Lisa Scottoline: Why My Third Husband Will Be a Dog: The Amazing Adventures of an Ordinary Woman

So you see what we’re dealing with. A force of nature. A four-foot-eleven bundle of heart, bile, and moxie.

And superpowers.

I’ve known for a long time that Mother Mary has superpowers. She used to cast off the evil eye when somebody gave me a “whammy,” by chanting a secret spell over a bowl of water and olive oil. She dipped her fingers in the water, made the sign of the cross on my forehead, and whispered mysterious words that sounded like osso bucco. This spell was handed down to her by another Italian Mother/Witch on Christmas Eve, which is the only time it can be told. She won’t tell me the spell because I’m a lawyer.

But I digress.

Your mother may not smear olive oil on your face, but she has superpowers, too. Spider-Man has nothing on mothers.

We don’t think of mothers as having superpowers, but they do. Mothers can tell what we’re doing when their backs are turned to us. They know we have a fever without a thermometer. They can be at three places at once, a soccer game, a violin lesson, and the high school play, even if it’s Annie. They can tell we’re sad by the way we say, “I’m fine.”

And, magically, they can change us into them, without us even knowing how or when. Mother Mary used to make me call her when I got home and let the phone ring three times, as a signal. (This, in a time when long distance calls cost money.) I thought it was silly, but she said, “When you’re a mother, you’ll understand.”

And finally, I do.

You know how they tell you to wear clean underwear in case you’re in an accident? Well, this story is almost like that.

Until Sunday night, my weekend was terrific. I went to New York for an opera marathon; Friday night was Madama Butterfly, Saturday matinee Le Nozze di Figaro, and Saturday night, Lucia di Lammermoor. Bottom line, for most of my waking hours, people were singing to me.

And if that’s not great enough, chocolate was involved.

Opera candy isn’t as good as movie candy, in that there are no Raisinets, but at least they have vaguely European chocolate bars that taste pretentious. I made do with the dark chocolate for the nighttime shows and switched to milk chocolate for the matinee, but in any event, as you can tell from the opera and the chocolate, I tend to overdo things. Which is why I have four dogs, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

So I came home and on Sunday night was having a wonderful time poring over my Playbills when a fight broke out between my old golden retriever Lucy and Ruby The Corgi. I leaped into action to break it up, stuck my index finger into the canines of some canine, and got bitten. Not to be a diva about it, but this was no little baby puncture wound. When I looked down at my finger, it no longer had a top.

And there was blood. Not as much as Lucia di Lammermoor, but enough to send Madame Butterfly running for her car keys and flying to the hospital. I hustled into the emergency room with one hand held high, which was when I remembered something:

I was braless.

Kind reader, my adventures can get personal from time to time. It’s never been quite this personal, but I think it’s important to deal with this subject, to be sure you girls out there learn from my mistake.

Here’s my lesson: you have to wear your bra all the time, even in the house when you’re relaxing by yourself after a busy weekend eating chocolate to music. Because you never know if something untoward is going to happen and you’re going to find yourself in a hospital emergency room in no bra.

At the same time that you’re middle-aged.

The first clue that I had forgotten my underwear was the running part. Yes, that’s it, running into the emergency room with my hand up in the air. The second clue was the look on the face of the hot male nurse when he came into the room to examine my finger. Because, of course, on the night that your dog bites your finger, the nurse will be male and hot. (Lately, I’m thinking that men divide into two groups: Married or Learner’s Permit. The nurse was the latter, which is more entertaining, if equally off limits.)

Anyway, I could tell from his look that I’d crossed the line.

You know which line I mean. The Point of No Return, Bralessness-wise.

When I was younger, going braless was fun and sexy. I wasn’t above resorting to bralessness, as needed. It was one of my female bag of tricks. The other was whining. Men love that.

The point is that bralessness used to work. But that was then, and this is now.

Now, I wouldn’t be caught in public without a bra. Now, I buy costly bras that not only lift and separate, but also hoist, buttress, cantilever, and generally defy gravity and other natural laws. Isaac Newton had nothing on my underwear.

Einstein’s Theory is no match for Victoria’s Secret.

In my younger days, I scorned padded bras. Now I demand them. Although now they’re called “formed,” which costs twenty dollars more than padded, but we both know what we’re talking about:

Extra credit.

A little help.

False advertising.

Except that here I was sitting in front of a hot male nurse, and I was wearing crappy jeans and a sweater that wasn’t slouchy enough. Truth to tell, no sweater is slouchy enough for my breasts, unimproved. The nurse gallantly averted his eyes, or maybe he was just nauseated. To his credit, he tried to stop the blood flowing from my finger and made small talk to distract me from the horror of the situation and also the fact that my finger was bloody.

He asked me, “Why do you have four dogs?”

“That’s just how I roll. And don’t get me started on opera and chocolate.” Silence followed, so I asked, “What do you think happened to the top of my finger? I didn’t see it on the floor.”

“Your dog probably ate it. They’re carnivores, you know.”

Yuck. I couldn’t speak for a moment. That my dog bit my finger is one thing. That my dog ate my finger is quite another. Not only was I grossed out, I wondered how I would be able to write. I type with two index fingers, and only one was open for business. Then I considered the bright side. If I missed my deadline, I wouldn’t have to say to my editor, My dog ate my homework. I had a much better excuse: My dog ate me.

But the nurse was shaking his head. “Looks like you need a skin graft. Tomorrow, you’ll have to see a hand surgeon.”

“Thanks,” I said, but this is what I thought:

Now that calls for an underwire.

I understand that there’s a religion that allows polygamy, so that a man can have as many wives as he pleases. To be fair, I’m not sure this is exactly the religion, but it’s the religion on the TV show, so it may only be an HBO-sanctioned religion.