Promises Are for Life, Which Is Why I Can’t Keep Them

“Look, he loves us.”

“I don’t think he does,” Jordan said, “I think he’s just opportunistic.”

Rowan, aka Robot, aka RoRo, was sprawled out on his back in his dragon-baby pose: elbows tucked, white chest pointing at us, back legs splayed, head craned back as far as it could possibly go over his back. His tongue lolled out of his dopey grin.

I took his dragon-baby pose as infallible proof that Ro was happy. Jordan thought he was just happy we have fingers to scratch what Ro can’t.

Robot was a rescue. He was probably twelve weeks old when we got him, but he’d already had a murky past. His first record was an intake form from an animal control facility in a tiny town in eastern New Mexico. On the form, there’s a photo of him and his litter mate; the litter mate looks like it’s advancing toward the photographer with doe-eyed happiness, but Robot is giving some serious whale eye and shrinking toward the back of the cage. Looking at the photo, I felt angry at whoever must have grabbed him too roughly and shoved him in there. Robot is a sensitive being. I know this because I am a sensitive being.

The day we brought him home, I sent my parents a video of him cowering under the table on our back porch. “I feel weirdly terrified,” I told my dad. “I just keep thinking about how he’s going to die someday.”

“That’s ridiculous,” my dad retorted, but then told me his friend’s daughter had just gotten a dog and had confessed exactly the same thing.

The first time I drove Ro around in the car by myself, I set his puppy kennel in the front seat and buckled it in sideways so I could see how he was doing during the car ride. A few blocks away from our house, he started whining softly. I stuck my fingers through the wire door of the kennel, and he sniffed them and then panted, staring at me.

“We’re only going a little way,” I said to the air. I knew he had no idea what I meant. I wondered if he even understood I was trying to tell him something, or if he assumed I was talking to the windshield.

At the stoplight I turned to look at him. Robot was trembling. I felt a surge of empathy, then sadness, then guilt. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We have to use this car to get places sometimes.”

Then I felt a huge wave of an emotion I couldn’t name. I had never felt this before. What the hell is this? I wondered, and the light turned green, and my heart was thumping and Ro was trembling and whistling shrilly. I felt lightheaded, and instead of continuing straight I turned into an alley and put the car in park.

Before I thought about the words, I heard myself saying out loud, “I love you. I promise I will always protect you.”

That was the emotion I’d never felt before: the protective force of love. The version of love that lifts cars off toddlers and screams in the faces of angry bears.

But as soon as the words were out, I wondered if I could keep the promise I’d just made. I didn’t even know this dog yet. What if he turned out to be aggressive and nasty? What if he was a biter? Could I really promise he wouldn’t one day get torn apart in a barbed-wire fence, as I’d seen happen to a neighbor dog, or caught by animal control and put down, like they were going to do with Tramp in Lady and the Tramp?

That’s what makes promises powerful. We keep them even though we don’t know what the future holds.

I will never have a kid, I thought. I can’t even handle the existential terror of having a dog.

A couple of weeks later, Jordan and I went to the park with the Robot. We’d made a habit of playing games to train his off-leash recall. Dogs weren’t allowed off leash in this park, but it was close to our house. People had written in on NextDoor complaining about the dogs off leash in the park, but I wasn’t on NextDoor. A fellow dog owner told me about it. I wondered if the neighbors ever described the black one with the white stripe down his face, but she didn’t say.

That morning, Jordan and I were playing a game getting Robot to race back and forth between us. Then Jordan hid behind a tree and whistled, and while the Robot was racing to find Jordan behind a tree, I hid behind another tree and called him. 

He came panting up to me, his tongue lolling around, eyes wide, his little curled scorpion tail sweeping back and forth across his back. So fun! So happy! Or maybe, So exhausting! This isn’t a smile—my mouth just opens like this.

Robot saw the man before I did. A big hulking guy in a tank top, head down, stomping his way across the park. He had a sledgehammer. Maybe he was planning to use it for some kind of workout. Robot had never seen a sledgehammer. He had seen a big hulking man before, and he didn’t like it. He tore across the grass after this man, barking viciously, and he was so much faster than me, and despite all our practice he didn’t so much as turn his head when I screamed for him. The man looked up and shouted in surprise. Get away! Then he swung his sledgehammer wildly at Ro.

Ro kept barking, jumping a close circle around the man. The sledgehammer swung inches from Ro’s head — at least that’s what it looked like in my terror as I ran up to them. Robot kept barking because he does not know what a fucking sledgehammer can do.

When I finally got close, he dodged me trying to reach for him, and I was terrified he would accidentally jump toward the sledgehammer if he was trying to get away from me. So I did something that probably looked nonsensical to the sledgehammer man: I called Robot and sprinted away, and it worked — finally Robot turned to chase me.

When we were a couple of paces away I stopped, and Ro looked at me, and this time I could reach out to him. I grabbed his harness and held him down. Jordan clipped the leash while shouting “Sorry, sorry sorry!” over his shoulder, and I tried to get a grip on my thrashing heart.

I will never, ever have a kid.

I can’t promise I’m capable of keeping my promises.