Read Online Plan B by Anne Lamott - Free Book Online

laid her head down, and died.
    I couldn’t believe that she was gone, even though she’d been sick for so long. I could feel that something huge, a tide, had washed in, and then washed out.
    I cried and cried, and called my brother and sister-in-law. Jamie said Stevo wasn’t home, but she would leave him a note and come right over. I prayed again, for my brother to be there before Sam came home from school, so he could take Sadie’s body away, to spare Sam, to spare me from Sam’s loss.
    I kept looking at the clock. School would be out in half an hour.
    Jamie and their dog, Sasha, arrived seventeen minutes after Sadie died. I had pulled the carpet out from under the bed. Sadie looked as beautiful as ever. Jamie and I sat on the floor nearby. Sasha is a small white dog with tea-colored stains; she has perky ears and tender eyes and a bright, dancing quality—we call her the Czechoslovakian circus terrier—and we couldn’t resist her charm. She licked us and ran up to Sadie and licked her, too, on her face. Then she ran back to us, as if to say, “I am life, and I am here! And my ears are up at this hilarious angle!”
    Stevo finally arrived, only a few minutes before Sam was usually home from school. I wanted my brother to hurry and put Sadie in the car, but it was too horribleto think that Sam might catch him sneaking Sadie out like a burglar stealing our TV. So I breathed miserably, and prayed to be up to the task. Stevo sat beside Jamie. Then Sam arrived home and found us. He cried out sharply and sat on my bed alone, above Sadie. His eyes were red, but after a while Sasha made him laugh. She kept running over to the dead, exquisitely boneless mountain of majestic glossy black dog in repose on the rug. And she leaped on the bed to kiss Sam, before tending to the rest of us, like a doctor making her rounds.
    Soon things got wild: My friend Neshama came over, and sat down beside me. I had called her with the news. Then a friend of Sam’s stopped by, with his father, who slipped behind Sam on the bed like a shadow. The doorbell rang again, and it was another friend of Sam’s, just passing by, out of the blue, if you believe in out of the blue, which I don’t; and then a kid who lives up the hill came to borrow Sam’s bike. He stayed, too. It was like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera . There were five adults, four kids, one white Czechoslovakian circus terrier, and one large dead black dog.
    Sadie looked like an island of dog, and we looked like flotsam that had formed a ring around her. Life, death, dogs—something in us was trying to hold somethingtogether that doesn’t hold together, but then does, miraculously, for the time being.
    Sometimes we were self-consciously quiet, as if we were on the floor in kindergarten, and should stretch out and nap, but the teacher had gone out, and so we waited.
    The boys eventually went downstairs and turned on loud rock’n’ roll. The grown-ups stayed a while longer. I got a bag of chocolates from the kitchen, and we ate them, as if raising a toast. As Sadie grew deader and emptier, we could see that it was no longer Sadie in there. She wasn’t going to move or change, except to get worse and start smelling. So Stevo carried her on the rolled-up carpet out to my van. It was so clumsy, and so sweet, this ungainly car-size package, Sadie’s barge, and sarcophagus.
    We could hear the phantom sounds of Sadie for days—the nails on wood, the tail, the panting. Sam was alternately distant and clingy and mean, because I am the primary person he banks on and bangs on. I stayed close enough so he could push me away. Sadie slowly floated off.
    Then, out of the so-called blue again, six months later, some friends gave us a five-month-old puppy, Lily. She’s a Rottweiler/Shar-Pei/shepherd mix, huge, sweet, and well behaved—mostly. She’s not a stunning bathing beautylike Sadie. But she’s