Part 2: A Thirty-Four-Year-Old Woman With Stage Four Cancer Adopted the Oldest Pit Bull at the Shelter — A Dog Nobody Had Wanted for Six Years. They Died Eleven Days Apart. The Shelter File Explained Why She Had Asked for Him Specifically.
Mr. Pickles came home with Marisol on the afternoon of February 16th.
He came home in the back of her 2009 Honda Civic, lying on a folded green towel she had laid down on the back seat. He did not pant. He did not whine. He did not stand up. He lay on the towel and looked out the window the entire ride, with his chin on his paws and his cloudy gray eyes tracking the saguaros on the side of Silverbell Road as they passed.
I was at the house when she got there.
She had asked me to be. I had been staying with her on weekends since the diagnosis. I had a job I was about to quit, an apartment in Phoenix I was about to give up, and a girlfriend who was about to become an ex-girlfriend in a way that turned out to be necessary. I would move into the adobe house full-time on the first of March. I did not know that yet on the sixteenth of February. I knew it by the end of the day.
Marisol parked the Civic in the gravel driveway. She did not get out right away. She sat in the driver’s seat for a full two minutes with her hands on the steering wheel.
Then she got out and she opened the back door and she said, “All right, viejito. Come meet your house.”
Mr. Pickles stood up on the back seat. He did not jump down. He waited. Marisol — who was, by that point in February, weighing one hundred and four pounds and unable to lift more than ten — looked at him. Then she looked at me through the windshield.
I came around and I lifted him out of the car.
He weighed sixty-three pounds. He let me carry him. He put his chin over my shoulder. His breath smelled like the way old dogs’ breath smells, which is to say like nothing in particular and a little like warm bread.
I set him down on the gravel.
He looked up at Marisol. He did not wag his tail. He looked at her the way an old man looks at someone he has been waiting to meet again. Steady. Quiet. Not surprised.
Then he walked, slowly, on stiff back legs, up the front path to the door of the adobe house, and he sat down on the step and waited for her to let him in.
He had never been to her house.
He had never been to that part of Tucson.
He sat down on the step like he had been coming home to it for years.
I noticed it. I did not say anything about it. There were a lot of things I was not saying anything about that month.
There was one other thing I am going to mention now, because it matters later.
When Marisol filled out the adoption paperwork at the front desk that morning, she had not asked to see his file.
She had not asked his age. She had not asked his medical history. She had not asked if he was good with other dogs or good with kids or good with cats.
She had asked one question.
She had asked: Has anyone here ever known a woman named Esperanza Salazar?
The young woman at the desk had said no. The shelter director had been called over. The shelter director, a woman in her sixties named Patricia Whitfield, had also said no. Then Patricia had said: Why do you ask?
Marisol had said: Because I think this is her dog.
Part 3
I need to tell you about our mother.
Her name was Esperanza Salazar. She was born in Nogales, Sonora, in 1958, and she came across the border with her parents when she was four years old. She grew up in South Tucson. She worked at the Tucson Medical Center as a janitor for thirty-one years. She married my father in 1984. She had me in 1986 and Marisol in 1990. She raised both of us mostly alone after my father left in 1998 for reasons I will not get into here.
She loved two things. She loved her two children. And she loved every stray dog she ever met in the entire course of her life.
For most of the time we were growing up, there was a Pit Bull living in the house on South Sixth Avenue. They were always Pit Bulls. They were always rescues. They were always old, or sick, or scarred, or all three. My mother said the same thing every single time she brought a new one home.
She said: Nobody else was going to take him.
The last one — the last dog she brought home — was a fawn-and-white Pit Bull puppy she found tied to a fence outside the Food City on Twenty-Second Street in the summer of 2012. He had a scar that ran from the bridge of his nose to the inside of his left ear, from something that had happened to him before she found him. She named him Pickles, because she said he was sweet and sour at the same time.
He was two years old when she got him.
My mother died of a stroke on a Thursday morning in March of 2018, at the age of fifty-nine. She had been making coffee in her kitchen. She fell in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room. The dog was the only one home.
The neighbor across the street — a woman named Mrs. Garza who has lived on South Sixth Avenue for forty years — called 911 when she saw the dog standing at the front window of the house at eleven in the morning, which was not a thing he ever did.
By the time the paramedics got there, my mother was gone.
I was the one who handled the arrangements. I was twenty-nine years old. Marisol was twenty-seven. Neither one of us was in a position, in March of 2018, to take in a six-year-old Pit Bull who had just watched our mother die in front of him.
I made a decision I have thought about every single day since.
I called the Pima Animal Care Center and I surrendered the dog.
I lied on the form. I said I had found him as a stray. I did not list his name. I did not list our mother’s name. I did not say he had been with someone who had just died. I did not want the shelter to know any of that, because I was twenty-nine years old and overwhelmed and ashamed and I did not want to answer questions.
I dropped him off on a Tuesday morning in late March of 2018.
I did not tell Marisol.
She found out four months later, when she went looking for him at our mother’s house and discovered he was not there. We had the only fight, in the thirty-three years we were both alive, that I am still not over.
She did not speak to me for fourteen months.
She did not, as far as I knew, ever look for the dog.
Part 4
Marisol declined fast in March.
By the second week she was sleeping fourteen hours a day. By the third week she had stopped going to the school to say goodbye to her kindergarten class — they had thrown her a small party on the playground on the first Monday of March, which she had attended for forty-five minutes in a wheelchair, and which had been, she told me that night, the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.
She had not gone back.
Mr. Pickles slept on the bed with her.
He slept pressed against her left side, with his head on her hip and his back against the small of her back. He did not move when she got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. He moved when she moved. He stopped when she stopped.
In the mornings, he would walk her, slowly, from the bedroom down the hallway to the kitchen. He walked on her left side. He matched her pace. When she stopped to lean against the wall — which she did, by mid-March, every fifteen feet — he stopped and waited and did not look at her until she started walking again.
I had not trained him to do this.
He had not been trained to do it at the shelter. The shelter notes said he was “well-mannered but generally unresponsive to commands.”
He had decided to do it on his own.
By the first week of April, Marisol was no longer getting out of bed.
A hospice nurse named Joan came every morning at nine. A second nurse named Bao came every evening at six. Mr. Pickles let both of them in. He sat in the doorway of the bedroom while they worked. He did not get on the bed when they were there.
He got back on the bed the minute they left.
On the morning of April 14th, Marisol asked me to sit on the edge of the bed.
She told me she wanted to tell me one thing.
She told me she had recognized the dog in the kennel at the Pima Animal Care Center on the first Friday of February. She told me she had gone there four times before that Friday. She told me she had walked the same hallway four times, looking at every old Pit Bull, and on the fourth time she had stopped in front of the kennel at the end of the left hallway and she had seen the scar that ran from the bridge of his nose to the inside of his left ear, and she had known.
She told me she had not told me she was going to go looking for him.
She told me she had not been angry with me for six years.
She told me she had needed him to know that somebody from the family came back.
She told me she had thought, when she was diagnosed in October, that she was not going to have time to go and find him. She told me she had decided, the night of the diagnosis, to make the time.
She had four months to live.
She used six weeks of it to bring him home.
Part 5
Marisol died on the morning of April 22nd at four eighteen in the morning. I was holding her right hand. Mr. Pickles was pressed against her left side with his chin on her hip and his back against the small of her back.
She had been unconscious for about six hours. The hospice nurse Bao had told me, the night before, that we were close.
I knew when it happened because Mr. Pickles lifted his head.
He had not lifted his head for two hours. He had been lying perfectly still, breathing slowly, with one paw across her wrist.
He lifted his head. He looked at her face. He lay back down.
He did not move from the bed for the next eleven hours, until the men from the funeral home came and gently asked me if they could take her, and I gently asked Mr. Pickles if he could let them, and he did. He got off the bed. He sat on the rug in the bedroom doorway. He watched them carry her out.
He did not come out of the bedroom for the rest of that day.
I called the Pima Animal Care Center on the afternoon of April 23rd. I did not call to surrender him. I called to tell Patricia Whitfield, the shelter director, that the woman who had adopted Mr. Pickles six weeks earlier had passed away, and that I was her brother, and that I was going to keep him.
Patricia was quiet for a long time.
Then she said: “Ramón. I need to tell you something.”
She said: “Your sister came to my office the day she adopted him. She brought something for me. I want you to come pick it up.”
I drove to the shelter the next morning.
Patricia took me into the back office. She handed me a manila envelope. She said Marisol had asked her to give it to me only if Marisol did not survive long enough to give it to me herself.
I opened the envelope in the parking lot of the Pima Animal Care Center on Silverbell Road.
Inside were three things.
The first was a photograph from the summer of 2014. It was a picture of our mother sitting on her porch on South Sixth Avenue with a two-year-old fawn-and-white Pit Bull in her lap. The dog had a scar that ran from the bridge of his nose to the inside of his left ear. My mother was laughing. She had one hand on his chest.
The second was a page from his shelter file. Patricia had given it to Marisol on the morning she had adopted him. It was the intake page from March of 2018 — the page I had filled out, the day I had lied, the day I had surrendered him.
At the bottom of the page, in handwriting that was not mine, somebody had written one line in pencil, the day he came in.
The line said: Dog is grieving. Surrendered after death of owner. Real name unknown. Will not eat for three days.
The third thing in the envelope was a letter from Marisol.
Part 6
The letter was three pages long, in Marisol’s careful handwriting, in the blue felt-tip pen she used to use to grade her kindergarteners’ worksheets.
I am not going to write all of it down here. Some of it belongs to her and to me. Some of it I will keep.
She wrote that she had forgiven me. She wrote that she had forgiven me a long time ago and had not figured out how to tell me. She wrote that she had spent the last six years carrying something she did not know what to do with, and that the diagnosis had clarified, in a way she had not expected, what she wanted to do before she died.
She wrote that she had decided, the week after diagnosis, to find him.
She wrote that she had gone to the Pima Animal Care Center four times in November, December, January, and February, and that on the fourth Friday she had finally found him in the last kennel on the left, and that she had known him the second she saw the scar.
She wrote that she had not told me, because she had not wanted me to feel what she knew I would feel, which was the thing I was feeling in the parking lot at that moment.
She wrote that she had wanted him to come home for whatever time was left.
She wrote that she had wanted, more than anything else, for our mother’s dog to die in a bed instead of a kennel.
She wrote that she had wanted me to know, after she was gone, that I had not done a wrong thing in March of 2018. She wrote that I had done the best thing a twenty-nine-year-old overwhelmed man could have done, and that the dog had survived because I had taken him somewhere that kept him alive long enough for somebody from the family to come back.
She wrote: Ramón. He waited. He waited six years. He’s old now. He may not have long. Whatever he has, you give him. And then you let him go. He has earned it.
I sat in the parking lot of the shelter for forty minutes.
I did not cry until I got home.
Part 7
Mr. Pickles died on the morning of May 3rd, eleven days after Marisol.
I knew it was coming. He had stopped eating on the twenty-eighth. He had stopped getting off the bed on the thirtieth. He had been drinking small amounts of water from a dish I held under his chin, and on the second of May he stopped drinking too.
I lay on the bed next to him for the last twenty-six hours of his life.
I put my hand on his ribs. I told him he had done a good job. I told him my mother would have been proud. I told him my sister had loved him from the second she saw him at the end of the hallway. I told him every name I could remember of every dog my mother had ever loved, going all the way back to a black-and-white mutt named Comandante she had owned when she was fifteen years old.
He died at six twelve in the morning on May 3rd.
He was twelve years and seven months old. He had spent six years and four months in a shelter. He had spent two months in a kitchen with a woman who loved him and one terrible morning watching her die. He had spent six weeks in a bed with another woman who loved him and one quiet morning lying against her back when she died too.
He had spent forty-six days as a member of our family, total, in a six-and-a-half-year span.
He had spent the rest waiting.
I buried him in Marisol’s back yard under the lemon tree. I buried him next to her dog Beto, who had died in 2017. The hole was harder to dig than I had expected. The ground in Tucson in May is hard. I dug for two hours.
I put his collar in the hole with him.
I put the photograph of him with my mother in the hole, in a Ziplock bag.
I covered him up.
I sat under the lemon tree for a long time.
Part 8
I still live in the adobe house off Park Avenue.
I have not put it up for sale. I am not going to. My sister left it to me in a will she wrote in November, the month after she was diagnosed, that I did not know existed until June.
I make iced tea every evening. I sit on the screened porch. The lemon tree has fruit on it again.
Every Friday, on my way home from the job I now have at a print shop on Fourth Avenue, I stop at the Pima Animal Care Center on Silverbell Road.
I walk the same hallway my sister walked.
I stop at the last kennel on the left.
There is always a dog in it.
I am not yet ready to take any of them home.
But I want them to know somebody comes by.
I want them to know somebody from the family comes back.
Follow this page for more stories about the dogs who wait longer than they should have to.
