Wanda

As I mentioned before, one of my favorite places to do book signings is Houston. The local golden rescue group is the gold standard, and the local mystery bookstore, Murder By The Book, is absolutely terrific. They always combine to put on a great event when I’m there.

When I’m traveling on tour, I can’t help but feel a little guilty about leaving Debbie at home to take care of the dogs by herself. Feeding them, cleaning up, petting them, going to the vet … it is definitely a minimum-two-person job.

I check in with her repeatedly, so frequently that it drives her crazy, and I ask her to call me if there are any problems. There is never anything she can’t handle, but I still want to know what’s going on.

On this particular trip to Houston, I was leaving the hotel to drive to the event when I got an ominous e-mail from her. The East Valley shelter had called; there was a ten-year-old golden that was going to be put down that afternoon if Debbie didn’t come and get it.

On its face that was no problem. We were always talking about cutting back on the number of dogs in our house, but we never seemed to follow through on it. And we were not about to say no to a senior golden.

The reason it was so frightening was that Debbie was going to a shelter.

A bad shelter.

By herself, without me to rein her in.

In my mind’s eye I could see her walking through the shelter, pointing to the dogs, saying, “I’ll take you and you and you and you … aw, what the heck, you too.”

I had just arrived at the event when I got the next e-mail. The golden, she said, was terribly matted but beautiful. She was also already spayed, which meant that Debbie would be able to take her right away and bring her to our vet to get checked out and bathed. Debbie had named her Mamie.

She went on to say that there was an eleven-year-old border collie mix “to die for.” She didn’t say that she was taking this second dog, but I figured there was approximately a 100 percent chance that she would. Or maybe a little higher.

The next e-mail came ten minutes later. There was a twelve-year-old Lab mix who looked “just like Waldo.” Waldo was a black Lab that had died a short time before. He was a great dog whose most distinguishing trait was a snore that could be heard for miles. Again, no mention of whether she was taking this other dog, but no doubt either.

“We really don’t need any more dogs,” I wrote back, and her reply was “I completely agree. Just these three.”

I was about to start my speech when I got what would be the last e-mail of the afternoon. It was short and to the point. “There is a 105-pound, emaciated mastiff that is amazing. I’ve named her Wanda.”

Debbie didn’t say that she was taking her, but it was fairly hard to picture her leaving behind an “emaciated, amazing” dog, especially since we had always wanted a mastiff. And it would have been downright silly to name a dog that was staying in the shelter.

So it was that Wanda and all the rest joined our little group. If Debbie felt any embarrassment or regret about gorging herself on rescue dogs, she hid it well. Her reason for taking Wanda, she explained when we spoke on the phone later, was that not to do so would have resulted in Wanda’s being put down or perhaps taken by someone who would keep her outside all day.

She said that Wanda had gotten up on her hind legs and hugged Debbie with her front paws through the cage bars. That, she explained, had clinched the sale, though I’ve got a hunch the sale was clinched the moment Debbie set eyes on her.

We took Wanda to our vet, as we did with all newcomers. He checked her out and the staff gave her a bath, and then began picking the ticks off of her. They counted over four hundred of them, which disgustingly revealed how mistreated she had been. Even worse, Wanda truly was terribly undernourished. I could see every one of her ribs; I will never understand how someone could fail to provide food for a dog. But that wasn’t going to be a problem at our house.

Once we got her home, Wanda gained weight so fast that I think Debbie must have been slipping her bowling-ball-sized biscuits. I assume her ribs are still there, but they soon retreated from sight, and Wanda currently weighs 165 pounds.

There are only four dogs currently capable of getting up onto our bed without assistance. Three of them—Jenny, Benji, and Otis—are relatively young and can jump high enough to get there. The fourth, Wanda, would never dream of jumping. She simply steps onto the bed, as if it were a curb.

Amazingly, she doesn’t seem to take up that much room on the bed. She finds her spot in the crowd and sort of curls up. She’s comforting to sleep next to; we call her the Great Wall of Wanda. She snores loudly, and for a few months Debbie thought it was me. Then one day I was out of town and the snoring continued, which got me off the hook.

Our bed is truly something to see at night. There are always four or five dogs up there, including Wanda and Bernie, the Bernese mountain dog. Everybody prefers Debbie to me, so they all get as close to her as they can, leaving me relatively unimpeded.

In Santa Monica, Debbie’s side of the bed was about two feet from the window, and I walked in one night to find her asleep, but so crowded that her feet were on the windowsill.

And the noises in our bedroom are unbelievable. Between the snoring and the scratching, the collars jiggling, and all the other weird noises, it sounds like a jungle in Zaire.

But back to Wanda. When it came to feeding time, she was hilarious. She got the same amount of food as the others, the only difference being that she viewed the serving as the appetizer. Once she was finished, usually about fifteen seconds after she started, she went on patrol.

She knew which dogs were unlikely to finish their meals, and she was on the scene when they walked away from their dish. She then inhaled what they’d left behind and moved on to the next one.

Wanda is a serious eater.

She is also a gentle giant, obedient and wanting only to be petted. She craves human contact. It is scary to think how many Wandas are out there, being used as guard dogs or stuck outside in deference to their size.

Wanda belongs in the house, on the bed, on the couch, wherever the hell she wants to go. And that is how she is going to spend the rest of her life.