There was something we wanted and we wanted it bad. But it cost money and between the two of, we had a grand total of nothing. We were smart kids, though, the products of a middle-class upbringing, a loving family, and rock-solid American values, so we knew exactly what to do: lie. Besides, it was Valentine’s Day, a gift-giving holiday, and with neither one of us dating anyone, we thought it would be pretty easy to get money from our dad.

So we plotted and planned, for at least ten minutes, and came up with a foolproof idea. “We need some money to get Mom something for Valentine’s,” my brother said. He even seemed sincere.

Our father, his eyebrows lifted over the top of his eyeglasses, seemed impressed. “How much do you need?”

My brother’s elbow hit me just below my left breast, his subtle invitation to join him as a partner in crime. As I fought to catch my breath, I saw my father sit up, rolling onto his hip, and reach for his pants at the foot of the couch. He dug through the pockets, fished out his wallet. It was now or never, I thought, and since I’d committed the newspaper ad to memory, even as I winced with what felt like a cracked rib, I was able to say, “Fifty bucks should do.”

“Fifty bucks? That’s all the money I have…”

“Oh the present can be from you too,” I offered, thinking on my feet.

“With me financing this venture, that’s terribly generous of you.”

My brother, I knew, would have to speak up. He was the one who could better play the role of the dutiful and adoring child—I think he’d learned it from tv or something. “But Dad, how can you put a monetary limit on the love we feel for our mother? Think of all she does for us…”

“You guys are up to something, aren’t you?”

We both shook our heads in transparent denials and, before I started laughing, I turned towards the door. And then I heard him sigh that sigh that my father always sighed when he gave us money, the forceful exhalation of air that was supposed to let us know that, out of pure love, he was extending himself financially, and that we should feel pretty damn bad about it. We had to listen to that sigh fairly often but the cash, once in hand, always seemed to make up for it.

When I was sure that my brother had the money, I walked outside, was nearly to my car before I heard my brother, racing up behind me, laughing. “Can you believe he fell for that shit?”

Just then, we heard the front door squeak open. We looked back and saw our father, clad only in his boxers, standing on the front porch. I looked at my brother, he at me, as we tried to assess how much Dad had heard.

“I just want you to know, both of you, right here and now,” he said, pausing, presumably for emphasis, the gap in his speech evidence of his intellectual superiority, his paternal dominance, his ability to lord over his kids while standing there, outside, in his underwear, “that I know you two just beat me for fifty bucks. I’d better get something out of this, at least a milkshake, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

I got in the car as my brother screamed back, “She’s going to love it, Dad, but please, just go back inside before the neighbors come out and see you.” He flipped us off, his typical farewell wave, and went back inside.

My brother climbed in behind the steering wheel, as we’d already agreed he should drive. After all, we were going south of Gandy, the wrong side of the tracks in Tampa, and I figured my brother would know his way around. And he did—he drove us straight there, no wrong turns or even the slightest hesitation on his part.

When he pulled up alongside the curb, the first thing I noticed was a car on blocks on the other side of the fence. A mud-colored dog was asleep on the hood. It awoke, stood up on its three legs, stretched, raised its ears inquisitively, and then fell back on the car with a thump.

“That’s the daddy right there,” the woman said, as she came through the door of torn screen and bent metal. From the curb, I could see that her dimpled thighs were spilling from the fringed edges of her cutoffs, her stained shirt was likely borrowed from a guy she referred to as her “old man,” her scraggily hair was more dishwater than blond. We started towards the house, our eyes still on the dog behind the fence, and she offered up some consolation. “The babies, they all got all their legs, so don’t you start worrying about that,” she laughed, her mouth opening wide, her thin lips gaping to expose teeth the color of pencil lead, dotted along her gums in such a way that they seemed embattled, each of them jockeying for position to be the first out of her mouth.

I was scared.

“You the folks who called abut the puppies?”

“Yes,” my brother said, walking towards her, several steps ahead of me.

“Well, I sure hope you want a girl dog ‘cause that’s all we got left. All the boys done gone. Don’t nobody want a girl puppy, it seems.”

“Not much of a saleswoman,” my brother back muttered to me, still just out of earshot from the woman on the porch. “That’s fine with us,” he shouted towards her, “a girl will be just fine.”

“Come on in, then,” the woman said as she slung back the door to the limits of its hinges, a courteous gesture she offered instead of holding the door for us. My brother took the steps all at once in an effort to catch the door before it slammed shut. He waited there for me, holding the door, and we walked inside together.

It was dark.

“Oh, we got the lights cut back on last week,” the woman said, standing in the middle of the room, visible only after my eyes had adjusted. “I keep ‘em off a lot though, on account of the baby,” and she pointed to a laundry basket on a couch near the front door, a sleeping baby nestled atop a stack of hopefully clean towels. I was still staring at the baby when I realized that my brother had followed the woman into another room, the kitchen, where there was more light, the day's last rays of sunshine bleeding through a greasy window over a sink stacked with dirty dishes.

When I caught up with them, I saw the puppies on the floor, three or four of them, tussling about in a baby’s playpen, tumbling, growling, snapping at one another. My eyes lit on the one that was mostly white, the one on top of the others, the one with a tiny patch of mottled color over one ear, one eye, just as my brother bent to pick her up. She grunted.

“That there’s what I thought was the runt at first, but now that the boys is gone, she gets plenty of titty time with her momma,” the woman offered. And I wondered if this was some more of her sophisticated sales banter.

“She’s certainly got a round little belly,” my brother said, and just then, he cradled her in his arms so that he could flip her on her back, exposing her squirming underside.

“Cute guy like you, I bet you get to see all the cooter pie you want—and now you get to look at a puppy’s too, huh?” I clenched my teeth to keep from laughing.

“Oh, no, ma’am, I was wanting to look to see if she had any other markings,” he said, ignoring that he’d just been accused of being not only a lover of animals in the most perverse of ways, but something of a pedophile at that.

“Markings? She’s a pit bull, son, she ain’t got no markings,” the woman said, a hint of growing impatience in her voice, her reasoning still beyond much of what I could follow. “You want her or not? Fifty dollars is what I’m asking. Got seventy five for the boys, though.”

“Sure,” my brother said. He handed her the money and I turned, made my way back through the darkened living room, back past the sleeping baby, back out the battered door, and back to the car. My brother handed me the puppy as he got in.

“We just spent every dime we had and now we don’t have any money to buy something for Dad,” I said, remembering that, even though we’d gotten this cute little, grunting little, squirmy little dream of a puppy, there’d be hell to pay. “He said he wanted a milkshake.”

“He’ll be fine,” my brother replied, always confident, always confident. “Just let me handle him when we get there—he won’t even remember that he said it, I bet.”

“Ok,” I agreed, then held the puppy up to my face, “but what will he say if we name her ‘Cooter Pie’?” His punch landed squarely on my unprotected thigh.

By the time we got home, it was dark and, when we came through the front door, our father was asleep, snoring, sprawled across the couch but he startled awake as we tried to sneak the puppy towards my brother’s room. “What in the hell is that?” he bellowed, the puppy snuggled in my arms, her little brown eyes focused on the hulking alpha on the couch.

“It’s Mom’s present.” She squirmed in my arms.

“Take it back. And I mean NOW.”

There was no way, no way, we were taking that puppy back, if for no other reason than neither one of us ever wanted to go to that house again.

My brother stepped towards the couch, towards my father, and lowered his voice, his words slowing to the cadence he assumed when he wanted to sound reasonable. “We can’t, Dad. The lady told us we couldn’t bring her back and besides, those people were so poor, Dad, they really needed the money.”

“I don’t give a shit,” was the answer to that, the seemingly bullet-proof excuse my brother had offered up.

But my brother wasn’t giving up. He reached back to me, towards the puppy who was already fighting her way towards the action, and he took her in his hands, then walked over and put her down on my father’s chest. “How can you look at this poor little thing and say you don’t want her? Don’t be such an asshole, Dad.”

And as he opened his mouth to protest being called an asshole by his teenage son, the puppy did what no amount of reasoning or arguing could do: she stuck her tongue squarely in my father’s mouth, a swiping lick of adoration that had her puppy tongue coming in full contact with my father’s very own tongue. And as he sat up, spitting, sputtering, coughing and hacking, trying to free his hands to wipe his mouth, his tongue, all in an effort to unring the bell that had been rung, to clear his mouth of a puppy’s kiss, she did it again, her tongue, this time, going so far in his mouth that it reached beyond his tongue and likely landed somewhere deep in his bowels.

My father spit and sputtered, coughed and hacked. Then choked. In every way possible, he choked.

He pulled the puppy away from his face, wiped his tongue against the length of his arm, deep, low guttural noises growling out from his throat, and after he’d finished his rather dramatic display of disgust, he said what we hoped he’d say all along: he told us we could keep the dog, but only if he could hold her for just a little while longer. As if she knew what had just happened, she settled down, stopped licking and squirming, and fell asleep on Dad’s chest, her nose nuzzled into his beard.