The Last Beach Bungalow by Jennie Nash Page A

over, I saw the fat lady staring at me.
    “You talkin’ to me?” she demanded.
    “No.” I shrugged, waving my arm in the air toward Rick. “My husband.”
    “Good,” she said. “ ’Cause I don’t want to be knowin’ nothin’ about nobody’s boyfriend.”

F RIDAY
    In the early years of parenting, you’ll give anything for twenty minutes free and clear of your kids. You pray for nighttime, when the noise will stop, the hunger will stop, the accidents will stop, the incessant questions about the moon, the sky, the ocean, the cat next door, the cow on TV, the telephone and toy in the bottom of the cereal box—will stop. But in the teen years, you’ll give anything for twenty minutes in the same room with your kids. You’ll pay a ransom for a conversation, a bribe for just a little time. I imagined that Jackie would stay home to nurse her broken finger, which meant I could have a whole day with her. My work could wait. We’d go get smoothies, do some Christmas shopping. I still didn’t know what to get her. There was nothing she didn’t have, nothing she seemed to need. A few hours walking through the shops in Redondo Village might give me a clue.
    When she was little, I used to love Christmas. I saved every single one of the letters she carefully wrote out to Santa, about wanting a real wooden train with a tunnel, or the red patent leather shoes for her American Girl doll, because they were requests I could so easily meet. For just a few hundred dollars, I could make her world complete. After church on Christmas Eve, Rick and I would stay up late wrapping all the presents we’d amassed and constructing some tangible proof that Santa had actually come to our house. We scattered ashes from the fireplace, kicked oatmeal around the front yard as if the reindeers had gotten their snouts into the food we’d laid out. We’d eat the sugar cookies, drink the milk, fill the stockings and wait to be awakened by Jackie’s squeals of delight.
    Christmas began to change when Jackie turned six. That was the year she decided she wanted a dog. It was no longer enough to talk to all the dogs we passed when we rode bikes through our neighborhood, or to play with the dogs whose owners snuck them down to the beach to play in the surf. It was no longer enough that other people’s dogs would immediately come to her and lick her hand or bring her a ball to toss. She wanted a dog of her own—one who would sleep at the foot of her bed and wait for her when she came home from school and sit with her while she read. She asked Santa for a dog, but this was one thing I couldn’t deliver.
    I can’t stand dogs. I can’t stand the way they jump all over you and lick you and never swerve from their high-demand status. I hate the way people treat their dogs like children, with hand-fixed meals and veterinarians who make house calls. I once read a Billy Collins poem about a dog—how the dog trots out the door every morning with only a brown coat and blue collar and how this is such a fine example of a life without encumbrance and how the dog would be a paragon of earthly detachment if it weren’t for the fact that the poet is the dog’s god. That was the last line: “If only I were not her god.” I remember thinking, That’s it. That’s exactly it. I couldn’t get Jackie a dog for Christmas because I would have to be the dog’s god, and that was something I couldn’t be.
    So Santa brought soft stuffed Huskies and pug-nosed mutts, a whole veterinarian set with fifteen kinds of plastic dogs, and one year, a life-sized Saint Bernard posed in a sitting position with his tongue hanging out, but it was never enough. Jackie began to get angry at Santa. She began to wonder why he didn’t listen, why he was so mean, why he brought Julia Bertucci a King Charles Cavalier cocker spaniel puppy on Christmas morning when he only brought Jackie a calendar that featured a picture of the same thing.
    What, after a certain point, can you say?