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I looked for German Shepherd puppies in Rochester, but all I could find was a breeder in Canada who specialized in police and cadaver-recovery dogs. There was a detailed explanation of training the dogs with a coffee can punched with holes and filled with human remains. I snapped my computer shut, but then Rin Tin Tin jumped over a burning hay bale to save his master.

That’s what was missing. That’s what I needed. Rin Tin Tin wouldn’t leave me for thin thighs and an aristocratic nose. Rin Tin Tin would be a loyal friend.

I went back to looking for a puppy. The words on the screen were starting to blur, but I didn’t care. I needed a dog, and I wasn’t going to stop until I found one. I clicked from one site to another, and then, I saw him.

He was a shaggy ball of fur. Jet-black, except for a small pink tongue hanging out of his mouth. His head was tipped to one side like he was listening to something intently. One of his ears flopped over. The breeder was in Bratislava, Slovakia, and the site wasn’t in English, with the exception of a few shaky translations. At the top of the picture of the puppy, it said something I couldn’t read, and then MALE 11/5. The puppy was only a few weeks old. He was just a baby. Under his picture, there was a link that said ORDER FORM. I moused over it, ready to click.

I took another long slurp of my Kool-Aid. I couldn’t just decide I wanted a dog and order one off the Internet. It was crazy. Crazy! I tried to go back to watching
Rin Tin Tin
, but I couldn’t stop staring at the picture of the puppy. It was like one of those paintings where the eyes follow you everywhere. From every angle, I felt like that dog was looking at me. He was going to be taken away from his mother. He was going to be given to some random family and he was going to get lonely and miss his mom and they wouldn’t understand. Not like I would.

“You need me, don’t you?” I asked him. I felt like his eyes looked more and more sad and lonely every time I looked at the picture.

I clicked on the link. The order form said that the cost for the dog was one hundred and forty thousand koruny, which, seven drinks in, I figured was like pesos or lira or something like that, where a thousand of them equaled a dollar. I thought about looking it up, but my vision was starting to blur, and I wanted a dog. Now. I didn’t want to wait any longer than I had to. What if someone else was sitting around in their pajamas watching the
Rin Tin Tin
marathon, realizing they needed a dog too? What if, in the time I took to look up the conversion rate, someone else bought my puppy? Someone else would get to cuddle up with that little ball of fuzz. Someone else would get sloppy dog kisses on their cheek. Someone else would have a true and loyal friend who would hop over burning hay bales for them, and I’d still be alone. It was probably really cheap. Cheaper than buying a dog from the United States even, I was sure. I grabbed my purse off the coffee table and riffled through the mess of business cards and discount cards, dropping them all over the couch, until I found my credit card.

Ha, Diane, I thought, remembering the time my mom asked her if we could get a dog. I was eleven and had just read
The Call of the Wild
in school. I spent an entire weekend planning for my puppy: where he would sleep, how I could pay for his food with my allowance. I made a chart of how I could squeeze in homework and take him on long walks, and Diane stuck a pin in it in two seconds. “Dogs are filthy. They lick their assholes. You can’t be serious, Nat,” she said when my mom asked her.

Well, this was my house and my dog, and Diane was done with me anyway.

I had to type my credit card number into the website four times before I got it right and it went through, but finally, it worked. The site said to expect a confirmation e- mail shortly.

Holy shit, I thought, as I flipped my credit card onto the coffee table. I just bought a dog. I felt like I should be panicking, but on TV, another
Rin Tin Tin
episode was starting. A tinny horn played a revelry while soldiers scrambled to attention, and a noble-looking Rin Tin Tin stood high on a rock watching them all, the breeze blowing his fur ever so slightly, a flag waving in the background. I could feel the excitement building. I was going to watch this episode carefully. I had to learn about German Shepherds.

I made myself another drink. I was almost out of Kool-Aid, so this one was mostly vodka. I sat down again, clicking the refresh button on my e- mail compulsively, waiting for information on when I could pick up my dog. But ten minutes later, there was still no e-mail. Fifteen minutes later, nothing. Twenty minutes, twenty-five minutes, then a half an hour and still nothing.

What if there is no dog? I thought. What if this was some kind of scam like those Nigerian prince e-mails? What if some Slovakian pervert was using my credit card number to buy porn and crack? I could picture him, in a dirty white undershirt, drooling over disgusting pictures in a dimly lit room. Maybe he wasn’t even Slovakian. Maybe there was some kind of messed-up crime ring that preyed on lonely women watching dog movie marathons by pretending to be dog breeders in post-Communist countries.

I took another chug of my drink. Even though it was light on the Kool-Aid, it was starting to taste like cough syrup. As soon as I got it down, it started to come back up. I tasted it in the back of my mouth, and ran to the bathroom.

I heaved and heaved. Toilet water splashed up in my face. My hair got in the way and ended up covered in purple puke. Finally, I felt like I came to the end of everything that was left in me. I spit into the toilet and started crying.

I cried about everything from way back when Diane told my mom I couldn’t have a dog, to Peter and the wedding and the check, my mom dying, the photo booth picture, and the Slovakian pervert. I cried because I really had no one. There was no one on my side. No one rooting for me above everyone else. There wasn’t even anyone rooting for me to come in second place. There was no one to hold my hair back, or wipe my forehead with a wet washcloth. All I had was me, and it wasn’t enough.

I curled up on the smelly bath mat and cried until I couldn’t squeeze tears out of my eyes anymore. Then I just lay there and clenched my teeth, listening to my breath whistle through my nose until I fell asleep.

I woke up on the bath mat, smelling like wet towel mildew and vomit. I leaned up on my elbow. My heart was beating in my forehead and my stomach lurched forward again. I pulled myself up to the toilet and heaved, but nothing came up. My stomach felt like an empty tube of toothpaste squeezed against the side of the sink to get the very last bit out. My eyes were so puffy that I could barely keep them open.

I stumbled downstairs, started a pot of coffee, and downed some aspirin. The living room was a mess. An empty ice cream carton leaked sticky chocolate goo all over the coffee table. My laptop was open on the couch. The TV was on, blaring an infomercial for some carpet sweeper that could pick up lug nuts.

I couldn’t remember much more from the night before, other than coming home and making myself a drink. I went back into the kitchen to grab a wad of paper towels to wipe up the ice cream. All of a sudden, I had a horrible thought and my heartbeat spiked: What if I’d called Diane and told her off? What if I’d called Janie and confessed or called Peter and told him I loved him?

It wouldn’t be the first time I’d drunk-dialed. In college, I had a horrible habit of calling my mom to tell her embarrassing details of my life while under the influence. And like a good mother, she never let me live it down. “Hi, drunkie,” she’d say when I called the next day, hungover, oblivious to my prior indiscretions, “I hear you flashed your RA last night.” She never got mad. She always chalked it up to normal college behavior, something she knew nothing about. I wished she’d put the fear of God in me and made me join a convent where they were so straight that they substituted grape juice for communion wine, or at the very least, I wish she’d trained me to never make phone calls while intoxicated.

I scrambled around looking for my cell phone and held my breath while I checked my recent calls.

Nothing. No calls. I let the air out of my lungs slowly, feeling the blood return to my extremities. Then I realized that drunk e-mailing could be just as dangerous.

I sat on the couch yelling, “Come on, come on, come on!” while my laptop wheezed its way out of sleep mode. “Sent mail. Sent mail,” I hissed through my teeth, waiting for the site to load. I typed in my user name and password, but before I even hit the SIGN IN button, I had a sudden flashback: sitting on the couch with my laptop, clicking REFRESH over and over and over again, waiting for a purchase confirmation. What did I purchase? Did I break down and buy that absurdly expensive laptop I’d been eying for months? My heart pounded while I waited for my stupid slow Internet access to take me to my e-mail. And then there it was, an e-mail with the subject line
Potvrdit’ pes
. It all started coming back to me. The fuzzy black puppy. Rin Tin Tin. German Shepherd. Burning hay bales. A deep voice with a heavy accent. I pasted the subject line into Google translate.
Confirm Dog.

“Fuck!” I yelled. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I bought a puppy. I bought a puppy off a fucking website like some kind of moron who doesn’t even understand that you don’t buy a freaking living being off the Internet.

I translated the e- mail sentence by sentence. The dog would be at the Rochester International Airport on a flight from Bratislava arriving at two thirty in the morning on Thursday. At the end of the receipt it said,
Master-card
, and then
one hundred and forty thousand koruny
. I looked up an online exchange rate calculator and held my breath, feeling my pulse pounding in my temples. I entered the numbers, hit GO, and closed my eyes before I could see the results.

It’s probably not that bad, I told myself. I remembered a girl from college who adopted a dog from the local animal shelter when she got her own apartment. It cost her two hundred and fifty dollars. Add to that shipping costs, and it would maybe double. I mean, how much could it cost to ship a teeny-tiny puppy? Five hundred dollars, I could handle, I told myself. I’d eat ramen noodles for dinner. I’d pay it off over a few months. Or I’d take on an extra freelance job or two. I’d barely feel the pinch.

I took a deep breath, opened my eyes, and looked at the screen. It said I’d spent six thousand and one dollars on a dog.

I ran back to the bathroom to throw up again.

When I was done, I got in the shower and winced as the hot water magnified my stench. Stomach acid, grape Kool-Aid, and mildew wafted around in the shower steam until I reached for the shampoo and started washing it all away. The hot and cold dials squeaked loudly as I turned the water off. The slapping sound of my bare feet hitting the tile floor echoed, and it was so quiet that I could hear the hum of the refrigerator from all the way downstairs, like a constant reminder that there was no one else here to make noise. I’d felt lonely before the wedding and the check, but I hadn’t realized how far it could go, or how quiet it could get.

I could have called the kennel in Slovakia to cancel my order, or called the credit card company to see if they could stop the payment, but I didn’t. I wanted to have someone on my team, even if that someone was only a dog. I wanted that kind of constant companionship and intense loyalty. I wanted someone to sleep at the foot of my bed, and keep me company while I was working. And it’s not like my dog was going to be bigger than a child actor when he showed up. I was getting a tiny puppy. I could handle that.

I
slept off my hangover through the weekend and by Monday, all I could do was think about my puppy. I didn���t know anything about owning a dog, so I went to the library and pored over books on dog intelligence, an “idiots” guide specifically for German Shepherd owners, and a book about being a pack leader. One book was about how to be your dog’s best friend. It was written in the seventies by a bunch of monks who bred German Shepherds at some monastery in the Catskills. It smelled kind of musty, like a basement in an old house, and the pages were water-stained and dogeared, but the black-and-white pictures of German Shepherds playing with the monks kept me reading. The book talked about letting your dog share every aspect of your life, sleeping on your floor at night, lying down at your feet while you ate dinner.

I read that a German Shepherd is capable of understanding as many words as a three- year-old child if challenged appropriately. When I got home from the library, I ordered more books on training and discovered a line of puppy toys designed to encourage creative play. The beginning of the week was a blur of credit card orders and trips to the pet store to get supplies. It helped me get my mind off of Peter. Or in the very least, it gave me something productive to do when I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter.

What was Peter doing, coming to see me on his wedding night? What had he been about to say when I cut him off? I imagined it over and over again.