By Lisa Scottoline
Another day, another doggy drama.
Thank God, this one ends happily, too.
I tell you that up front because I don’t want you to stress.
These weekly columns of mine exist to make you smile.
I want them to go down easy, like a cup of decaf, with occasional profanity.
I reassure you upfront because, like anybody with a heart, I can’t bear it if something bad is going to happen to an animal.
I’m so crazy that I actually consult a website called does-the-dog-die.com before I watch a TV show with a dog. If you didn’t know that website exists, you do now.
I want everybody happy and decaffeinated.
Plus what happened this week will seem like a rerun, if you read a column I write less than month ago, when my spicy little cavalier Eve ate thirty cherry pits from a bowl that I carelessly left poolside.
I’m not blaming the dog.
I’m blaming myself.
Like I’m the problem, it’s me.
So what happened is that it’s tax time, and I have a wonderful accountant who will come to my house and meet with me and explain my taxes to me. I think I dread this meeting, because who loves paying taxes, but I know it’s necessary because I really want to try to understand more about my finances.
I have math anxiety, which is a medical excuse for freezing up whenever I hear numbers.
But I’ve been trying to fight my way through it and I haven’t succeeded at this point, but I’m going to keep trying.
So please understand in my own defense that I was sitting at my kitchen table with my accountant, and he was taking me through my tax return and explaining stuff about business deductions and I was really trying to pay attention, when I started to hear some noise under the table right at our feet.
Eve was under the table with my new puppy George, also a Cavalier, and they’ve been getting along great which is a miracle. George was an older puppy when I got him, so his transition has been miraculously amazingly easy, and Eve has not tried to kill him, which is its own sort of happy ending.
On the other hand, George does everything she does, and she has led him into temptation.
I never should have named her Eve.
I actually thought about naming the new puppy Adam, but that would be stupid.
But it might have been true.
To return to the story, I heard some noise under the table, and I assumed the dogs were playing with their frisbee. I was trying to focus on what the accountant was telling me, and there were so many numbers I was trying to keep my face looking like a normal person and not a confused person.
But finally I looked down and the dogs weren’t playing with a frisbee.
They were playing with an empty box of yogurt-covered raisins.
I did a double-take. I didn’t know where they came from because I don’t buy yogurt-covered raisins.
I like raisins covered in chocolate.
Obviously.
In fact I like anything covered in chocolate. You could cover cardboard in chocolate and you-know-who would eat it.
Unfortunately, it turns out the accountant had a box of raisins in his backpack, and Eve had dug them out for her and her partner-in-crime, and they had eaten them.
Uh-oh.
Raisins are poisonous to dogs.
So I called the vet right away and they said bring them both in, right away.
You may recall that it was only a month ago that I brought Eve in for the cherry pits, also toxic to dogs.
Luckily my vet did not say, “Again?”
Or, “Will you have the usual?”
Or, “Why don’t you watch your dogs for a change?”
Bottom line, I brought them both in, and they both were made to throw up. The box held between twenty-five and thirty raisins.
All told, Eve threw up twenty-eight and George threw up three.
So she doesn’t even share.
And we live to tell the tale.
From now on, I promise to watch the dogs better.
It’s more fun than watching the taxes.
Copyright © Lisa Scottoline 2026
Look for Lisa’s latest novel THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING and look for Francesca’s novel FULL BLOOM, now in paperback.