Sweet Betty Was Strictly One of a Kind

My mother started the conversation with small talk, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Yes, we were all fine.

Then she sighed, just for an instant, an abbreviated release into the phone.

“Sweet Betty died,” my mother said.

Betty was a dog. But we loved her as we would a child, because you can only love one way really, and that is completely, without thinking that one day it might end.

Betty was going on 16 years, a black Labrador, smarter than some people I know. She bossed my parents’ two Dobermans, the ones with the registered monikers long enough to require nicknames.

Betty’s beginnings were far more humble. My sister picked her up at the pound. Betty was just a puppy with a $5 price tag. No, my sister didn’t need a dog. She was a local television reporter, single with a life.

Her editor had sent her to the pound on an assignment that she no longer remembers, but meeting Betty she’ll never forget. She was in a cage with her brothers and sisters, squirmers all of them, big kissers, of course.

As my sister watched, an attendant put a tag on the puppies’ cage. It carried a code for their execution day, the first thing the next day. That was enough for my sister. It may have been a ploy, who knows, but my sister is not one to risk losing sleep.

She took Betty--and her siblings too--right there on the spot. She gave all but Betty away.

Sometimes we called her Betty Lou. “Better” worked too. Didn’t matter. Betty loved us; she would always come when we called.

She kissed a lot. In later years, this could give you pause. Her breath was not always fresh.

After my sister had Betty for about five years, the house that she rented was burglarized. This place was rustic, isolated in woods that suddenly seemed inhabited with criminals and lunatics.

My sister decided to move to more civilized environs, into an apartment that she knew would be temporary because the landlord’s definition of civility did not include dogs. Betty moved in with our parents, hundreds of miles to the north.

About a year later, my sister told my parents that she would take Betty back. My sister was married now, with a house of her own.

She had met her husband at work where they had carried on a secret romance until Betty had blown their cover.

My sister had stopped by the TV station with Betty, just for a minute, but Betty heard a voice that she recognized. She trotted off down the hall to find it, before my sister could hold her back.

And the gig was up right there.

So, naturally, my sister and her husband wanted Betty to share in their new life.

“I’ll see you in court,” was how my father responded to that.

That’s how Betty came to belong to us all.

I never lived with Betty myself, but she didn’t discriminate. She knew I was kin, and my husband and daughters, too. Betty always loved the one she was with.

Funny thing about this dog, she had a way of lingering in your thoughts. The time she did this . . . the time she did that.

On the day that she died, my daughter and I had been walking in our own neighborhood when we came across a puppy who looked, and kissed, like Betty did in her youth.

The day before, we were digging through photographs to find one of my daughter in front of a body of water (one of the more arcane class assignments of the first grade).

We picked one shot at my parents’ cabin in the Sierras, which my mother and father claim added years to Betty’s life. The photograph shows my sister and my daughter bundled against the cold while Betty, in the background, skates on the frozen lake, skinny legs akimbo.

My mother was with Betty when she died at home. We’ve all declared that a blessing of sorts, in the way that people do when someone has died. Especially, since Betty never met a veterinarian she liked.

My father buried her in the back yard, but he broke a water line with his shovel first.

No, they’ll be no “replacement” for Betty. For now, my parents have turned her baby picture face down on the shelf. It’s too early to think of her in the past.