Free Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris

magazine. “We’d like to use Sadie as our September cover story and were hoping to schedule a photo shoot as soon as possible. Do you think you could have her ready by tomorrow?”
    We thought a kitten might lift our mother’s spirits, but she declined all offers. “That’s it,” she said. “My cat days are over.”
    When Mädchen Two developed splenic tumors, my father dropped everything and ran to her side. Evenings were spent at the animal hospital, lying on a mat outside of her cage and adjusting her IV. He’d never afforded her much attention when she was healthy, but her impending death awoke in him a great sense of duty. He was holding her paw when she died, and he spent the next several weeks asking us how many dogs could say they’d lived in a redwood house.
    Our mother, in turn, frequently paused beside my father’s tattered, urine-stained golf bag and relived memories of her own.
    After spending a petless year with only one child still living at home, my parents visited a breeder and returned with a Great Dane they named Melina. They loved this dog in proportion to its size, and soon their hearts had no room for anyone else. In terms of mutual respect and admiration, their six children had been nothing more than a failed experiment. Melina was the real thing. The house was given over to the dog, rooms redecorated to suit her fancy. Enter your former bedroom and you’d be told, “You’d better not let Melina catch you in here,” or, “This is where we come to peepee when there’s nobody home to let us outside, right, girl!” The knobs on our dressers were whittled down to damp stumps, and our beds were matted with fine, short hairs. Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter. “That’s what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.”
    The dog was their first genuine common interest, and they loved it equally, each in his or her own way. Our mother’s love tended toward the horizontal, a pet being little more than a napping companion, something she could look at and say, “That seems like a good idea. Scoot over, why don’t you.” A stranger peeking through the window might think that the two of them had entered a suicide pact. She and the dog sprawled like corpses, their limbs arranged in an eternal embrace. “God, that felt good,” my mom would say, the two of them waking for a brief scratch. “Now let’s go try it on the living-room floor.”
    My father loved the Great Dane for its size, and frequently took her on long, aimless drives, during which she’d stick her heavy, anvil-sized head out the window and leak great quantities of foamy saliva. Other drivers pointed and stared, rolling down their windows to shout, “Hey, you got a saddle for that thing?” When out for a walk there was the inevitable “Are you walking her, or is it the other way ’round?”
    “Ha-ha!” our father always laughed, as if it were the first time he’d heard it. The attention was addictive, and he enjoyed a pride of accomplishment he never felt with any of us. It was as if he were somehow responsible for her beauty and stature, as if he’d personally designed her spots and trained her to grow to the size of a pony. When out with the dog, he carried a leash in one hand and a shovel in the other. “Just in case,” he said.
    “Just in case, what, she dies of a heart attack and you need to bury her?” I didn’t get it.
    “No,” he said, “the shovel is for, you know, her… business.”
    My father was retired, but the dog had business.
    I was living in Chicago when they first got Melina, and every time I came home the animal was bigger. Every time, there were more Marmaduke cartoons displayed on the refrigerator, and every time, my voice grew louder as I asked, “Who are you people?”
    “Down, girl,” my parents would chuckle as the dog jumped up, panting for my attention. Her great padded paws reached my waist,