10/14, 1:30pm—Austin TX, Burnet Rd.

So it’s been a tough week.

I went to New York on a work trip, which was a nice break from routine. At the same time, I also learned that Kat’s job, which is contract-based, wouldn’t be getting renewed—and that it would be ending even sooner than we expected that it might. Then, the morning I was flying back to Austin, the kind fella who volunteered to dog sit messaged me to let me know that Dio had developed a new late-night/early-morning activity of refusing to eat anything and throwing up yellow bile everywhere.

I told him not to worry, that I was sure everything was okay, that he didn’t do anything wrong, that it was totally normal for him to drink puddle water and he shouldn’t assume that anything he did caused it, which was all true—but this was also new behavior, and coming on the heels of other new behaviors like bad poops and anxiety and going inside the house, it worried me. My flight landed on Monday afternoon, I came home, let the dog out of the crate, and he proceeded to drink a bunch of water, and then throw it up all over the kitchen floor. I cleaned it up, took a nap, then took him for a walk when I woke up—where he started having scary problems coming out the other end. I made a vet appointment for the very next morning, asking the calm receptionist to reassure me that I didn’t need to go to an emergency vet right then. She told me no, to keep an eye on him and see how he was in a few hours, but unless there were repeated alarming incidents, to just sit tight. I slept about three hours that night, worried about basically everything—the dog, the vet, the vet bills, the general cost of living when Kat’s job was going away, etc. I know I must have eaten something at some point that day, but I don’t remember what.

It didn’t really get better for most of the week, either. Dio was lagging on walks—another new behavior—and when I called my brother-in-law, a vet in Indianapolis, to ask about things, he would give ominous responses like, “I don’t like where this is headed.” I remember ordering an Instacart grocery delivery one day, but mostly the past week was sleepwalking through work, skipping meals, and worrying about everything.

All of which is to explain the ten-day gap in the use of my pasta pass.

On Friday, Dio had an ultrasound appointment scheduled, and the news was good? In that weird way that “your dog has a tumor on his liver the size of a baseball” can be good news—because before that, we didn’t know what was wrong, and now we did. The vet was optimistic—liver tissue regrows well, and the mass was all in one spot, it was on the outside of the organ, and it hadn’t spread to anywhere else. We could do a biopsy, he said, to see if it was cancerous or benign, but given that it was obviously causing him all sorts of problems, the best thing for the dog would be for the mass to be removed in either case. He described surgery as “option one,” and then described option two, which I don’t remember exactly because it was a stressful call, but which probably involved doing the biopsy and then making a decision about what to do, and then option three, which involved doing nothing. I told him we were option one people, and he said he’d refer us to a specialist. I asked him how much it would cost, and he said he expected it to be around $2,000, which actually undershot the estimate that the specialist gave us by half. It is a pretty bad time for an unexpected $4,000 vet bill, given Kat’s work situation—especially on top of the $1,000 we’ve already spent on vet bills this month—but what are we supposed to do? We are option one people. Our dog has been suffering for almost two months, and it’s getting worse, and this, the vet says, can cure him of it, and save his life, to boot.

Friday was a hard day, too, but it was also okay. I had been worrying all week about the dog and about money. Learning from the vet that the dog could be helped relieved that worry, and learning that it was expensive basically just kept the money worry at the status quo of “oh, this is bad.”

After I went to the vet to pick him up (they shaved his tummy; he’s very embarrassed) and got back home, I got on Facebook and posted about Dio’s status. Dio’s a gregarious dog, and photogenic, too—a lot of my friends care about him, and I wanted them to know what was happening. Because I have been an over-sharer on the Internet since I was 18 years old, I wrote about my anxieties around all of this, too. And people were very kind. They would comment to reassure me that this specialist was the finest in all of the area, that their beloved pets had endured worse and come out healthier, that they would be grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the expense of Dio’s surgery. (I was too embarrassed to consider it, but my brother went ahead and set up a GoFundMe campaign on Dio’s behalf.) People texted me, offering anything within their power to ease the burden of dealing with this. (There isn’t much to do, of course, but it’s a kind sentiment.) And Donner and Senia—two of my oldest friends, who’ve dog-sat for Dio I-don’t-know-how-many times over the years—asked if they could come by on Saturday to bring him treats, and to go eat lunch. I told them yes, of course. In stressful times, it’s good to be around family.

Which is, of course, also the spirit of hospitaliano. So after they came by around 1 o’clock on Saturday afternoon—bearing a dental chew for today, and a baked peanut butter treat for after the surgery, while I finished cooking the chicken-and-rice meal that is the only thing this dog seems willing to eat at the moment—they asked where we should go to lunch. I asked if either of them were currently observing a low-carb diet, and they said they were not, so I suggested the Olive Garden.

We took one car to the restaurant, and arrived around 1:30. It was crowded, because it’s always crowded during Never-Ending Pasta season; when we reached the hostess stand, she told us it would be a 25 minute wait. I asked if the bar was open, she said that it was, and we sidestepped the delay. We talked about, I don’t know, Star Wars and The Avengers and Brett Kavanaugh and mutual friends from the Rio Grande Valley, where we all met 150 years ago, and Senia’s plan to save for a house and the Lyft rides Donner has been giving, and it was the exact sort of comforting conversation with people you’ve known forever that you need in times of stress. We don’t see each other much these days—not like we used to, anyway, when I went out more at night, and they had more free time during the day—but it was no surprise that, after talking about the stressful, frightening week that I’d had, I would find myself the next day at a table at the Olive Garden with Donner and Senia. Honestly, it would have been more of a surprise if they weren’t the first people to show up.

I ordered the five-cheese marinara with crispy chicken and rigatoni, while you can see in the background of that photo up there Senia’s lasagne, and the barest hint of Donner’s Tour of Italy. It was delicious, and reassuring in that way that pasta can be. I don’t remember much of anything that I ate between leaving New York on Monday morning and picking the dog up at the vet on Friday afternoon, but I’ll remember the meal at the Olive Garden I had on Saturday. It’s a reminder that, even though life can be busy, and the amount of time you make to devote to some of your long-standing relationships sometimes changes, the nature of those relationships themselves does not. If there’s a need for family, they’ll be the first to show up, to bring your dog a treat, to drive you to lunch, and to say, after you suggest it, “I was secretly hoping you would say ‘the Olive Garden.’”