“It was while I was still in Missouri. During my last year of college. We were talking a lot more at this point so my mom would fill me all in about it and then when I would come home I would hear all about those dogs. She tried to get me to take one. A year before she had said I wasn’t emotionally ready enough to take care of a dog.”

“You’re kind of hard on your mom sometimes.”

“I’m really not. You know how they say you reach a certain age where you start to realize that your parents are actual people? Like your mom and dad are just some girl and some guy. Well, it’s true but it also kind of isn’t. Because they may be some girl or some guy but that’s how I feel right now, like they are just some dude and some woman, except that that dude and that woman are my parents.”

“I don’t get it.”

“It’s impossible to divorce the concept of ‘my parents’ from the people that are your parents.”

“What happened after the dogs were at your dad’s place?”

“The deal was that my mom would stop by at least once a week to resupply dog food and make sure the dogs weren’t sick or anything. That’s one thing my dad worried a lot about. He didn’t want to have to be responsible for having a dog get sick and die on him. It worked like this, with my mom swinging by occasionally and my dad doing the bulk of the work until my dad messed up his back again. They scheduled him for surgery. This is about three weeks after the dogs arrived. They kept Dad in the hospital for about a week and some change, then he spent a couple days at my aunt’s until he couldn’t take it anymore and he headed home. He had a walker now and scars all on his neck. It was gruesome. They had to shave his beard too, so my dad looked really different in a really short amount of time. I was home from college for the vacation, staying with my mom, and it was her job to go check on the dogs every day. I volunteered to go stay at my dad’s place for a week and take care of the dogs while they were in the hospital but my dad didn’t go for it. He said it was locked and that he didn’t have a key with him. I just don’t think he wanted anyone in that house, like foreign contaminants could ruin it. Baby, you should have seen his face. You saw he had the beard when you visited, right?”

“Yeah.”