CHAPTER SIX
THE TEST OF WILLS—BUREAURACY RAISES
ITS UGLY HEAD AGAIN
(24th installment, Scruggs and Samantha, by Mary de la
Pena)
I know I said it earlier, but let
me repeat myself: adopting an animal is not easy. Besides the emotionally draining aspect of
choosing the right animal, there is the bureaucratic nightmare of paperwork.
I arrived back at
the front office with Scruggs’s and Samantha’s paperwork in hand. Having previously completed the contracts for
the dog and a kitten, as well as the adoption questionnaire, I thought all I
had left to do was pay the adoption fee.
Unfortunately for me, I was wrong.
Worse yet, the compassionate worker who had helped me previously was
again working the phones and was no longer assisting with licensing and
adoptions. I was left to the mercy of
Precious Princess One and Precious Princess Two, both of whom appeared to be in
rare bureaucratic form yet again.
I confidently
stepped forward with my paperwork, checkbook in hand, only to be met with a
sniff and a hair toss from Precious Princess One. I smiled in response and handed her the
forms.
Not a word
emanated from the clerk as she began typing my information into her
computer. Suddenly, she stopped, looked
up at me, sniffed and did the hair toss over the shoulder again.
“You’re not
eligible to adopt,” she said.
“Pardon?” I answered.
“You’re not eligible to adopt a dog according to the local municipal
code,” she said, almost smirking.
“I’m sorry, but
why is that?” I asked, irritation rising in my chest.
She rolled her
eyes at me as she tossed the hair and sniffed again. Then she said, “You have
too many dogs, and some aren’t current with their tags.”
“No, I don’t,” I
answered. “I only have the two dogs, and
the city allows three!”
“No,” she said,
almost smirking, “the computer says you have at least three dogs, possibly
more. At least two, if not more don’t
have current registrations.”
“That can’t be,” I
said. “I registered them when the agent
came to my house. I even showed her the folder I keep with my copies of their
vaccinations. Do you have the right address?”
She repeated my
address back to me and my home phone number. When I confirmed that both were
correct, she just shrugged.
“What dogs do you
say I have?” I asked, trying to solve the mystery.
“You have a
Rottweiler named Katie,” she answered, “And she is seriously behind in her
registration.”
“Katie is
deceased,” I answered, taking what felt like a blow to my chest.
Katie was my first Rottweiler and the love of my life. She had been the first dog of my adulthood,
and the one my husband and I had picked out together. Like many empty nesters,
she became our “child.” We had trained
her together, spending every Monday night at the park for over a year with
her. We had traveled with her, and even
bought an SUV so she could travel comfortably.
When it became too difficult to find hotels that would take her, we
bought a cabin so we could spend our weekends away with her. At the end of her life Katie had been
diagnosed with cardiomyopathy, an enlarged heart. I had always thought the diagnosis was
appropriate because her heart was huge and filled with love. When her time came she had died in our arms. Just thinking of her made me relive the
trauma of her death.
But she was more than
eight years gone! How could the ninny
behind the counter even think she could be eighteen years old?
I smothered a
withering verbal retort and asked her who else she had.
“I also have Yukon
and Tessa, neither of which is current,” she answered with another hair toss.
“Both are
deceased,” I answered.
“You seem to have
trouble keeping your animals alive,” she said.
I swallowed hard.
Visions danced in my head of snatching her long hair and pulling it out in
large handfuls until she was bald. But just as quickly I smothered my desire
for violence as I tried to be pleasant since she still held the fate of Scruggs
and Samantha in her hands.
“Please check the
animals’ birthdates,” I said. “They all
are dead due to old age, except Tessa who was killed by a coyote near our
cabin.”
Precious Princess
One sniffed again, flipped her hair over her shoulder, and tapped a few more
keys on her computer.
“Okay,” she said, not looking up at me. “Even if you say those three are deceased,
you also already have three dogs at your residence,” she said, with somewhere
between a smirk and a sniff.
I felt the heat of
blood rushing to my face as I stood clenching my fists. Just as an emotion
somewhere between panic and homicidal mania with a twist of mayhem was again
about to overtake me, my cell phone rang.
It was Prince
Charming on the line.
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