"This dog, I swear to God, has never touched anything in his life," Carrie tells Pittsburgh City Paper. "I used to go to Salem's and bring home a salad with lamb on it and leave it sitting out, and he wouldn't even touch it."
But on Friday, Carrie heard her husband utter a thing she never could have imagined: "Suddenly Clayton yelled to me, 'Cecil's eating $4,000!!!!!' I thought, 'I cannot be hearing that.' I almost had a heart attack."
Once the initial shock wore off, Carrie and Clayton got to work gathering up all the chewed up bits on the floor, piecing together anything they could, but it wasn't much. "We realized we were going to have to wait until he expelled this," she says. (Note: If you're wondering why they had $4,000 in their house, the answer is that's nunya business.)
Over the next few days, Clayton got to work collecting Cecil's yard deposits, and he and Carrie sifted through them, picking out every tiny scrap they could find. "There we are at the utility sink," she says, "washing this shitty money, yelling 'Yay! Yes! We got one!' It smelled so bad."
But all that literally shitty work yielded lucrative results; Carrie and Clayton were able to recover and tape together almost all of the amount they lost. "The bank says this happens," Carrie tells City Paper, so in fact, there's a process. Apparently, if you can stitch together a bill with enough of the serial numbers intact, the bank will take it back and replace it with a fresh note.
"We're only down $450," Carrie says.
Thankfully Cecil is fine ("He only threw up some," Carrie says), and he's back in the good graces of his owners. "He's a very fancy fellow," says Carrie, who is working on a piece of art, in which Cecil takes on a regal appearance, to commemorate the experience. "He just has very expensive taste."
