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  JuJu got up to use her box, though, and Cowboy and Layla tiptoed in and stole their spots back. Such big, brave doggies.

  After the dogs reclaimed the pillows, anyone want to guess what the cat did next? Hint: Rhymes with “slay” but has a “pr” in it. Yeah. I did an extra load of laundry. The battle was on. Just another exciting day at the home office.

  ~~~

  Chapter Thirty-one: Our Dog Whisperer

  Cowboy the Big Yellow Dog has a lethal tail and a bony head like a dinosaur. Eric sometimes calls him Chewbacca—not because of his size, but because he talks like Chewbacca. A lot.

  Cowboy’s heart has always belonged to Susanne. At 120+ pounds apiece with silky blond hair, they are a great match. Susanne loves to curl up with him nose to nose. He wraps his paws around her arms to make sure she doesn’t leave him.

  When Susanne would ask him, “Do you love me?,” he would answer in Chewbacca noises that sounded shockingly like “I love you.”

  “Do you love only me?” she asked.

  Chewbacca responded with something that sounded quite similar to “yes.”

  “Do you love me so much, more than anything in the world?” she asked, and again he replied. This would go on for five or six iterations of question and answer until they tired of the game.

  I tried to recreate the scene myself once. I slipped into Susanne’s position next to Cowboy and asked, “Do you love me?” His eyes smiled, and he wacked his tail like a club against the ground, but he did not answer. “Do you love Eric?” Nothing. “Are you a good dog?” Silence. “Do you love Susanne?” Chewbacca agreed enthusiastically with a loud “Rarrr rarrr rarrrr.”

  The only thing he ever says to me—and he says it each day at eleven a.m.—is “out.”

  Forget Cesar Millan. That girl is the Dog Whisperer.

  ~~~

  Chapter Thirty-two: Raptors 1, Industry 0

  Eric was supposed to do some work at an oil refinery in St. Paul, but it was indefinitely postponed. It seemed that one of only three pairs of mating peregrine falcons in the state of Minnesota had made their home in the exact stripper18 tower of the exact fluid catalytic cracking unit that his team was scheduled to work on. The refinery was working with state agencies on a relocation for the birds, but it appeared Eric’s trip would have to at least wait for the little hatchlings to arrive.

  How would you like to be the guy that took this picture? That bird looks like it is ready to do some damage. The operators from this refinery reported that any time they got near this tower, she and her mate dive-bombed them. Also, see the band on her leg? She had been tagged and was being tracked.

  Note that she placed the eggs the perfect distance from the warm toasty flange in the upper left. She didn’t even have to sit on these eggs, and no need for a nest. Girl Power!

  18 No, that’s not another name for an exotic cage dancer. A stripper tower is a piece of equipment in a refinery.

  ~~~

  Chapter Thirty-three: New Favorite Pet

  After sweeping animal hair from tile floors every other day for eight years, I decided something had to give. I tried making the kids take over, but they missed spots or sometimes just skipped the entire exercise. I wanted something as tireless as Cowboy, as eager to please as Layla, and as independent as Juliet. So I found a favorite new pet. No, it was not the rabbit, although I sort of loved him. It was the Roomba robotic floor cleaner! It followed me around the house, talked to me, didn’t make a mess—and in fact, cleaned up after others, did what it was told when it was told, and went to its bed for a time-out when it was tired.

  I found myself talking to it: “Way to go, little buddy!” or “Great job in the living room!” Sometimes “Do you need a rest?” and “How about I clean those filters for you?” Embarrassing but true. I could go on and on about this clever little thing, but I’ll spare you.

  Pet shmet. It was my new favorite child.

  ~~~

  Chapter Thirty-four: Not A Beaver

  Every day when she came home from school, the first thing Susanne did was pick up the rabbit and snuggle it, pet it, carry it around, shove it in my face, and try to put it on my bed, because “he just wants to come see you, Mommy.” And every day after Beelzebunny bit her, Susanne would go into my bathroom for the hydrogen peroxide, cotton balls, band-aids, and Neosporin. She was as unconcerned about the daily biting as she was about leaving the first aid supplies all over my counter. On this particular day, though, she had something different to tell me.

  “Mom, I can’t find Ninja.”

  This didn’t sound like especially bad news to me. Just that morning when Eric went into Bunnicula’s domain to feed him, he’d found him asleep in the cat box, which the cat had been using for several days for cat box purposes. Ninjapoo had gotten all tuckered out after digging to China; litter and unmentionables were scattered all around the room.

  Only one day before, said hare had displayed another charming quality: the gnawing ability of a beaver five times his size. In that one day alone, Eric repaired four bunny-bitten cords: my elliptical trainer and three cords to our Wii and its various accessories. And Thumper had already eaten through extension cords and lamp cords, and even destroyed a plugged-in laptop entirely.

  The bunny’s charms were wearing thin.

  So, I answered my daughter with the memories of Ninja’s bad behavior in my mind. “I’m sure he’s just hiding from you. We’ll find him when Eric gets home. In the meantime, I need you to finish your homework and pack a bag. The Weather Channel said we’re going to have a hurricane.”

  “Cool,” she said. A hurricane was nothing new or scary to my island girl. If anything, it was, well, cool.

  That afternoon, I wrote a post to my blog, bemoaning the bunny’s flaws and making fun of him for his beaver impersonation. I lamented that if we left town to avoid the hurricane, he’d have to ride the storm out alone. When Eric came home, I told him about Ninja’s AWOL status.

  Eric is a methodical searcher. Susanne is our finder of all things, but with her that’s all intuition-based. Eric hunts for the missing like he’s a crime scene specialist on CSI with a search grid and an ultraviolet light. He made a first pass of the house. No Ninja.

  “Could he have gotten outside when a door was open?” I asked.

  “Maybe. I searched the front and back yards, though, too. No sign of him,” Eric replied.

  After dinner, Eric resumed the hunt. Now he took it to another level. Furniture was moved. Doors presumed closed were opened anyway and he combed their interior rooms. Attic spaces were searched. Meanwhile, after I shepherded the kids into packing their “just in case” Hurricane Ike travel bags, I did what I normally do in the evenings when we aren’t training or supervising kids: I stole a few moments to write. Forty-five minutes later, when I was lost in the world of Annalise and Katie, Eric came into my office and shut the door behind him.

  “I found him,” he said. His tone and face said that his good news wasn’t.

  “Oh no,” I replied.

  “He was behind the weight bench. Stiff, or starting to be anyway. Like the guinea pig19 was when I found it dead in its cage back on St. Croix.”

  “What in the world? He was fine this morning.”

  “I don’t know,” he said, “but I have a theory.”

  “The cat poop?” I asked, then immediately felt silly. That made no sense. “Did he throw his back out doing a crazy bunny gainer twisty hop?” That didn’t seem right either. Rabbits were born to do that maneuver.

  “I think that table leg he chewed yesterday did him in.”

  “But how?”

  “Maybe a varnish on the wood? Maybe he couldn’t pass wood through his digestive system. My money’s on the varnish, though. It’s poisonous.”

  Unbelievable. An overdose of wood chips did him in? This was horrible. Worse, I felt guilty, oh so guilty. I had groused about the bunny. Worse yet, I had regretted that we got him. I hadn’t exactly wanted him to die a horrible and premat
ure death from poisoned wood chips, but still.

  “And another thing,” Eric said. “I caught the news a minute ago. We need to leave for Austin if we’re going. We can stay for the storm if you want to, but they’re not calling for a mandatory evacuation. It just seems like if there were ever a good excuse to go visit Marie, this would be it.”

  “Yes, of course, let’s go.”

  We assembled the children hastily and told them we were leaving to visit their sister at the University of Texas, STAT—and, oh yeah, the rabbit died. Other than morbid curiosity about the circumstances, the kids took the news well. They’d received news of a lot of dead pets in their time. By now, hurricane evacuation had their undivided attention, so poor Ninja was given a very rapid service and burial in a shallow, unmarked grave.

  I do want to assure everyone that we’d always given him bunny-recommended and bunny-appropriate chew toys, and we encouraged him to play with those instead of eat the furniture. Unfortunately, the force of his personality was stronger than we were.

  Ah, the guilt.

  RIP, Bunnicula.

  19 Note again the common link in pet deaths, too numerous to recount in full in this book. Makes me wonder: where was Eric when Chester the pig died, hmm?

  ~~~

  Chapter Thirty-five: Redneck Adventures

  So my long-suffering island-boy-to-Texas-transplant husband convinced me that the perfect retreat for our family would be in a secondhand20 trailer on a bug- and snake-infested piece of property five miles from Nowheresville, Texas—yeah, for real—much to the chagrin of our kids, especially Clark, who announced that his weekends were 100% booked from now until infinity in Houston with debate, robotics, and a girlfriend.

  We looked for Texas Hill Country acreage for quite some time. The conversation between my husband and me about this one went something like this:

  Eric: I lahhhhke this one. It has a POND on it.

  Me: Stop me if I’ve said this before: Some cowboy is going to kick your ass and good one of these days for making fun of our accents. And ponds have snakes.

  Eric: That pond is nahhhhhhce. I lahhhhhhke that pond.

  Me: I like that it is only an hour and a half from your office.

  Eric: And it has a real nahhhhhce pond.

  Me: I think you’ve mentioned that. But I can’t camp out there. Too many bugs and snakes. And Africa-hot. Plus there’s those bugs and snakes.

  Eric: We’ll get us a travel-trailer. That’d be nahhhhhhce. You’d lahhhhhke it.

  Me: Forget the cowboy. I’m going to kick your ass. And I made a promise to myself years ago—no RVs, no travel trailers. Sheets, running water, A/C, indoor potties, and no trailers.

  Eric: You’re not being very nahhhhhce.

  (Sounds of scuffle and pummeling, and Clark laughing at seeing his mother beating the crud out of his stepdad.)

  Well, of course we bought the land, which we dubbed Shangri-La. Then we bought and fetched the trailer of a redneck’s dreams from a real nahhhhhce couple even further away from Nowheresville, Texas. It came time for Bubba-mon, Clark, and me21 to stash the trailer—soon dubbed the Quacker because Mallard was emblazoned on its front window cover—on Shangri-La.

  Surprise, surprise, we had some issues.

  First, five minutes before we got there, we took a shortcut detour which, it turned out, included an overhead bridge under which our trailer could not pass. As we turned around to take the long way, Cowboy whimpered once, shot Bubba-mon an apologetic look in the rear view mirror, and unloaded the entire contents of his freakishly large digestive system out his back end and down the spare tire well of our 2000 Suburban. This is how we discovered, to Clark’s eternal horror, that four hours really is Cowboy’s limit in the car. Oops, had it been that long?

  Second, a mere thirty minutes later, this is how Clark discovered that no matter how logical it seems to him, toilet bowl cleaner is not the appropriate thing to use to clean dog poo from your vehicle’s carpet. No, we don’t always carry toilet bowl cleaner with us. We had stocked up on supplies for the Quacker. Luckily, those supplies included alternative cleaners to deal with the vaporized carpet.

  Third, as my Bubba-mon pulled downhill on our narrow, winding drive into Shangri-La, he swung wide to avoid planting the Quacker into a tree. This is how we discovered the large tree stump under the skinny bush that he had assumed the Suburban would easily skim over. Fourth, when Bubba-mon was unable to free the Suburban from its high-center position on the stump through techniques such as teeter-tottering forward and backward, lifting, and lightening the load, Clark, after many unhelpful and highly irritating suggestions, came up with one good one. He suggested we use our jack to achieve clearance and then gently pull off and over the jack. This is how we discovered that there was no jack in the Suburban, after all. I’m not going to blame the teenage driver of this Suburban, but, well, there is the issue of custodial possession and responsibility. If you’re reading this, Liz, honey, I love you, and all is forgiven.

  Long story short, Bubba-mon ultimately decided that the stump and Suburban were conjoined at a noncritical area, and he got aggressive with the gas pedal. It worked. He employed his superior trailer-backing skills, and we hid the Quacker in the woods and headed home to Houston. Where we slept like the freakin’ dead.

  Three weekends later, we loaded up the truck and we moved to Beverly . . . Shangri-La that is, big ponds, bugs and snakes (cue banjo music). Of course, we ran into a few issues.

  Upon entering the trailer, a horrible smell assaulted my princess-and-the-pea-like nose. Since the trailer had sat in the sun for weeks in the Texas heat, this was not entirely unexpected. Yet, somehow it was. Unexpected. And really, really awful.

  Me: There’s something dead in here, Eric.

  Bubba-mon: Turn on the A/C. You’ve got an overly-sensitive nose. It’s probably just musty.

  Five minutes pass. Meanwhile, Clark made a tactical error: he flushed our brand-new thirdhand potty. A noxious odor filled the trailer. The LP gas detector went off immediately, screeching out its warning to everyone within a five-mile radius.

  Me: (running from trailer with towel over my face, Clark on my heels, gagging) OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD RUN ERIC RUN IT’S GOING TO BLOW

  Bubba-mon: (running) (IN THE WRONG DIRECTION) What the hell’s going on?

  Me: I don’t know. Clark flushed the potty, it got really stinky, and the alarm went off. I’m afraid we have a propane leak. We have to evacuate.

  Bubba-mon: Hmmmmm, but the propane isn’t even turned on. (Sticks head foolishly into trailer.) Oh SHIT. What’s that smell? (Turns to me.) OH, shit. That’s methane gas. (Reaches over and turns off LP gas detector.)

  Me: What do we do?

  Bubba-mon: I can fix this, no problem.22

  So, first, this is how we discovered that, despite the instructions on the toilet tank treatment bottles that promise one dosage takes care of a whole load, you can’t leave anything in that tank in the hundred-degree Texas sun for three weeks. We could have driven a Prius to Houston and back on the amount of methane we discharged into that twenty-six-foot trailer. Ace Ventura’s “Whew, do not go in there!” took on a whole new meaning for us that day.

  Second, after a honeymoon phase that lasted until darkness fell and the strangely disturbing night calls of the [7,521,999] frogs began, Cowboy and Layla crawled under the Quacker and cried half the night, until they finally moved closer to the thundering white noise of the generator, beside which they dug sleeping pits and curled up against its motherly presence like two puppies. And this is how we discovered that city dogs—like city girls—grow soft and become great big pansies after a few years away from the Cruzan rainforest.

  Despite all of this, or maybe because of it—I dunno—I will grudgingly admit that Bubba-mon was right: This place is nahhhhhce and I lahhhhhke it. I am head over heels for the Quacker, Shangri-La, and Nowheresville.

  20 Make that thirdhand, but who’s counting?

  21 Clark’s sister
s conveniently found ways out of helping. Not that their help was ever much help, anyway.

  22 This was the first time we were to hear what became an oft-repeated phrase in the adventures of Bubba-mon and the Quacker in Nowheresville.

  ~~~

  Chapter Thirty-six: How do I love thee?

  I am cheap. No, not that kind of cheap. I am fiscally tight. Notoriously so. Hold that thought; it’s important to a story I want to tell you about Cowboy.

  We went out to Nowheresville recently. Yeah, it was awesome, as usual. We even lured Eric’s youngest daughter and her boyfriend into coming with us. We ran and biked; they fished and swam. We saw five black wild boars with a bevy of white piglets. We cooked out and made s’mores over a bonfire under the stars. Liz and I picked june bugs out of our food. The men carried the heavy things. It was all good.

  Things went awry when Eric turned on the A/C in the Quacker. Or, rather, when he attempted to turn on the A/C, and realized it no longer C’d the A, so to speak. So off he trekked to Home Depot. He toted back a schnazzy portable A/C. Since it was ninety degrees (on March 26th!), I applauded this decision. I did not know we had a few more expenditures to go along the way.

  Our next calamity struck when the generator came to a grinding halt. Oopsie. Out of gas? Nooo. Out of OIL. Bad. Dead generator. Cha-ching.