hold down a job, a boyfriend and exist in polite society.
“Nope,” Samantha replied.
“Oh, I thought I heard you flush.”
“Uh huh. I was pooping.” Before Tina could chastise her younger sibling for being so unapologetically revolting, the delivery guy pulled up on his bike, looking around for the attack mutt.
“Dog away?” he asked Tina in the most untrusting tone that she’d ever heard. This is saying a lot from a girl who grew up branding cows.
“Yes,” Tina accepted her plastic bag holding a paper bag that most likely contained another plastic bag. “Thank you so much,” The man squinted his eyes at her while taking a mental picture, getting back on his bike and speeding the wrong way down the sidewalk.
“I can meet you at your subway stop after work.” Samantha was now crunching on something loudly into the phone receiver. Tina briefly wondered if her sister had remembered to wash her hands.
“Ok. I’ll make the appointment.” It could have been a moonstruck moment where Tina and Samantha reflected on Williby’s life, his contribution to their family, and their fond memories of the pup in healthier times. It wasn’t. Samantha was on to something else.
“Oh my god, did you see that thing??-” Samantha had this habit of waiting until she and Tina were wrapping up their conversations to share her most pressing news.
“What?” Tina rushed back up the stoop, up two flights of stairs to her apartment. She had only worn her flip-flops outside and her toes were beginning to lose feeling. She opened the door to Williby, lying on the living room couch. There he was, uncomfortably twitching, giving off an odor so foul, Tina felt herself gag involuntarily. He had taken a massive dump in the center of the entryway. Tina’s flip-flop slid right into the disaster.
“Shit!” she yelled. The dog didn’t flinch. Samantha didn’t ask what the problem was. She was still chewing loudly on the other end of the phone. Tina had momentarily forgotten that she was still on the phone.
“So there’s like a legit thief, robbing people on the 6 Train. Like, put your purse inside your jacket or whatever.”
This was a surprising bit of headline news coming from Samantha. She went to state finals wrestling on the boy’s team in high school. Tina didn’t think she ever spent that much time considering her own personal safety, even in a city of twelve million.
“Ok. I will text you when I have a vet appointment.” Tina hung up the phone. She looked down at her foot, covered in the brown, sticky goo. The dog growled at her from the couch, baring his decaying teeth. She put down her noodles. She had lost her appetite.
The news of Williby’s impending demise spread quickly around Tina’s family and everyone wanted to call her and talk about it -mostly in the middle of her work day when it was exceptionally annoying. The Mulberry family was generally supportive of their two oldest daughters going to the big city. But that doesn’t mean that they truly understood what their girls were after. They were, to be fair, a fifth-generation farming family.
Tina moved to New York to chase her dream of working in production. She’d started out making videos in high school, pursued it more in college while getting a more pragmatic degree in chemistry, but decided two years ago to go for the life she really wanted. It was a sometimes impossibly tough industry, throwing you in one direction and then another, desperately trying to balance the making of art with financial and, sometimes, emotional stability. Growing up, Tina rode bulls at the local rodeo. If she knew how to do anything in this world, it was how to hold on.
Her career was going, well, better than average. She had steady work as a camera assistant for commercial shoots and was now on set regularly to work on very low-budget short films. She was currently in the running to be hired as a director of photography on her first feature and was feeling more hopeful than she had in her years in The City. Even though this all sounds good and positive, try explaining it to your family in Missouri.
There was her mother: “Well, we saw a movie with Brad Pitt at the multiplex. Why didn’t you work on that?”
Or her father: “Just show up on their door, show ‘em how hard a farm girl works. Then they’ll hire you.”
Her Aunt Billy-Jean: “Did you get that big Super Bowl commercial you told us about?”
And Her Brother, Casey: “So, wait, you hold the camera? Isn’t that what tripods are for?”
The energy that it took to explain her life to the Mulberry clan was enough to make a person feel like they’d finished a triathlon while pulling an angry pig through a pit of quicksand. The calls on this day were different. They were all about Williby.
“He was a good dog to you, not good for hunting. Or protection. Or listening, But you liked him”
“Thanks, Mom,” Tina whispered into the receiver while filling out a spreadsheet in her cubicle at the production company offices.
“Always sad to say bye to an old friend,” was her father’s more sympathetic response.
“Samantha and I will call you after the appointment,” Tina whispered into her phone, trying not to disturb the editors working in booths around her own office.
“Shoulda done it months ago,” her father replied. “Save some money at the vet. Have Samantha do i–”
“Oh! Sorry Dad, gotta go.” Tina hung up before her dad could elaborate any further on her younger sister’s husbandry skills.
The week flew by and the vet appointment was much less sad than Tina had expected. Partially because letting Williby go was one hundred percent the right thing to do. It was also tolerable because Samantha and her impossible attitude could make anything funny and she was at her best in uncomfortable situations.
“Now, it will be $750 for the cremation,” the vet tech said as gently as possible while Samantha pulled a Snickers bar out of her purse. The tech looked appalled.
“I promise,” Samantha shook her head knowingly, “you don’t want to see me hungry.” She suddenly stopped chewing. “What? Seven hundred and fifty DOLLARS? To what, throw it in a-”
Tina clapped her hands, cutting off her sister.
“Um, do you mind giving my sister and me a moment to discuss this?” The vet tech looked them up and down and left the room wordlessly.
“Samantha, how the hell do you get through life saying whatever comes into your head? Like, seriously?”
Samantha swallowed the last of her chocolate bar.
“I think people find me ‘refreshing.’ Anyway, you cannot afford to spend that. We can bring him back to my apartment. It’s getting dark out, we can bury him in the park.”
Samantha shrugged as if this was the most obvious answer. Now, Tina had no interest in schlepping a canine carcass to the Upper East Side but Samantha did have a point. That was a lot of money. A lot of money that Tina did not exactly have at the moment. Before she could challenge her sister’s scheme, the door opened and the vet asked what they’d decided.
And that is how the two oldest Mulberry sisters, from Mulberry Family Farms in Southwest Missouri, ended up dragging an old suitcase from the back of a midtown veterinary office, containing 70 lbs of a deceased pet, down the concrete steps, and into the 57th Street Subway station in Manhattan.
By the time Tina and Samantha had managed to get themselves and their luggage onto the correct uptown train, they were sweating through their winter coats.
“Ok,” Tina whispered to her sister who’d managed to pull a canister of Pringles out of who knows where, “what exactly is your plan?”
“We just bury him in the park,” Samantha responded way too loudly. But, because it was New York City, none of the nearby passengers batted an eye. This didn’t seem like a great plan. But, that was the thing with all of Samantha’s plans throughout her entire life: they all sounded insane and impossible and like someone was going to get arrested but then they all kinda just somehow worked out.
Like, how was Samantha working in New York City and able to afford an apartment on the Upper East Side and holding down a serious relationship while being, well, Samantha? It wasn’t the easiest idea for her older and more organized sister to wrap her head around.
As the train doors opened and closed for the 66th Street stop, Tina felt her anxiety not so subtly creeping up like invisible hands around her throat. They couldn’t just go dig a hole in Central Park. First of all, as far as she knew, neither one of them owned any farm tools whatsoever, let alone a metal shovel. Second, there was no way that Samantha’s plan wasn’t very, very illegal. She didn’t want to get arrested and have to explain the contents of the mostly broken suitcase bulging at the seams. This was a terrible idea. Just because life usually worked out for Samantha in the past didn’t mean that it would all work out now. As Tina was looking for the words to tell her sister that maybe they should just turn around and spend the seven hundred and fifty dollars, a tall man dressed in all black tapped her on the shoulder.
“What’s in the suitcase?”
Now the invisible hands of Tina’s anxiety threatened to strangle her right then and there. She sure as shit wasn’t going to tell this strange man the truth. And she didn’t have the presence of mind to wonder why he was asking her the question in the first place. She just looked up at him in his turtleneck and knit beanie and squeaked out,
“Laptops.” Tina has no idea why she said this, where the idea came from, or how she got the word out of her mouth but, well, she did. The Subway intercom dinged,
“66th Street, 66th Street Station. Next Stop, 72nd Street.” The doors clamored open. Passengers rushed off. And that is the moment that the man in all black grabbed the suitcase and sprinted off the train, the doors narrowly closing behind him.
“What the fuck just happened?” Samantha turned to her sister. “STOP, THIEF!” She yelled at the top of her lungs, Pringles spewing out onto the orange and yellow seats. But, it was too late. The Subway had already lurched forward and the man and the suitcase were farther and further away at every passing second.
“Oh boy. Is he in for a surprise,” were Samantha’s thoughtful remarks. “It’s ok, cuz I wasn’t sure my plan was going to work out anyway.”
Tina was dumbfounded, frozen, and totally unable to speak.
“Well, maybe now that dude will stop stealing people’s shit. Want to go for Mexican?” Tina shrugged. What else was she supposed to do?
So, that’s what they did.
They trudged back home in silence, not sure whether to laugh or cry or… call the police? No, they should definitely not do that.
The Mulberry sisters ordered chicken tacos, eating them on Samantha’s couch while watching 30 Rock. They toasted Williby and wondered aloud how far the thief had gotten before he opened the suitcase.
And, look, there is no way to prove that Samantha was right about the identity of the perpetrator, but, well, the news stopped covering the Subway incidents. There were no more robberies on the 6 Train. And the girls scoured the news website daily. If you ask Samantha about her lifelong accomplishments in New York, she would excitedly tell you that she and Tina were the reason behind stopping the thief by a rarely-used technique of psychological trauma. Tina wishes that she would stop telling people this story and has not gotten a new dog since. So, thanks, girls.
Sweet Dreams
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