And so in and out of the shelters we’d go—leaving after a quick survey of the cages lining the walls—mostly pit bulls and rottweilers and scrawny mutts and mixed breeds with missing eyes and paws and patches of fur. Hiding under his long hair and baseball cap, Teddy would look and shrug, which was his way of not saying that none of the dogs was our dog.

And none of them were. Until a cold January day—Martin Luther King Jr. Day—when he was home from school, and Gary was home from work—and when the house vibrated with so much tension between us that I took Teddy to the Harvard Museum of Natural History to look at the giant bugs and the glass flowers. Afterward, as I drove more slowly than usual in an effort to postpone the inevitable—I didn’t want to go home and deal with Gary’s jumpiness and anxiety, always worse in the winter when the weather was bad and we were all trapped in the house together—Teddy tapped me on the shoulder from the backseat: Can we go to the pet store?

The pet store was the same one that I had gone to when I was young—it’s where my parents got me my first (and last) goldfish and the pair of gerbils that gnawed and burrowed in a glass aquarium until they killed each other and their litter in a crazy act of murder-suicide. For serious dog people, pet stores were evil sellers of dogs from puppy mills, but we were desperate: we’d been looking in shelters for over a month and hadn’t found a single dog that called to us. Until that freezing cold afternoon when I opened the door to Debbie’s Petland and saw, instantly, in the cages along the right wall of the shop, a perfect fluffy fur-ball—a tiny Lassie—and announced to Teddy and anyone else in the store who may have had designs on her: that’s my dog.

I still remember Teddy on the floor of the pet shop playing with her, then just three months old, that cold gray afternoon—how he said he wanted to name her Charlotte because they’d just finished reading Charlotte’s Web at school—a smile under all his long hair and looking happier than he had since preschool. So I bought the puppy, and the crate, and the food and the bowls and the leash and collar and the chew toys, over a thousand dollars’ worth of pet and gear, loading everything—except the dog itself, who sat on Teddy’s lap in the backseat—into the trunk. Which was a small price to pay for what would become my full-time companion; my life vest; my vine; my dog-baby.

Inhabitancy

Having the always-costumed People Puppets in our house feels strange and quickly creates a cloud of shoulds in my head: we should entertain them, we should treat them as special guests; we should put out snacks, make dinner with all their favorite foods, fix all the broken and leaky things (“The top 10 ‘should’s and why you should [see what we did there?] ignore them”). But for the first few days of their stay, I’m off the hook: after they load in their giant duffle bags, stomping their hoof-boots on the front hall mat before scuffing the walls with their massive plastic storage containers on their way to the basement, we barely see them. They leave early in the morning and come home late, after dark, already working long hours at the school, building sets and sewing costumes. Morningside Montessori Autumn Inhabitancy is in full swing, apparently, but the only thing Teddy has told us is that the themes for the big finale “Spotlight” performance in a few weeks have been decided on: a combination of “Resistance” and “Together We Rise”—an echo of the country’s pushback against the political turmoil in our country.