“If this fucking dog dies,” 
I thought to myself, “Robby may never speak again.” It was dramatic, of course, but held a sort of truth when I looked at the large, pink storage bin in my lap. A scruffy black head the size of my fist swiveled calmly, peering into the quietude that 4 AM brings. Robby eased the car down hauntingly clear streets, following the map that glared from his phone screen. We pulled into Pets Are People Too Veterinary Hospital, where I held the tub to my chest and scooted sideways through the door. A woman with small gauges and a name tag labeled “Julia” led us to a gray, clean room with no table. There was a stunning photograph of a collie mounted on the wall that could have been an ad for human shampoo. I set the bin down.
Robby lifted the warm bundle and carefully lowered it. “This is Orion,” he told Julia. Orion stood still for a moment, then loped toward the woman, who knelt and stroked his ear. His paws dragged like rolling snowballs over the sterilized floor.
***
“I think we should get two,” I whispered, as if the dogs in neighboring pens could hear. I was standing in front of a puppy labeled “Cherie,” who was scrappy and brown and mowing back and forth through shredded newspaper. I said it because I knew Robby had already fallen in love with the puppy in the pen next to hers.
Alexander was light charcoal and curled into a sad puddle, with a plastic cone blooming from his face like a clinical daffodil. When I lowered my hand into his pen, he waddled over and sniffed my fingernails softly, then licked them.
“He’s just so sweet,” Robby said. Then, as if the next statement were unrelated, “I don’t know about two. That’s a lot.”
He was right, and I knew he was right, and I knew from the second he laid eyes on that tiny, recently-neutered dog in the very last pen, that Alexander would go home with us. I even knew his future name. We had talked about names we liked, and Orion was on the short list of mutual loves. The puppy’s eyes blazed an icy star blue.
***
“How long have you had him?” Julia asked, still stroking his ears.
“Half a day. We got him this afternoon.”
“And how many times has he thrown up?”
“Seven, maybe eight. We lost count. At first, we thought it was puppy stress. But after hours of it, we thought it might be worse.”
I sat on the cold floor and crossed my legs. Orion toddled over and put his head in my lap. He craned his terrier face up at me, and his Weimaraner body 
folded itself into an impressive little oval in the basket of my legs. His wildly varying breed mix produced a mystery as to his future size. He would be anywhere from 30 to 65 pounds, the Humane Society unhelpfully guessed. Likely around 50.
The terrier in him flashed its presence in a short little face and patches of wiry fur. The Weimaraner created large paws and long, floppy legs. It also brought the possibility of a twisted stomach, which had herded Robby and me to his car with a puppy in a pink storage bin thirty minutes prior. A twisted stomach, though unlikely in a puppy this small, would result in certain surgery and possible death.
Julia left and the vet came in twenty minutes later. Robby and I were barely awake, drooping our heads on each other’s shoulders while Orion slept in our laps. The vet confirmed it was kennel cough, an upper respiratory infection that would dissipate with doses of berry-flavored antibiotics.
“He isn’t dry heaving,” she said when Orion shuddered, hissed loudly and helplessly, and deposited a small dose of stomach bile on the floor. “Those hisses are coughs. He’s coughing so hard that he can’t keep his food down.”
***
Orion doesn’t cough anymore. It’s been a week and he has graduated to pooping all over the apartment. But he’s quickly learning that the dustpan handle isn’t food, and that urine goes in grass, and that the cylindrical treats with meat in the center taste better than the tiny bone-shaped ones, but are harder to eat.
I’m convinced he’s absorbing Atlanta’s heart. Last week, a couple on a romantic picnic at Piedmont Park called him on to their blanket and gave him water and cuddled with him for ten minutes. Yesterday, the heavily tinted window of a Wells Fargo branch yelled at us when we walked by.
“Wait! Bring that dog over here!”
I lifted Orion and brought him toward the window, where I could make out the silhouette of two women in an excited huddle beside the microphone.
“Give me one second,” the voice shouted mechanically.
A sharply dressed woman bolted through the front door and around the corner of the building before performing a strange downward flutter toward Orion.
Orion takes this excessive attention with shocking grace. It’s as if he’s aware of how his tiny nose makes people crinkle theirs into smiles, or that his piercing eyes make passersby freeze. He simply looks up at them and sits politely, then licks their fingers and rolls on his back. People feel a pound lighter after being with him.
The criminal cuteness dissolves after our evening walk, when he chews on my dread lock then darts around the kitchen and gnaws on table legs. He lies motionlessly in the grass outside, then waits until we go back in to shit beside the neighbors’ welcome mat. Improvement is present but slow.
Sometimes, I go to sleep angry at a puppy. He knows not to pee in the corner, I think. We discussed this. I know I’ll have to drowsily clean poop off the floor at 3 AM, and I know he’ll try to bite my nose off tomorrow afternoon. Robby and I have set permanent alarms for the middle of the night, and we’re not sure when we will be able to delete them. I stare out at the purple sky and marvel at the fact that so many people have children.
Orion curls himself into a plushy little comma and pushes against my belly. Stinky breath jumps from his mouth in warm puffs, and a sliver of pink tongue pokes out like a wing. Robby rubs Orion’s sleeping face as if it were something holy. The puppy’s warm body emanates a magnetic peace, and I realize that the same peace is somehow present when he’s chewing on books. Orion’s spirit is classically calm. I run my fingers down his gently arched spine, smiling slightly at the thought of him loping leash-less through the park during tomorrow’s morning walk. Something calls to Orion in his dream, and he lets out a soft little word.