My Alaska-raised husband once had a sled dog for a pet, and when I first met him, he told me this cringy Alaskan joke: A man locks his wife and his Husky in the trunk of his car. When he lets them out two hours later, who’s happy to see him? Ouch. I married him anyway, for I did get his point: Dogs are easy. People can be harder.

So, I’m not completely surprised when he brings home Charlie, a golden poodle mix, a hand me down from one of his university students.

“Is that a dog?” I ask calmly.  

“Happy Mother’s Day?” He tells me, somewhat sheepishly, the dog is here for a tryout, to see if he’s’ a good match for our household. 

Even my wily and always optimistic husband knows this will be a tough sell. I’m a one-dog-kind-of-woman and we already live with Lucy, our small black pooch, the family pet who entered our lives when our girls were little. Now they are grown and gone, and Lucy, I have to admit, misses them a lot. She and I wait patiently for their visits, and like the Husky in the trunk, we’re gleeful when they return. Lucy yaps and pushes her snout into their laps, while I do the human equivalent, the maternal hugging and fussing, though I, too, feel like yapping with pleasure.

In our empty nest, Lucy and I have become soul sisters: two females attempting grace with growing older—the rusting of limbs, the dimming of senses, that bothersome inkling our best days may be behind us.

On the other hand, I can already tell Charlie is a twin of my preternaturally youthful husband: distractible, rambunctious, always running into things, and perhaps, a bit entitled. 

As I peer down at the puppy, all I see is trouble. 

“How big will he be?” 

“Small. Very small.” My husband knows the hot light of an inquisition.

“Is he trained?” I circle the new dog warily; he squats and beams up at me with puppy panache.

“Of course. Do you think I’d bring an untrained dog into the house?”

I sigh, for my husband and I both know this is exactly what he’d do. He likes a challenge. He revels in mess and a certain chaos. I, on the other hand, crave order and calm, a household haven against the clattering of the outside world.

“Well, is he at least housebroken?” 

“Of course, he’s housebroken!” my husband insists, indignantly, as the dog relieves himself against the leg of a cherry table, the only household item to which I hold any particular attachment.

I see how this is to go. The familiar tug of war, the struggle to make one another see the world as we see it.

We’ve been here before. My husband and I are that fabled romantic ilk—the opposites who attract. Less fabled are the decades of negotiations to become less opposite, more aligned. On good days, our differences enchant us; on difficult days they undo us. He and I have had a long seesaw of a marriage, with the ordinary ups and downs, but also, a few jaw-jarring landings on hard, ungiving ground. Our love story encompasses heated conflagrations, a Cold War era, and now it seems, a proxy war; Charlie and Lucy are our avatars.

“A puppy will annoy Lucy,” I predict, as Charlie jumps and spins like a hopped-up gymnast. 

“Nah, he’ll keep her company,” my husband counters, pulling at Charlie’s leash, attempting to make him sit still.

“Two dogs are too much work.” I look down at Charlie, and he, sensing a pending judgement, crawls between us and rests his muzzle on my foot. 

“Won’t be two for long. Lucy doesn’t have much tread left on her tires.” My husband can be ruthless, but in this he’s not wrong. In the piling up of the years, Lucy outruns me. I’m getting older, but she’s getting ancient. 

At first, I’m steadfast. Lucy’s been a good dog. Loyal, kind, trustworthy—an eagle scout of a pet. It seems unfair to usurp her with Charlie, this new, more vigorous animal, something like a man trading in his first wife for a younger, hotter model. Can’t Lucy just settle into her last act without this handsome mutt sniffing at her bottom?

But my husband is no amateur in our marital statecraft.

“What about that road trip you’ve been wanting? We could take the dogs, see how we all get along?” 

He’d resisted my earlier suggestion for a getaway, a leisurely drive from New England to the Upper South, to escape our East Coast bubble and shake off the pandemic’s global pause. Now he willingly offers up such a trip over his spring break, and I’m very tempted to say yes.

For my husband and me, road trips are something like make-up sex: A sheltered time of no distractions, maximum togetherness, the reigniting of the flame. And there’s no escape hatch; instead, we’d be like astronauts, bound together in our metal capsule of a car. We’d breathe the same air, log the same miles. And on a road trip I can reach over and touch my dervish of a husband any time I want, and there he’ll be, inches from me. 

So, I agree to road test life with two dogs. 

We set off a couple of weeks later; for the first leg of the trip my husband drives and I try to navigate with a jiggly puppy and a sedate octogenarian on my lap. And we’re on good behavior, he and I, mindful of the case we’re making to the other.

In our marriage, as in many I observe from the outside, there’s a tendency to caricature one another, to exaggerate differences. When our girls were babies, for instance, I became the designated worrier, and, he the cool cucumber. I’ve wondered since—had I’d worried less might I’d have left room for him to worry more? Or, if I were not so pathologically punctual, might he show up closer to on-time, at least sometimes? 

And is it happening again, this push towards caricature? Is my stand for calm exacerbating his push for chaos? Rather than pulling towards the extremes, couldn’t we do better at meeting in a middle?

The dogs, meanwhile, are locked in their own negotiation, tussling for top dog rank, angling to see who will ride shot gun, with their long nose hanging out the window, ears whipped back like wind socks.

We make our way from Pennsylvania to West Virginia, from Kentucky to Arkansas. We stop whenever the mood strikes us. We eat the foods we disdain back home: French fries, and waffles, and hot dogs, which we share with the real dogs. We start the first chapters of a half dozen audio books but don’t agree which to listen to, so instead, we Spotify our college playlists, and like kids, try to wow one another with musical discoveries.

Between the four of us, there are frequent pit stops. One afternoon, about a week into the trip, we come to a rest area on the alternate route we’ve been traveling to avoid the franchise pocked super highway.

I accompany Lucy to the gravel area behind the one pump station, and coax her to do her business. My husband and Charlie bound in the other direction towards a knoll across the road.

They slip over the hill and I lose sight of them. Lucy and I sit beneath the shade of a tree. The sunlight lengthens and I grow impatient. I imagine my husband and his new companion cavorting, selfishly, mindless we’re left waiting in the heat of the day.

Lucy, though, is unbothered. Like most dogs, she does not hold onto perceived slights or hurt feelings. She accepts us flawed humans as we are, imperfect to the core, without asking us to change. 

Just when I’ m tempted to climb back into the car in a huff and drive away with Lucy . . . somewhere . . . my husband and Charlie are running towards us.  

He’s breathless. “The damn dog got away from me. I had to chase him through a field, and over barbed wire.” He shows me his nicked palm.

I see that Charlie is panting, his tongue hanging. I fetch my canteen, and bowl my hands as he laps water. 

“Maybe you’re right. He’s a lot of work.” My husband is sweating and I extend the water to him. He looks weary, older.

Lucy continues to lie in the shade, as Charlie serpentines between our legs. He rubs up next to me, then plops his head onto Lucy’s back. She settles again and places her paws on his paws.

“I don’t know,” I say. “They’re getting used to one another, I think. Maybe she’ll calm him down?”

My husband considers them for a time. “They do seem to be getting along pretty well.”

“Yeah, and Lucy seems happier, somehow.” I shrug and look up to my husband.

He pauses to consider this. “So, he’s a keeper then?” He looks at me.

“Yes, a keeper I think.”

We open the car doors and corral Lucy and Charlie into the front, where they tussle a bit before each settling into a sliver of space in the overpacked vehicle. I slide onto the seat, maneuvering between them. My husband taps “motels that take dogs” into the car nav system. While the animals rest peacefully, too spent to vie for top dog position, we hit the road again.