Boys Are Dogs by Leslie Margolis

nodded anyway. Dweeble was an accountant at a firm that sold insurance. Or maybe he sold insurance to accountants. Mom told me once but I hadn’t been paying attention and now it was too late to ask. I wondered how many slow days he had. Was he going to come home early all the time? I wanted to ask, but I’m not that rude.
    “Cool,” I said instead, because I had to say something. Then I glanced at Mom, who smiled up at Dweeble. It gave me the strangest pangs in my belly.
    She really liked this guy. It didn’t matter that the kitchen was yellow, or that our new dog was out of control. Nor did she care that I had a lousy first day at Birchwood. Okay, true, she didn’t know my first day was so bad. But maybe I didn’t tell her because I didn’t want to mess up her great new life.
    “Well, I’d better head out,” said Dweeble, winking at my mom.
    I don’t understand winking. I mean, unless you’ve got something stuck in your eye, what’s the point?
    Once he was gone, my mom dumped the cucumber slices into some weird blue bowl I’d never seen before. Our wooden salad bowl sat nearby, in the center of the counter. Now it was filled with peaches and plums and some fat red grapes. I don’t know why but it made me want to cry.
    “What’s wrong?” Mom asked, when she caught me staring.
    “Your salad bowl.”
    “I thought it looked nice out on the counter.” She rotated the bowl a quarter of a turn and beamed at it, like everything was so very perfect.
    “But it’s not a fruit bowl.”
    “You don’t always have to be so literal, Annabelle.”
    I know it was just a bowl, but at the same time, it wasn’t just a bowl. Staring at the thing, so chock full of fruit, it made me feel empty inside. “You think everything is a nice change, but you could have at least kept this one thing.”
    Mom put down her knife and wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Come show me what you’ve been teaching the dog, honey.”
    As we headed out, she put her arm around my shoulders, like she was trying to tell me everything was okay, but it wasn’t. And I don’t even mean the living with Dweeble part.
    We walked out the sliding glass door, straight into a brand-new disaster.
    Stripe was digging up Mom’s vegetable garden. He’d already destroyed one tomato plant and was now working on his second.
    Mom ran over and tried to shoo Stripe out of the way, but he wasn’t giving up so easily.
    “Oh, Stripe, how could you do this?” She grabbed his collar and pulled him from the mess. Except he didn’t let go of the stalk so it snapped off and three green tomatoes dropped to the ground. Mom picked up a tomato and held it up to Stripe asking, “Do you know how much time and effort and money I spent on this?”
    Um, Stripe had no idea. Mom seemed too upset, so I figured it wasn’t a good time to teach her about Dog-Speak or Positive Reinforcement .
    Instead, we put Stripe in the kennel and I helped her finish preparing dinner.
    When she thought I wasn’t looking, she dumped the fruit into a different bowl and put the salad in the old one. But by then, I didn’t care.
    As I put plates around the table, I wondered if we’d have to eat like this every night: with a tablecloth and folded napkins and vegetables.
    When it was just me and Mom, we usually ate at the kitchen counter, or sometimes even on the coffee table in front of the TV. Whenever she was too tired to cook, which was most of the time, we either got Chinese food delivered, or we picked up chicken and ribs from this really good barbecue place.
    Today was Monday, my third night in Westlake, and we hadn’t eaten takeout once.
    Anyway, our old coffee table was gone. Mom sold it on Craigslist because we didn’t need two. And yesterday, when I put my soda can down on Dweeble’s coffee table, he rushed over with a coaster. “Here, you should always use one of these,” he’d said. “This table was imported from France.”
    He’d been really nice about it but it was still