started this story. Even though it’s hot. I look down, and
it’s Connor’s youngest granddaughter, Evvie. Tugging at
my jacket sleeve.
“Uncle Luke, Uncle Luke,” she says.
For some reason, Evvie has a tendency to say im-
portant things twice. Most things, actually. I think she’s
at that age when everything on her mind feels terribly
important. The repetition must make her feel that she’s
properly expressing her urgency.
Life is a very urgent place when you’re seven. I seem
to recall that, though it’s been a long time.
“Yes, Evvie?”
“Why are you just standing here? You’re just stand-
ing here.”
She doesn’t say, “My mom told me to come get you.”
She doesn’t need to. I know.
“I guess we should go, then,” I say to Evvie, in that
voice you use with a child when you’re admitting that
they’re entirely right and you’re entirely wrong. That’s
always a satisfying moment for a kid.
“Grandma wants to know if you’re coming to the
house after. She wants you to come to the house.”
I look up at Dotty in the distance and offer her a sad
little smile, but she might be too far away to see.
“Try to keep me away,” I say.
“But we don’t want to keep you away,” Evvie says,
clearly frustrated with me. “We want you to come.”
“Okay,” I say. “Fair enough. Let’s you and me go
together.”
Evvie and Harris and I walk back to the cars, through the
neatly tended gravestones. Evvie and I walk hand in hand.
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“What about the kitten?” Harris asks me. “You never
told me what happened to the kitten.”
“What kitten?” Evvie asks, but her cousin shushes her.
“Oh,” I say. “Right. I forgot about the kitten. Well.
She didn’t stay a kitten for long, of course. Connor named
her Sky after the color of her eyes, and she grew into a big cat. Nearly twenty pounds. She lived to be twenty-two
years old. No joke. He got her when he was fourteen, and
his little girls knew her through most of their childhoods.”
“My mother knew her?”
“She absolutely did.”
“And my mother knew her?” Evvie asks.
“She absolutely did. Everybody cried like a baby when
she died. Even me. But I wouldn’t say anybody was dev-
astated. Just sad. I mean, she lived so long.”
Harris stops walking. Suddenly. We almost leave him
behind before we notice.
“That was a sad story,” he says.
“It’s really not a sad story. Not to me.”
“But everybody dies.”
“Well, that’s not the problem with my story,” I say.
“That’s a problem with life. But anyway, it’s a story about
a lot of people doing a lot better than they expected to. A
lot better than anybody thought they would. And I don’t
mean to be wrapping it up on a bunch of sad notes, but,
the trouble is, I’m in a bind here, Harris, because how do
you tell a fifty-year-old story without reporting that most
of the principals have ended their run on this earth? Well,
there’s really only two possible answers for this one: You
lie. Or you can’t do it. And you know me. I’m not one to
lie. But I still have to say it’s not devastating that people and animals live and then die. Other people may think so,
but I don’t. It’s hard, but those are the rules of the game.”
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We walk again.
And I think to myself, If you think having and losing is so bad, try never having. Now that’s devastating.
* * *
By the time we get back to the Barneses’ house together—
Evvie took me up on my offer to ride with me—Dotty,
Connor’s widow, is already a little bit in her cups. And
Dotty was never much of a drinking woman.
Her family is trying to gently pry the glass out of her
hand and talk sense to her, but I don’t interfere. I figure
if she can’t get drunk on the day she buries her only hus-
band, on what day of her life will it be okay?
As I step into the house, she’s surrounded by all three
of her sons-in-law, all trying—mostly at cross-purposes
to one another—to get her to sit down on the couch and
relax. But she doesn’t. She looks up and sees me, and her
gaze just locks on me. It’s almost a little scary. She’s like a bird of prey, tracking on a scampering mouse in the grass.
I move across the room, but her eyes follow me.
“You,” she says.
Just in that moment it doesn’t sound like much of a
compliment.
I move in her direction, thinking a hug might help.
But she stops me with one hand extended, her index
finger pointing at the “me” in question. Her dark hair,
which was pinned up in a careful bun at the funeral, is
coming down in wisps across her face and shoulders. Just
here and there. She looks a little too red in the face.
“You,” she says again. “It was always you. Connor
told me so.”
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She has a son-in-law holding her by each arm. The
third is behind her. And now they’re all four staring at me.
Probably everybody in the room is staring at me—though
I don’t look around to see—wondering what I’ve done.
In that split second before I answer, I swear you could
hear the proverbial pin drop in that living room.
“What did Connor tell you?” I ask Dotty. My voice is
soft because I know Connor never said a bad word about
me to her. I don’t doubt what I know. You don’t know
a guy for sixty-one years and then start having doubts
like that.
“He said we never would’ve met if it wasn’t for you,
because he wouldn’t have lived that long. He said it was
all you. Everything after he was fourteen was all because
of you.”
“It wasn’t all me,” I say.
I still don’t look around, but I can actually hear people
start breathing again. Because now we realize her grief
has simply brought out a passion and an intensity in her
face and her words that was making even a good thing
sound bad.
She’s shaking her head hard now. Too hard. She looks
as though she might unbalance herself. Then again, those
sons-in-law will never let her hit the carpet.
“He said it was you.”
“It wasn’t. It was Zoe.”
“But who introduced him to Zoe?” she asks, her voice
far too loud, her arms flailing wildly for some kind of
inexact emphasis.
“I’ll take credit for introducing him to Zoe,” I say.
“But I can’t take it all. Connor was a kind man. He was
generous. He gave me too much credit. The truth is, it
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wasn’t me. The truth is, we took care of each other. Zoe
and Connor and Roy and me. We just took care of each
other. That’s all that was.”
She
reaches out and pats my cheek, then nearly falls over.
The sons-in-law usher her out of the living room and
into her bedroom for a much-needed nap.
* * *
Harris corners me on the back deck a few minutes later
and reminds me I never told him what happened to
Rembrandt and Vermeer. It seems like a question with an
obvious answer. I mean, it’s a fifty-year-old story. So on
one level, he knows. But he clearly wants more details.
More color, as they say on Monday Night Football. So I drop back into my storyteller mode.
“They lived pretty long lives for Dane mixes.
Rembrandt lived to be eleven, Vermeer nearly thirteen.
I ran with them up until nearly the day they laid their
heads down on their beds and chose not to pick them
up again. I’m not saying that’s always a choice. I’m just
saying in their cases I think it was.”
“Wait. How do you know?”
“Now … that’s a question I can’t answer. It’s not a thing
I can wrap words around. You just had to know them.
If you knew them, I think you’d understand. Anyway.
They both passed quietly at home, in their doghouse next
to their cabin in the woods.
“I cried like a baby both times.
“I had my own dogs by then, but that didn’t help as
much as you might think.
“Grandma Zoe swore she was done with dogs, I think
because the losses hit her so hard. But not three weeks
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after Vermeer left the world, somebody abandoned a litter
of puppies at the county pound, and the shelter was in an
overflow situation. Word got around that they were go-
ing to put the puppies down straightaway, so Zoe drove
over there in that same old pickup and took two of them
home. She didn’t even know what kind they were, but
she took them.
“They grew up to be crazy to look at. Some huge
mix with wild hair like some kind of wolfhounds, or
maybe those big long-haired sheepdogs. Or both. They
were nothing like the two we lost, but maybe it’s better
that way. They barked like crazy, and they grew up to be
big, goony clowns, but we loved them. They liked to run
with my dogs and me, and that’s what really mattered.
To me, I mean. To Zoe, they stayed close to the cabin
and made her feel safe.
“They were good dogs in their own way.
“Then she had two more sets after that.
“She had a pair of big dogs when your grandad Connor
finally talked her into coming out of the woods and into
town. He’d spent years trying to get her to take that spare
bedroom his mother had left behind, but Zoe wasn’t hav-
ing any of it. But then she got into her late seventies, and the strain of living out there in the middle of nowhere
finally wore her down. There’s only just so long you can
chop your own wood to stay warm and carry your own
water from a hand-pump well. Time catches up with
everybody. Even Zoe Dinsmore. She lived with your
grandma and grandad for a decade, and it was a good
decade. I can say that for a fact because I was there. Not
living there, but there enough.
“She made peace with one of her daughters before all
was said and done, but the other one never came around.
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Still, both daughters let her see her grandchildren, and
that’s no small matter. And then she finally left the world
at age eighty-nine. Quietly, at home. Just like her dogs.
I thought Connor would be devastated. I thought Roy
would be devastated. Hell, I figured it would kill me. But we were fully grown adults by then. We weren’t little
boys anymore.
“That’s not to say that grown-ups don’t feel the pain
of loss, or that being grown gets you out of a thing like
grieving. All I’m saying is that we had her when we needed
her the most—when we were scared and lost and all the
grown-ups around us were letting us down.”
“That’s funny,” he says. But not really like it’s some-
thing you would laugh about.
“How so?”
“It just seems funny how all the grown-ups were al-
ways warning you about Grandma Zoe. Like she would
hurt you somehow.”
“Right. Good point. And meanwhile they were dam-
aging us every day without even knowing it. And it was
Zoe who helped us come home to ourselves. Yeah. I guess
that is funny. Here’s why we were more or less okay when
she died. We had no good options when we met her. We
didn’t have tools or skills to figure out the world, or get
by in it. When she died of old age, we had more of that
stuff. Because we’d gotten so much of it from her.”
“But then you never got married,” he said.
It’s one of those direct—bordering on rude—statements
a grown-up would know better than to make. It’s also
incorrect. I did get married. Twice. But both times were
long before he was born.
“I got married twice,” I tell him, “but it never really
took. They weren’t bad marriages, exactly, and the splits
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were amicable enough. I still talk to both my exes from
time to time. I think we have these ideas about success
and failure, and sometimes we fall into the trap of think-
ing one size fits all. Some guys like Connor were born
to be family men. Then there are guys like me who do
really well with a couple of good dogs. So that’s the way
I went. I went with the couple of good dogs.”
* * *
harder when you don’t drink. I should know, because I
don’t drink around Roy. At all. After all these years, I’m
sure he wouldn’t care if I did. But I care.
It’s just one of those things you do for your brother,
out of respect.
Zoe and my brother Roy always had the same clean
date in the program, which is a very weird thing for a
guy to share with his sponsor. But they both started their
time that night Zoe walked back into the meeting and
got Roy to share for the first time, and they never messed
it up and had to start over from scratch.
Zoe had a little more than thirty-four years clean and
sober when she died.
That means my brother Roy has fifty years and
counting.
He and I are talking partly about Connor and partly
about Zoe Dinsmore. We have been for nearly an hour.
Someone who didn’t know me so well might think I
wasn’t taking Connor’s death all that hard. But Roy
knows me. He knows it just hasn’t hit me yet. When
Zoe died, it took me two weeks to get that she was
really gone.
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The kids are all in bed, even the teenager, and I’m
thinking it might be close to that moment when we can
make a gracious exit. But we haven’t done it yet.
“You think her old place is stil
l standing out in the
woods?” he asks me.
I’m more than a little bit surprised by the question.
“Yeah, of course it is. I go by it every day on my run.”
“Why do you take the same path every day?”
Roy is not a guy who would take the same path
every day.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just do. I thought you knew.”
“No, I knew you run every day. But I’m not out there
following you, you know. I figured you mixed it up.”
“Be right back,” I say.
I get up and walk across the room to Dorothy, Connor’s
oldest. She knows why. She hugs me and kisses me on
the cheek and thanks me for coming. Like that was ever
in question. Like that could ever in a million years have
been in question.
Then I shoot Roy a signal that we’re leaving, and he
meets me at the door.
“Come on,” I say. “I’ll take you home. We’ll go the
long way.”
* * *
Being a hardware man means always having a good,
strong flashlight in your glove compartment.
I take us out via the River Road, because that’s the
shortest walk.
For what it’s worth, Roy walks fine. He still has a
limp after all these years, but you’d almost have to be
focusing on it to notice.
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He uses a sort of prosthetic that goes inside his shoe,
so he can balance well when he walks. After fifty years
you can imagine he’s had a lot of practice with it. But he
still takes it off as soon as he’s not in public, so I think it’s always bothered him a little. Maybe more than he
lets on. Once he told me a few details about it, and it has
something to do with the nerve endings at the point of
that amputation. But he doesn’t like to talk about that,
because it makes him feel like a complainer.
He still keeps more of his insides to himself than I
might’ve hoped for, but things like that are never a zero-
sum game. You get progress, you be grateful for it. In
the realm of wounded humans, you’re never going to
have it all.
Also, I should note that in my opinion, we’re all
wounded humans. The rest is just a matter of degree.
He never married. He keeps to his own company
and seems to get by okay, considering that okay is also a
relative term.
He drives fine, too, though he needs an automatic
transmission because he drives with his left foot. It makes