Bly have done all that unprotected fornicating

and gotten away with it. We were both convinced

conceiving was going to be no easy task.

So as our friends announced their plans to try to

get pregnant, we remained silent. Jenny was sim-

ply going to stash her birth-control prescription

away in the medicine cabinet and forget about it.

If she ended up pregnant, fantastic. If she didn’t,

well, we weren’t actually trying anyway, now,

were we?

Marley & Me

❉ ❉ ❉

Winter in West Palm Beach is a glorious time of

year, marked by crisp nights and warm, dry, sunny

days. After the insufferably long, torpid summer,

most of it spent in air-conditioning or hopping

from one shade tree to the next in an attempt to

dodge the blistering sun, winter was our time to

celebrate the gentle side of the subtropics. We ate

all our meals on the back porch, squeezed fresh

orange juice from the fruit of the backyard tree

each morning, tended a tiny herb garden and a few

tomato plants along the side of the house, and

picked saucer-sized hibiscus blooms to float in lit-

tle bowls of water on the dining room table. At

night we slept beneath open windows, the

gardenia-scented air wafting in over us.

On one of those gorgeous days in late March,

Jenny invited a friend from work to bring her bas-

set hound, Buddy, over for a dog playdate. Buddy

was a rescued pound dog with the saddest face I

had ever seen. We let the two dogs loose in the

backyard, and off they bounded. Old Buddy

wasn’t quite sure what to make of this hyperener-

gized yellow juvenile who raced and streaked and

ran tight circles around him. But he took it in good

humor, and the two of them romped and played to-

John Grogan

gether for more than an hour before they both col-

lapsed in the shade of the mango tree, exhausted.

A few days later Marley started scratching and

wouldn’t stop. He was clawing so hard at himself,

we were afraid he might draw blood. Jenny

dropped to her knees and began one of her rou-

tine inspections, working her fingers through his

coat, parting his fur as she went to see his skin be-

low. After just a few seconds, she called out,

“Damn it! Look at this.” I peered over her shoul-

der at where she had parted Marley’s fur just in

time to see a small black dot dart back under

cover. We laid him flat on the floor and began go-

ing through every inch of his fur. Marley was

thrilled with the two-on-one attention and panted

happily, his tail thumping the floor. Everywhere

we looked we found them. Fleas! Swarms of

them. They were between his toes and under his

collar and burrowed inside his floppy ears. Even if

they were slow enough to catch, which they were

not, there were simply too many of them to even

begin picking off.

We had heard about Florida’s legendary flea and

tick problems. With no hard freezes, not even any

frosts, the bug populations were never knocked

back, and they flourished in the warm, moist envi-

ronment. This was a place where even the million-

aires’ mansions along the ocean in Palm Beach had

Marley & Me

cockroaches. Jenny was freaked out; her puppy

was crawling with vermin. Of course, we blamed

Buddy without having any solid proof. Jenny had

images of not only the dog being infested but our

entire home, too. She grabbed her car keys and

ran out the door.

A half hour later she was back with a bag filled

with enough chemicals to create our own Super-

fund site. There were flea baths and flea powders

and flea sprays and flea foams and flea dips. There

was a pesticide for the lawn, which the guy at the

store told her we had to spray if we were to have

any hope of bringing the little bastards to their

knees. There was a special comb designed to re-

move insect eggs.

I reached into the bag and pulled out the re-

ceipt. “Jesus Christ, honey,” I said. “We could

have rented our own crop duster for this much.”

My wife didn’t care. She was back in assassin

mode—this time to protect her loved ones—and

she meant business. She threw herself into the

task with a vengeance. She scrubbed Marley in the

laundry tub, using special soaps. She then mixed

up the dip, which contained the same chemical, I

noted, as the lawn insecticide, and poured it over

him until every inch of him was saturated. As he

was drying in the garage, smelling like a miniature

Dow Chemical plant, Jenny vacuumed furiously—

John Grogan

floors, walls, carpets, curtains, upholstery. And

then she sprayed. And while she doused the inside

with flea killer, I doused the outside with it. “You

think we nailed the little buggers?” I asked when

we were finally finished.

“I think we did,” she said.

Our multipronged attack on the flea population of

345 Churchill Road was a roaring success. We

checked Marley daily, peering between his toes,

under his ears, beneath his tail, along his belly, and

everywhere else we could reach. We could find no

sign of a flea anywhere. We checked the carpets,

the couches, the bottoms of the curtains, the

grass—nothing. We had annihilated the enemy.

C H A P T E R 5

The Test Strip

❉

Afew weeks later we were lying in bed reading

when Jenny closed her book and said, “It’s

probably nothing.”

“What’s probably nothing,” I said absently, not

looking up from my book.

“My period’s late.”

She had my attention. “Your period? It is?” I

turned to face her.

“That happens sometimes. But it’s been over a

week. And I’ve been feeling weird, too.”

“Weird how?”

“Like I have a low-level stomach flu or some-

thing. I had one sip of wine at dinner the other

night, and I thought I was going to throw up.”

“That’s not like you.”

“Just the thought of alcohol makes me nau-

seous.”

John Grogan

I wasn’t going to mention it, but she also had

been rather cranky lately.

“Do you think—” I began to ask.

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

“I almost didn’t say anything,” Jenny said. “Just

in case—you know. I don’t want to jinx us.”

That’s when I realized just how important this

was to her—and to me, too. Somehow parenthood

had snuck up on us; we were ready for a baby. We

lay there side by side for a long while, saying noth-

ing, looking straight ahead.

“We’re never going to fall asleep,” I finally said.

“The suspense is killing me,” she admitted.

“Come on, get dressed,” I said. “Let’s go to the

drugstore and get a home test kit.”

We threw on shorts and T-shirts and opened the

front door, Marley bounding out ahead of us,

overjoyed at the prospect of a late-night car ride.

He pranced on his hind legs by our tiny Toyota

Tercel, hopping up and down, shaking, flinging

saliva off his jowls, panting, absolutely beside

himself with anticipation of the big moment

when I would open the back door. “Geez, you’d

think he was the father,” I said. When I opened

the door, he leaped into the backseat with such

gusto that he sailed clear to the other side without

touching down, not stopping until he cracked his

Marley & Me

head loudly, but apparently with no ill effect,

against the far window.

The pharmacy was open till midnight, and I

waited in the car with Marley while Jenny ran in.

There are some things guys just are not meant to

shop for, and home pregnancy tests come pretty

close to the top of the list. The dog paced in the

backseat, whining, his eyes locked on the front

door of the pharmacy. As was his nature whenever

he was excited, which was nearly every waking

moment, he was panting, salivating heavily.

“Oh for God’s sake, settle down,” I told him.

“What do you think she’s going to do? Sneak out

the back door on us?” He responded by shaking

himself off in a great flurry, showering me in a

spray of dog drool and loose hair. We had become

used to Marley’s car etiquette and always kept an

emergency bath towel on the front seat, which I

used to wipe down myself and the interior of the

car. “Hang tight,” I said. “I’m pretty sure she

plans to return.”

Five minutes later Jenny was back, a small bag

in her hand. As we pulled out of the parking lot,

Marley wedged his shoulders between the bucket

seats of our tiny hatchback, balancing his front

paws on the center console, his nose touching the

rearview mirror. Every turn we made sent him

crashing down, chest first, against the emergency

John Grogan

brake. And after each spill, unfazed and happier

than ever, he would teeter back up on his perch.

A few minutes later we were back home in the

bathroom with the $8.99 kit spread out on the side

of the sink. I read the directions aloud. “Okay,” I

said. “It says it’s accurate ninety-nine percent of

the time. First thing you have to do is pee in this

cup.” The next step was to dip a skinny plastic

test strip into the urine and then into a small vial

of a solution that came with the kit. “Wait five

minutes,” I said. “Then we put it in the second

solution for fifteen minutes. If it turns blue,

you’re officially knocked up, baby!”

We timed off the first five minutes. Then Jenny

dropped the strip into the second vial and said, “I

can’t stand here watching it.”

We went out into the living room and made

small talk, pretending we were waiting for some-

thing of no more significance than the teakettle to

boil. “So how about them Dolphins,” I quipped.

But my heart was pounding wildly, and a feeling of

nervous dread was rising from my stomach. If the

test came back positive, whoa, our lives were

about to change forever. If it came back negative,

Jenny would be crushed. It was beginning to dawn

on me that I might be, too. An eternity later, the

timer rang. “Here we go,” I said. “Either way, you

know I love you.”

Marley & Me

I went to the bathroom and fished the test strip

out of the vial. No doubt about it, it was blue. As

blue as the deepest ocean. A dark, rich, navy-

blazer blue. A blue that could be confused with no

other shade. “Congratulations, honey,” I said.

“Oh my God” is all she could answer, and she

threw herself into my arms.

As we stood there by the sink, arms around each

other, eyes closed, I gradually became aware of a

commotion at our feet. I looked down and there

was Marley, wiggling, head bobbing, tail banging

the linen-closet door so hard I thought he might

dent it. When I reached down to pet him, he

dodged away. Uh-oh. It was the Marley Mambo,

and that could mean just one thing.

“What do you have this time?” I said, and be-

gan chasing him. He loped into the living room,

weaving just out of my reach. When I finally cor-

nered him and pried open his jaws, at first I saw

nothing. Then far back on his tongue, on the

brink of no return, ready to slip down the hatch, I

spotted something. It was skinny and long and

flat. And as blue as the deepest ocean. I reached in

and pulled out our positive test strip. “Sorry to

disappoint you, pal,” I said, “but this is going in

the scrapbook.”

Jenny and I started laughing and kept laughing

for a long time. We had great fun speculating on

John Grogan

what was going through that big blocky head of

his. Hmmm, if I destroy the evidence, maybe

they’ll forget all about this unfortunate episode,

and I won’t have to share my castle with an in-

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