Introduction

This comic breakup novel will have readers cheering for its loveable, dumped, dog-napping heroine. Rena never meant to steal her ex-boyfriend’s dog.. She’d just been casually driving by his new house, taking stock of his new life and his new girlfriend, when the dog invited himself into her car. Okay, she stole the dog. But how could a dog as great as this one be happy living with those two very bad people?     Unfortunately, being a dog-napper is the least of Rena’s problems. Her mother has announced she’s getting married to creepy Ronald, her former-pot-smoking-turned-Orthodox-Jewish sister has suddenly stopped wearing her wig, and her family won’t stop fixing her up with anyone single in pants—most recently, the ultra-nice Chuck, who knows all about Rena’s illegal escapade. If Rena’s ever going to get on with her life, she’ll have to face up to the choices she’s made, the dreams she’s put on hold, and the man who broke her heart. “Fans of Jennifer Weiner will eat this up like good dark chocolate.” –Debra Dean, author of The Madonnas of Leningrad and Confessions of a Falling Woman

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Excerpt

First Excerpt:

My love life, abridged edition:

When I was thirteen, Matt Stone dumped me for Linda Acres, she of the great legs. I didn’t even know women had such a thing as great legs back then, but Matt Stone did. Suddenly, our long afternoons of making out on the single bed in his basement bedroom under a smelly army blanket were over. He hardly glanced at me in the hallways of Captain Charles Wilkes Junior High after that. You’d have thought he’d never in his life tried to shove his hand up the front of my shirt and, finding the route impassable, tried shoving his hand down my pants instead. You’d have thought he’d never looked at me with his huge brown eyes and long eyelashes like a girl and told me that he really, really liked me. But I couldn’t have cared less. Making out with him hadn’t been all that much fun anyway. I hadn’t yet equated “boyfriend” with a person you wanted to be with. I thought it was all about making out.

Then, the summer before ninth grade, I fell hard for Daniel Berenbach at a camp for Jewish teens. Suddenly, I knew what love was. Love was Daniel Berenbach’s sun-kissed face and skinny golden chest. Love was Daniel Berenbach choosing to sit next to me at the Saturday night campfire. Love was Daniel Berenbach sneaking out of his cabin after lights out to stand under the window of my cabin and make the ridiculous cooing noises that were my cue to sneak out, too. Love was letting Daniel Berenbach shove his hand up my shirt under the pine trees at the foot of Lake Tanwax, while the stars I’d never noticed before filled the black sky. Love was the heartbreak of leaving Daniel Berenbach on the last day of camp and pledging to somehow see him again, even though he lived in San Francisco and I lived in Seattle. And love was finding out that love can end on a dime as happened to me four months later when I ended up in San Francisco on a family trip to visit ancient relatives only to find out that the boy I once loved no longer had a suntan or a head of long, tousled hair. He was just a boy in a pair of green pants. Good-bye Daniel Berenbach!

Tenth grade was one long bad hair year for me, along with a few bouts of embarrassing acne, but I made up for it in the eleventh grade by falling in love with Neil Matthews and having sex with him after five months of his interminable begging. This was before condoms were handed out as door prizes at high school parties, back when you had to actually go into a drugstore and ask to purchase them, which Neil Matthews bravely did at a drugstore nowhere near Lincoln High School.

“Yes, I’m looking for prophylactics,” Neil said to the pharmacist—the repeated recitation of which later, as we sat naked in his parents’ bed while they were out for the evening, sent me into a state of hysterical laughter horribly exacerbated a moment later by the sight of Neil’s erect penis. Up until that moment, I’d never really seen one, only felt one pressed hard against my leg, or cupped in my hand in the darkness of Neil’s parents’ sedan. But here it was, long and hard and wrapped in a rubber, and fumbling its way toward the entrance to my tense, petrified vagina. Somehow, we persevered. We were teenagers, after all. But the experience put me off of sex for a good five more months, by which time Neil Matthews had left me for the far more experienced, far less hysterical, not to mention seriously well-endowed, Tina Phillips.

By senior year, I’d figured out how the whole process was supposed to work. Truth was, you really didn’t have to do much. The boy already had a pretty strong sense of direction and hardly needed coaxing. The pangs of male performance anxiety, the dread over penis size, the thought of his partner’s enjoyment—all of that was still in the future, as was my knowledge of same. I spent my entire senior year having sex with Gene Muldoon, never realizing that his penis was unusually small. Thank God, I found out my freshman year of college. I was beginning to wonder what the big deal about sex was all about. Turned out Gene Muldoon, along with being poorly endowed, had also been poorly equipped in the technique department. It took Billy St. Clair to show me the errors of Gene Muldoon’s ways, followed by several others—the number of which I am not inclined to reveal—and ending with Phillip Rosen. Suffice it to say that by the time I met Brian, I pretty well knew my way around the block. Then, seven years of Brian.

And now, nobody.

I woke Saturday morning to a phone message from my mother, wondering what I’d thought of the single Jewish guy Alicia had snuck on me the night before. Of course, she didn’t call him the “single Jewish guy.” She called him the “very nice boy.” But first she droned on about Alicia’s cooking and Ronald’s yarmulke. Finally, she got down to the point of her phone call.

“And didn’t that Chaim seem like a very nice boy?” she said to my voice mail. Silence. Then: “Okay……call me!”

If it weren’t for the fact that it was still the Jewish Sabbath until sundown—no telephone day for the Orthodox—I’m quite sure Alicia would have called to leave the same message.

Alicia. I made a mental note to remember to call my sister. Or maybe I needed to wait until she called me. If she’d had a fight with Aryeh, it could very easily have blown over by now—maybe she was even hoping I’d forgotten all about it so that she didn’t have to explain the whole thing. Didn’t all couples fight every once in awhile? If my sister needed to call me, she’d call me.

I took the Big Guy out, returned him to my apartment, ran out to buy a coffee and then, despite my better judgment, called my mother back. Better to get the conversation over with than to deal with the series of voice mails that otherwise awaited me.

“Yes, I’m sure he’s very nice, ma,” I told her. “But then, who knows? He could be a serial killer.”

“He’s not a serial killer.”

“How do you know?”

“He’s not a serial killer. I know.”

“You never know.”

“Stop it,” my mother said.

“Stop what?”

“You know stop what. He was very nice.”

“I don’t need setting up.”

“Fine. We won’t set you up, then.”

“Good.”

“Because you’re doing very well on your own.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“I was being sarcastic,” my mother said.

“You’re kidding.”

My mother sighed.

“But he did seem nice, didn’t he?” she said.

Conversations with my mother are always exhausting.

Even though I wasn’t thrilled by my family’s attempt to set me up with Chuck/Chaim, the truth was that I wouldn’t have minded meeting a guy. But how did a person meet guys anyway? I was seriously out of practice. Before—when Brian was still my boyfriend—meeting guys seemed the easiest thing in the world. They were everywhere. Eyeing me from across a bar, or asking to share my table at a crowded coffee shop, or making conversation with me in line at the grocery store. But inevitably, I suppose, in the exact same second I suddenly truly needed the attention, the entire cadre of available men simply disappeared. Oh, I suppose men would have still eyed me from across a bar if I had any intentions of sitting in a bar where men might be able to eye me. But suddenly, the idea of sitting in a bar, or a coffee shop, or making conversation with the man behind me in line at the grocery store, seemed the pinnacle of obvious desperation.

And I certainly wasn’t going to go trolling the internet for dates. All of those humiliating matching-up-people sites with their embarrassing air-brushed photographs and even more embarrassing bios. What could be more exhausting than meeting a guy online and telling him my entire life story, and reading his entire life story in return, only to find—upon meeting in the flesh—that neither of us lived up to the others expectation? And then the thought of starting the whole rigmarole over yet again! Forget it.

This, I suddenly realized, is why people have dogs.

Second Excerpt:

Just after the dinner rush at Sammy’s Place, my mother showed up out of the blue. I spotted her standing next to the hostess’ station in the purple trench coat, scanning the room with wide eyes.

“I’ll be right with you,” I said to an impatient table of four who’d been waiting a good twenty minutes for me to take their order. They could wait longer. Nothing worse than dinner patrons in a hurry, the husbands twisting their heads this way and that in a desperate attempt to catch your attention. More than once I’d felt like telling some jerk about the McDonald’s two blocks down the road where dinner would miraculously be waiting for them even before they’d ordered. But when you lived for tips, you learned to keep your big mouth shut. Most of the time.

“Mom,” I said.

“Oh, there you are,” my mother said.

“What’s going on? Did something happen?”

“Nothing happened.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

Maybe they’d broken off the engagement and she’d rushed over to give me the news.

“What am I doing here? I’m eating here. Ronald’s parking the car. You go on. We’ll ask for your section.”

“You’re eating here?”

“You want us to leave?”

“No. No. You just don’t come here. Ever. But great. Stay.”

I headed back to the impatient table of four, took their order, ran it to the kitchen, and came out to find my mother seated in a prime booth, Ron by her side closely studying the menu through his thick glasses. Across from them, to my amazement and horror, sat the bareheaded Chaim/Chuck, who was currently thanking the busboy for filling their water glasses. Was I dumbfounded by this plan of attack on my mother’s part? Not really. If anything I felt a twinge of disappointment that I hadn’t foreseen the entire scenario. Of course my mother would show up unannounced at Sammy’s Place with the entirely available and clearly not balding Chaim/Chuck, sit in my section, and pretend everything was perfectly copacetic. This was my mother, after all.

“Hey Ron,” I said. “Hey Chaim.”

Chuck smiled at me and gave a tiny, embarrassed shrug, as if to say none of this had been his idea, please don’t stab him with a steak knife.

“Well, Chuck hadn’t eaten yet and so we invited him to join us, didn’t we Ronald?” my mother said.

Ron looked up from the menu.

“Excuse me?” he said.

My mother patted Ron’s arm.

“She called you?” I asked Chuck.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Oh, God,” I said.

Clearly, my mother had asked Alicia for Chuck’s phone number—a fact Alicia had conveniently avoided passing along to me. By now, the entire Orthodox community was probably abuzz with my future wedding plans. Thankfully, besides my sister and her nuclear clan, I didn’t know anyone else in the Orthodox community.

“Go ahead and do your thing,” my mother said. “We don’t want to keep you.”

“This is my thing. You’re in my section. And please don’t make me tell you the specials.”

“Oh, right. Well, give us a minute then. Unless you know what you want, Chuck?”

“Uh, no. Not really.”

“Well, you just take your time, isn’t that right, Ronald? No rush.”

Chuck visibly blanched behind his menu.

Ron tilted his face up toward mine.

“What’re the specials tonight?” he asked.

I looked at my mother.

“I’ll be right back,” I said.

I ignored the three stooges in the prime booth for as long as I possibly could before finally returning with their dinner salads, my mother’s with dressing on the side.

“So, Chuck was just telling us about his family,” my mother said.

She immediately eyed the lettuce, never trusting for a moment that the prep crew had properly washed the produce.

“Great,” I said.

I raised my eyebrows at Chuck and he smiled back at me, a little sheepish smile that meant the error in judgment he’d made in accepting my mother’s invitation to dinner had become crystal clear. Well, it was too late. They still had steak and potatoes to get through. And probably dessert. That’s what he got for picking up the phone when it rang.

“He’s one of five children!” my mother said.

She shook her head in disbelief, as though being one of five children was somehow an unusual and fascinating feat, on par with being a trapeze artist, or winning the Nobel Peace Prize. As though her very own daughter didn’t have five children herself.

I felt a little sorry for Chuck right then. But I must say, he demonstrated amazing perseverance. Each time I glanced at their table he was deep into conversation with both Ron and my mother, and acting as though he’d rather be nowhere else. In his slightly tattered, blue button-down shirt that had clearly never seen an iron, he looked just like the starving, aspiring, young filmmaker that he was. And I must say, it was a pretty good look. I wondered if he’d worked hard at picking his outfit for the evening, or if he’d merely pulled things out of his drawers at random. Did he know he looked disheveled? Or was his disheveled appearance the real thing? I liked a guy who appeared as though he never looked in a mirror, but when a guy looked into a mirror in order to achieve the no-look-in-the-mirror-look, it ruined everything. Not that I’d set my sights on Chuck. But it seemed possible that he’d set his sights on me, a fact that gave my bruised ego a much needed boost. I might not have been a long-haired, long-legged, mountain-climbing veterinarian, but I could still get a guy in a wrinkled shirt to pay attention to me. Unless of course, he’d merely been hungry and known better than to turn down a free meal.

“Listen,” my mother said when I delivered the bill to Ron. “Ronald and I have got to get moving—a movie. Downtown. Do you think you could give Chuck here a ride home? After your shift?”

“Oh, no, you don’t have to do that,” Chuck said. “Really. I don’t need a ride.”

“But of course you do!”

“I can….walk. Or catch a bus or something.”

“No, no. Rena will drive you. She doesn’t mind.”

“That’s all right,” Chuck said.

“Don’t you get off soon?” my mother asked me.

She had desperation written all over her face. She looked like a little girl about to open the very last birthday present, hoping with all her might it will somehow miraculously turn out to be the very thing she wanted.

“I’ve got another forty-five minutes,” I said. “Give or take.”

“That’s not so long,” my mother said.

“Or we can drop him off,” Ron said.

My mother slapped him audibly on the thigh.

“No, no. Rena’s got it taken care of,” she said. “Haven’t you, Rena?”

I plucked the remaining plates and glasses from their table and held them aloft. What the hell. I’d make my mother deliriously happy.

“Would you like a ride home in forty-five minutes, Chaim?” I asked.

Chuck looked from my face to my mother’s and back to mine again.

“You know what? I’ll catch a cab home. It’s fine.”

“No, no. I’ll take you,” I said.

“I’ll catch a cab. Really. I should be going soon anyway.”

“We’ll take him,” Ron said.

“I’d be happy to drive you home,” I said. “Really. Not a problem.”

Chuck shrugged and looked at me.

“Okay,” he said.

I’m nearly positive my mother mentally crossed herself and thanked Jesus.

“Perfect!” she said.

I drive the dirtiest Subaru in the western hemisphere. Do not argue with me on that one. Do not claim to have an even dirtier, smellier, more disgusting Subaru than mine. You cannot win. Yes, sure, you have kids, a dog, a few stained remnants of spilled sodas, a sandwich or two lost under the seats. I scoff at your meager messes. My Subaru is worse. My Subaru beats your Subaru hands down. Do I take pride in the sordid state of my car? Not really. I’m just not motivated enough to clean it up.

Besides, over the years, I’ve found that a dirty car provides the perfect litmus test for forming new friendships. For instance, if a new acquaintance has to be warned several times on the walk to the Subaru about what sight/smell/stickiness awaits them, then I already know that the new acquaintance is out of my league and will never be invited into my apartment for a glass of flat diet coke. If I feel compelled to give the warning only twice, the person has a much better chance. If I give only one warning, and especially if that person sits down in my car and exclaims, “This is nothing! My car is worse!” (an impossibility, but still an outburst that is always welcomed), then a budding friendship may be in the cards. But if no warning comes—if I feel no compunction whatsoever about the raging tornado of debris which awaits the person I’ve offered a ride to—well, that, my friend, is a sure fire sign that a friendship is in the making. Either that, or I just don’t give a shit about the person at all.

All of which is to say, it was probably a good sign that it didn’t occur to me to warn Chuck about my car. I didn’t even think about it until he was already safely settled in the front seat next to me, having shoved several magazines, papers, bags, pens, and empty water bottles onto the floor.

“Sorry, my car’s kind of a mess,” I said then.

Chuck shrugged.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said.

“I’ve noticed you’re a big shrugger,” I said.

“A what?”

“A shrugger. You shrug your shoulders a lot.”

I shrugged my shoulders to demonstrate. He shrugged me back.

“It’s a good all-purpose answer,” he said.

I shrugged.

“Look,” he said. “You should know that your mother sort of said you’d asked me to come to the restaurant. I thought we were all meeting for dinner.”

“Oh, God.”

“So, I’m sorry for, you know, showing up like that. It’s pretty embarrassing, really.”

“I’m the one who’s embarrassed. God, my mother! I’m so sorry!”

“No, I’m sorry.”

“I’m going to kill her.”

“I think she meant well.”

“Yeah, well, she’s not your mother.”

“True.”

“Okay, deep breaths,” I said.

I inhaled once and blew out the air. Would a day ever come when my mother would leave me alone? I knew the answer to that question already.

“It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, I could have said no.”

“True.”

“So. Sorry.”

“Not your fault,” I said.

“Okay, so everything’s okay.”

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

“Right.”

I started up the car.

“So, where do you live anyway?” I asked him.

“Green Lake.”

I backed out of the parking space.

“But would you like to get a drink somewhere first? Or coffee?” Chuck asked.

I shrugged. I was more than a little flattered. But truth was, I really had to get home and take the Big Guy out. I’d learned from short experience, the Big Guy didn’t take kindly to hours cooped up in my apartment.

“I’d like to, but I can’t,” I said.

“Oh.”

“I’ve got a dog in my apartment and he’s got to go out.”

“What kind of dog do you have?”

“A Golden Retriever. And he’s not mine. I’m actually just taking care of him for a little while. Dog-sitting.”

“That’s nice of you.”

I shrugged.

“Not really,” I said.

“Well, we could take the dog out first and then you wouldn’t have to worry about taking him out.”

I tried to remember just what state I’d left my apartment place in. The problem is that when your place is in a shambles for long enough, it starts to look normal to you. Still, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d vacuumed the floors or washed the dishes that had piled up in the kitchen sink, or done just about anything else that could be construed as cleaning, for that matter. I’m pretty certain your average person would place the state of my apartment somewhere on the cleanliness scale between shocking and appalling. “My apartment’s not too clean,” I told him.

He shrugged.

“How dirty can it be?”

“Very.”

“I’m sure it’s not that bad. I mean, just look at how neat you keep your car.”

I smiled.

“Okay. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I’ll consider myself warned,” he said.

I pulled out into the street. What do you say to the person you hardly know who is riding in the seat next to you in your car? The fine art of appropriate small talk has always been beyond me. And silence makes me nervous.

“So, Chuck,” I said. “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

It was the best I could come up with on the spot, probably since I was well aware that the worst thing I’d ever done was about to introduce his slobbery self to my unsuspecting passenger.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, like, have you ever robbed a bank? Or stolen a gumball? Or tripped a blind person?”

“I’ve tripped two blind people.”

“No, really.”

“What? Is this some kind of personality test?”

“Yes. Like if you were to tell me you’ve killed somebody, then I might consider making you get out at the next light.”

“Oh, very good way to suss out the murderers.”

“So, what is it?”

“Okay. Let’s see. Worst thing. Hmmm.”

“Slept with a married woman?”

“That counts?”

“Come on. You’re acting like this is a game or something.”

“Oh, right. Let me get serious.”

He put a hand up to his bearded chin and stroked it.

“Well, I’m not very consistent in my flossing,” he said.

“You are very bad at this.”

“Okay, then you tell me. What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

I thought about telling him then and there about the Big Guy, but quickly came to my senses. Even though I knew he was only Chuck and not the religious Chaim I’d first thought him to be, I still didn’t want to smudge my appearance in front of the only man currently paying me any attention. What if he thought stealing the Big Guy made me a terrible person? Because, in fact, stealing the Big Guy did more or less make me a terrible person. Except that I wasn’t a terrible person underneath it all. Just a seriously messed up one.

“I’m a perfect angel,” I said.

“That’s what I thought,” Chuck said. view abbreviated excerpt only...

Discussion Questions

1. Rena believes her personal happiness depends on loving a man and being loved back. Is loving a life partner your definition of happiness? Is it possible to have real happiness, even when not in a loving relationship? Has Rena fallen victim to societal conventions? Discuss the differences between happiness, contentment, and satisfaction.

2. Rena ultimately realizes that Brian will never be her life partner—that they will never get married as they once had planned. Yet when she leaves him the last time, she tells him that she hopes he’s very happy. Does she mean it? Is she being sarcastic, or is she being big about the situation? If you have ever had a bad breakup, did you wish for happiness for the other person?

3. Rena steals Brian’s new dog in an impulsive moment of romantic revenge. Have you ever taken revenge on an old boyfriend or girlfriend? What did you do? What was the outcome?

4. When Aviva/Alicia married Aryeh/Alan, she made an inherent promise to live under the rules of a traditionally Orthodox Jewish home. Is it fair of her now to change her mind? What do we owe someone when we make a pledge to them that becomes unpalatable to us later? What promises should a bride and a groom make to each other? Will Aviva and Aryeh stay together?

5. In all the years she lived in the building, Rena had never been inside Carl’s apartment. It isn’t until he dies that she gets to know more about him. Has this ever happened to you—you’ve gone to someone’s funeral and realized that you missed out on really knowing them? Should Rena have made more of an outreach to Carl when he was alive? What do we owe to our neighbors, and in particular, to our elderly neighbors? Where does responsibility begin and where does it end?

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