Page 79 of Spiced!

He looked at me from the console with the calm, wide-eyed attention of an innocent puppy who had made a decision and was simply waiting for me to accept it.

“Papito, the back seat is your seat.”

He sneezed.

“That’s not an argument.”

He shifted his weight forward, redistributing himself so that more of him was in the front than the back of the car. It was a trick I hadn’t seen from him before. It was a clear escalation.

“You can’t ride up here, mijo. It’s not safe. It’s—”

He did the head tilt thing, the full one with his left ear flopping forward and both eyes locked on me with an intensity that suggested he was genuinely trying to understand.

“Don’t do that. Don’t get all cute when I’m scolding you.”

He did it more.

I tried not to laugh, knowing it would only encourage him, then drove the rest of the way to the clinic with a beagle on my center console, ears streaming back slightly in the air conditioning like a tiny dog in a very slow Titanic movie, only without the ships and icebergs. I told myself this was temporary and that we would be addressing it seriously when we got home.

We would not be addressing it seriously when we got home. We both knew this.

The vet’s office waiting room had a laminated photo of a Malayan tapir on the wall under a label that read Our Current Patient. I’d been looking at it for about thirty seconds, Mofongo sitting on my foot doing his own assessment of the tapir, when Marcus appeared from the back hallway.

He looked at me. Then he looked at Mofongo. Then he looked at Mofongo’s ears specifically, which today were doing something particularly ambitious.

“Mr. Voss,” he said with a professional composure belied by the knowing grin in his gaze.

“Hey, Marcus. How’s the morning?”

“Very productive, thank you.” His eyes hadn’t left Mofongo. “He’s grown.”

“Every week.”

“His ears are—” He picked up a pen, scribbled something, then set it down. “I’ll let Dr. Davis know you’re here.”

Marcus disappeared through the back hallway, moving slightly faster than was probably standard. I heard him say something to someone on the other side of a door. Then a sound that might have been Diane saying, “How big?” and Marcus saying, “Just go look.”

Diane came through the door and froze.

“Oh,” she said.

Mofongo stared up at her. She stared down at him. Mofongo, sensing an opportunity, sat up straighter and deployed the full head tilt. Diane made a sound that was not professionally compatible with the scrubs she was wearing. She crossed the room and crouched down. Mofongo launched himself at her with the complete, unguarded joy of a puppy who considered every new person a gift specifically arranged for his benefit. He got both paws on her knee and his entire back half involved in the greeting, his wag extending through his hindquarters in a full-booty endorsement of her existence.

“Hello, little guy,” she said, a wide, toothy smile parting her lips. She spoke in the voice people used for puppies, babies, and occasionally, for particularly skilled lovers. “Hello, hello. Look at you. Look at those ears. Those can’t be real.”

“They’re proportional,” I said. “To his future self.”

“They’re extraordinary.” She smiled up at me. “Has he always been this—” She gestured at Mofongo, who had now gotten both front paws on her shoulder and was conducting a thorough examination of her ponytail. “—this much?”

“Since day one,” I said. “If anything, he’s more focused now.”

I watched Diane fold herself around my dog as though she’d been waiting all morning for a reason to envelop a creature. Marcus now hovered close enough to get a turn. I felt the specific, complicated warmth of being somewhere that was glad I’d come.

I didn’t entirely trust that feeling.

This was not a flattering thing to know about myself, and I knew it about myself with great precision. I am excellent at being welcomed and terrible at believing it will last. I show up with pan dulce and a good story and a dog with unreasonable ears, and rooms open for me, then some hard little abacus in my chest immediately starts calculating how long it will take before the room remembers it didn’t actually order me.

Abuela would say I think too much for a man who takes his clothes off for a living. Abuela would probably be right. She usually is. It’s her most annoying quality, narrowly beating out her second-most-annoying quality, which is being willing to say so.