Free I'm Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship by Wade Rouse Page B

From across the room, Ozzy looks from her to me and says, “Sounds like someone was having a bad dream, Judy.”
    He heaves a sigh with his entire body, then immediately drifts off to sleep himself, chanting, “It was only a dream, Judy. Only a dream.”

The Lone Wolf
    Laurie Notaro
    I had never seen such a sad look on a dog’s face before.
    She sat alone in the play yard, not a soul around, hunched under a Fisher-Price play structure. Everyone else, apparently, was inside the doggie day-care center as the lone little dog looked on at the closed door that separated her from her compatriots, forlorn, abandoned, friendless.
    It was a pitiful, wrenching sight.
    Especially because the dog I was looking at was my very own.
    As soon as I hurriedly parked my car, I ran inside the lobby and immediately accosted Sarah, one of the dog wranglers, a cute, perky girl in her early twenties.
    â€œMaeby is out there all by herself!” I boldly proclaimed, pointing in the direction of the play yard, as if there was a nefarious-looking man in a trench coat about to lure my dog away from her position under the plastic log cabin with a laced chicken strip.
    The girl smiled. “Oh, Maeby hides,” she said comfortingly.
    My dog? I thought. She can’t be talking about my dog, who howls every time we leave the house to bring her pack back together and who acts like she took a hit off the doggy crack pipe as soon as we pull into the day-care parking lot. I don’t know how many Maebys there were at day care, but certainly, she couldn’t be talking about my dog.
    â€œI mean my Maeby,” I tried correcting her. “The tan and white Aussie mix, one brown eye, one blue.”
    She laughed. “Oh, I know Maeby,” she said with a wider smile. “There are a lot of times we can’t even get her to come inside with the other dogs. She’s a little lone wolf.”
    I almost burst out laughing. She had to be kidding. My Maeby? My little dog, who couldn’t wait to burst through the day-care doors in the morning to play with all of her friends? I felt like Sarah had suddenly told me that my dog was a cat or that I had been taking a bonobo on walks all this time. The thought that my dog was a lone wolf was preposterous; we had done everything possible to socialize her before the Experience Window of Doom shut and apparently locked at sixteen weeks. She loved other dogs; in fact, she had been made a doggie day-care “greeter” a year before, in which she was introduced to new dogs to play with them and make them feel at home.
    I simply did not believe that my dog was basically skulking around the playground by herself, not associating with anybody and hanging out alone in the log cabin as a matter of choice and preference like Ted Kaczynski.
    I knew it was a lie.
    Until Sarah opened the door to the play yard and called for Maeby to come in.
    She refused to move, looked at us briefly, and then, carelessly, looked away.
    Like a lone wolf. Like she didn’t even know me.
    I gasped.
    Sarah glanced at me with an “I told you so” face and headed out to the playground to try and coerce my antisocial dog into coming inside and going home, armed with a cookie that had sprinkles on it.
    I told my husband what happened as soon as I got home, and he had as much trouble believing me as I did Sarah.
    â€œShe probably didn’t feel very well today,” he said, trying to explain it away. “That dog is a player. Other dogs line up to play with her. She’s been invited to ten dog birthday parties this year alone. Lone wolves lick themselves in public and pee on everything, rub their noses on windows. They don’t get invited by every little dog on the block to their birthday parties. She’s an A-lister. A must-have.”
    â€œThat’s true, that’s true,” I said, nodding, mainly because I very much wanted to believe it, but then suddenly had an idea. I ran