Deconstructing Carmel

The first time I met my mother's new dog, I found him curled up in my childhood bed, his paws hidden among the layers of lace on my white duvet cover, his snout resting on my matching pillows. I crawled into bed next to him, thinking I was being generous by sharing, but he curled his lips and growled at me. "That's Carmel's bed now," my mom said, pointing me toward the guest room.

Later I saw that the photos on my mom's desk of my twin sister and me had been replaced by framed shots of Carmel, posing with a ball in his mouth, jumping for a Frisbee. "Those pictures of you all were so old," my mom said. "And Carmel is just so photogenic."

The dog was quite handsome. Though he certainly was a mutt, he looked like a purebred, with foxlike slanted eyes the color of burned chestnuts and a silky orange-yellow coat. To my mother he was the newest, best breed. When she called the vet to ask about freezing Carmel's sperm to preserve his bloodlines, I protested. "He's a mutt, Mom, the bastard son of some slutty shepherd."

"Please don't talk about him like that," she said.

Growing up, we always had litters of well-bred German-shepherd puppies tumbling around the yard like in those Purina Puppy Chow commercials. But Carmel was different from the dutiful shepherds, who obeyed my mom's every command. Either Carmel was untrainable or my mom was a sucker for his breezy indifference. Either way, he won her love in a way the shepherds never could. Soon my sister and I had been dispatched to some distant kennel in my mother's world view.

Carmel knew better than to acknowledge the competition. He ignored my sister and me, while he took my mother's love and ran with it, knowing full well that with a few loving nuzzles he could get away with anything, like demanding to go for walks in the middle of "24."