JAMES KEITH SMITH

Therapy Dog

My therapy dog, Vincent, suffers from anxiety and depression. 

“Two peas in a pod,” my mother-in-law says. She pulls a grapefruit from her purse, sets it on the table in front of her like it’s some new kind of currency. She says my kitchen is too cold. She won’t take off her jacket.

“I don’t think a dog can be depressed,” she says. 

I should’ve expected this from the woman who thinks dogs can’t smile. Who, when we lived with her, refused to take anything except a single aspirin and a shot of cognac each night. 

Vincent, a German shepherd, lies at my feet—all sixty-eight pounds of him. When he came into my life, ten years ago, I could barely get out of bed. Somewhere along the lines, the tables turned. Certified? Yes. But I’ve taken him to the vet and they want to start him on Prozac. 

Meanwhile, for the first time in a year and a half, I’m medication-free.

My mother-in-law peels the grapefruit. Signs of her daughter are everywhere. The mixing bowl I never use. Her kitchen table, her sofa. Even her brown leather jacket is still on a hanger in the closet. 

I know what she thinks. That young people today are weak. That if we were under political duress—like she was in communist Poland, fifty years ago, we wouldn’t put up a fight. There wouldn’t be an uprising. 

Look around, I want to say. Turn on the news.  

Back to Vincent. I tell her that, when we hear the mailbox, he doesn’t look up. At the dog park, he sits alone in the center of the gravel field. When I leave to the store and come back, he’s in the same place—on a pile of dirty laundry. 

I scratch behind his ears and under his chin. 

“Why don’t you take him for a few days?” I say to my mother-in-law. “Maybe you can cheer him up.”

She laughs at the idea of this. “What am I going to do with a depressed dog?” she asks. 

I’m beginning to think maybe my mother-in-law likes me after all. She listens as I tell her about work, how everything is going well again. I’ve even started going to the gym. And finally, what I’ve invited her here to talk about, my new girlfriend. 

“You’d like her,” I say. 

“What does she do for a living?” 

It’s the same thing she asked her daughter about me—the first thing, actually. And then I think of the arrangement she picked out for my wife’s funeral, the desert roses, the lilies. Suddenly, I can’t tell her that my new girlfriend is a florist. And so I lie, say that she’s an accountant. Maybe my mother-in-law is right: my generation is weak, after all. 

“Does this new girlfriend make a lot of money?” she asks. “Does she come from a good family?”

It’s as though she’s reading from a script. I almost expect her to ask next about my girlfriend’s teeth. But I know she’s being protective in her own way. 

She asks a few more questions, and when she’s satisfied, she stands, goes to the door. I pretend not to notice the grapefruit peel she leaves on the bare table.

“We should all have lunch,” I say, but my mother-in-law makes excuses, says she doesn’t want to intrude. It’s been fourteen months. When her daughter was alive, all she did was intrude. When are you going to have children, she’d ask. Why do you live in this house, in this neighborhood? 

“I’m glad you’re happy, but don’t expect me to be,” she says, and it cuts so deep that when she leaves, I’m shaking. I open the fridge, look out the kitchen window, sit down on the floor beside Vincent. He stares at the door. 

James Keith Smith’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip Magazine, Moon City Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Pithead Chapel, and others. He lives in Washington state with his wife and two young children. You can read more of his work at jameskeithsmith.com.