Live Free: Rotisserie Chicken Run

It’s a little after 8 o’ clock on a Wednesday night, and Market Basket closes at 9. I have time but just barely.

The backstreets of Portsmouth are blessedly abandoned as I press the gas pedal a little harder. “I’m sorry, Officer,” I say to an imaginary cop, “Speedy’s out of his rotisserie chicken, and he won’t eat kibble.” 

I ease up, figuring that a late-night rotisserie chicken run for a 16-year-old chihuahua’s (now late) dinner isn’t the kind of emergency that any traffic officer would let slide. Besides, now that he’s eating regularly again, Speedy is getting a little chunky, anyways.   

Now parked, I hurry into Market Basket and make a beeline for the hot chicken display. To my horror, it’s empty. “UGH,” I lament to the empty aisle. This late at night, there’s not a chicken in sight, and now I have to go all the way across town. Back in the car, I contemplate what my life has become.
What once was a life of my own is now a life lived at the beck and call of a 6-pound dog. 

It’s my fault that Speedy is in my family, but he hasn’t always been my dog. When I was about nine, my mom and I met and fell in love with Speedy when he was the tiniest puppy you’d ever seen. We asked my dad about bringing him home, but we had just adopted a 10-year-old English lab, Mimzy, and my dad was adamant that two dogs was too many. So, my mom and I did the next best thing. We called my grandpa. 

When the two met the next day, it was love at first sight. The little dog was quickly named “Speedy,” which was Grandpa’s call sign in the Air Force. Combined with our last name, and the puppy’s oversized, mouselike ears, it was perfect. Speedy came home as a surprise for my grandma (her first chihuahua was stolen by a biker gang early in their marriage, but that’s another story). But it was always Grandpa and Speedy versus the world, an inseparable duo. Grandpa had always joked that Speedy was also my dog. “He’s your dog, too, kid,” he’d say with a smile, when Speedy would steal my napkin from my lap and rip it to shreds. 

I knew Grandpa was serious, but I couldn’t imagine a reality where Speedy would be living with me full-time, until it happened. Just before Christmas last year, I got a dog; not in the way I dreamt about as a kid, wrapped in a bow waiting for me under the tree, but in a promise made during a late-night conversation in the ICU that I didn’t know was goodbye. 

Losing Grandpa, and inheriting a bereaved Speedy on the same day, turned both of our lives upside down. While Speedy maintains the same pampered standard of living that he’s grown accustomed to, for the first few months of our living together he grieved so deeply that even the warmest rotisserie chicken wouldn’t interest him. I knew he was starting to heal when he started stealing napkins again. 

Living with Speedy is like working for a rockstar. His adoring fans, gripped with Speedy-mania, scream and fawn over him, but only a select few know how big of a diva he is behind closed doors. 

He’ll only have Market Basket rotisserie chicken in his dressing room, and it has to be hand shredded. Thinking about serving him kibble? Think again. He won’t touch the stuff, and in retaliation, he’ll sneak into your room and leave you wishing you had closed the door. He spends most of his day napping, bathed in pools of sunlight -— the sweetest image of a perfect angel. 

You almost forget about what a diva he is until you try to wake him up before he wants to. It’s those moments of sweetness that send you flying into Market Basket moments before they close.

I make it to the second store with minutes to spare. I ask the teenager standing sentinel
at the register if they have any rotisserie chickens left, and ignore his judgmental stare. All I care about is that he says they do. I walk with purpose to the back, and grab the last one. 

Triumphant, I walk back to my car, and buckle the chicken into the passenger’s seat — I’m not taking any risks. Tonight, the rockstar is happy and I’ll be in his good graces…
 for now.