He was stiff, even his hair felt stiff, but she knew she could pull him back. She heard herself crooning in his ear, luring him home with sounds that weren’t her words but new words, a sort of dog talk, like in her dreams about him, that she was finally fluent in. He would listen. He’d always done anything she told him to. Such an easier child than Peter, never recalcitrant, never moody. Walt was her best friend, her partner, her lover. She heard him laugh. Don’t laugh, she told him in their language; it’s true. You are my love, my deepest love. She began to laugh with him. She pressed her face to his, though his eyes were looking off toward the nightstand. Didn’t you know that, baby? Didn’t you know? I found you at a gas station. I rescued you. And you rescued me. We drove across the country together, just you and me. What would I have done without you? Where would I have gone?
She was still trying to coax some movement out of him when she felt a hand on her shoulder. At first she thought it was Brick, asking her to have another talk.
“He’s gone, honey. He’s gone.”
“He’s just so tired.”
“He’s dead.” He said it as if he enjoyed the word.
“Please, just go get Peter.”
Peter stood several feet back. “What happened?”
Vida wanted to raise her head and reach for him, pull him down beside her, but she couldn’t bring herself to let go of Walt’s head.
“What happened to him?”
From far off, Tom said, “He was old and in pain. His heart probably just gave way.”
She felt Peter’s fingers on her back briefly. “I’m sorry, Ma.” That’s all he said. He did not squat down with her, mourn with her.
He left. After a while Tom left, too. She thought of the bourbon on the shelf. She continued to talk to Walt in their language. She wanted to cry but he wouldn’t like it. She shut his eyes and stroked the velvety fur of his eyelids. She apologized again and again for not having been home, not having been on her bed when he came in to find her, to spend his last minutes with her, his only love. He had never warmed to Peter. Peter had never loved him. They’d never had that boy-dog thing.
Occasionally there were voices behind her. “He was a nice dog,” she heard Fran say.
“He’s finding his new form now,” Stuart said. “Something more elegant and powerful.”
He’s perfect the way he is. She didn’t know if she’d said this out loud. She caressed the length of Walt’s body, her hands remembering how strong it once had been.
Tom stood at the door and spoke of dinner. Later it was Peter, urging her in to eat. But she was so tired. Maybe it was time for her to die, too. She was so very tired. She could hear them at the table, clattering, chattering. All their voices chittering along, while she sat on aching knees with her dead dog. I need a goddamn drink, she told Walt. If she’d married Brick they’d have a minibar in the bedroom.
Then they were all there, surrounding her with their platitudes and garlic breath. Tom had, of course, formulated a plan.
“He needs to be buried. We could call the vet or we could just bury him here.”
“Here?” Fran said, disgusted.
Tom shushed her. “Which would you like to do, Vida?”
“I just want to pat him.”
“We can have a little ceremony. I’m going to start digging a grave out back.”
“You can’t do that,” Fran screamed as if expecting this all along. “Not in my mother’s garden.”
“To the side, near the compost.”
“You’ll break all the roots of her lilacs. You will.”
“I won’t. I’ll be careful.”
Fran followed him out of the room. “It’s just a dog, Daddy.”
Vida wanted to scream at her, but Walt told her to not to bother.
In a few minutes she heard them in the back, rummaging through the shed, calling out to each other, laughing.
“That’s a snow shovel, you dingbat.”
“We should rig flashlights up on our foreheads like coal miners.”
“How much do you think grave diggers make an hour?”
They were all outside.
She placed Walt’s head carefully down on the carpet. Neither of her legs could hold her weight so she leaned on the bed, then the doorknob until she could get herself down the hallway alone. The bourbon in the pantry was gone.
It wasn’t that she needed a drink. It was the principle. It was not getting bossed around. She had a boss, a boss who’d put her on probation after sixteen years of indentured servitude. No one else was going to push her around — not tonight.
He would have hidden it somewhere. He was such a Yankee he wouldn’t have been able to throw it out. In the basement she groped around for the string that hung somewhere near the washing machine. She was always helplessly searching for the goddamn lights in this house. Her finger brushed it briefly, then it was gone again. “Fuck it,” she cried out. At that moment there was no one she wasn’t furious at. She was even pissed at Walt for dying on this lousy day. Finally she felt the soft twine in her hand and yanked. The string snapped off the chain, but the light was on. She went through every cupboard, every box, everywhere except the one place she guessed he’d put it. Finally, she had to look there, too.
She unzipped the garment bag, separated the flaps, and reached in. The dresses parted easily, as if they’d been expecting her. She ran her hand along the cardboard bottom. On one of their dates, probably that date at Emma’s he’d been going on about, Tom had read her what Fran had written for her mother’s funeral. It was a poem, and he kept it in his wallet. “She smelled like hyacinths and rain” was one of the lines. Vida remembered asking afterward if Fran had been reading T. S. Eliot at the time. She remembered, too, that this response had disappointed Tom and she didn’t understand what he could have expected. She’d never known Mary, had yet to meet Fran, and Tom himself was hardly more than a stranger who’d taken her out to dinner a few times. She didn’t know until now, until she’d buried her head in a rackful of Mary’s clothes, how accurate the description was.
But there was no bottle of bourbon.
She went back to the kitchen, trying not to think of poor Walt abandoned on the bedroom floor, to get Tom’s keys. The only place left was his car. She still had the goddamn string in her hand, and when she went to put it in the trash she saw it. Neck-down, nearly buried. She lifted it out. It had been drained and tossed out. Not such a skinflint after all.
She rummaged around for her old mushroom-colored raincoat beneath the pile on the hook and went out the back door. The padded right shoulder of the coat bobbed at her chin. She made straight for the half-dug grave.
Tom was in the hole up to his waist, crouched, spraying up dirt. Above the grave, they’d tied a flashlight to a tomato post. Fran stood beside the post, still shouting about roots. She stopped when Vida stepped into the flashlight’s faint outer ring.
The first thing Vida noticed when she stopped moving was that it was not raining. It hadn’t rained all day. The sky was clear and full of sharp stars. She had added this detail. In books it always rained while graves were being dug. Or perhaps it was Fran’s poem. Hyacinths and rain. She looked at Fran now, in her silver-studded jean jacket and fake fingernails. She hardly seemed capable of such a line.
Tom raised his head. He looked as if he’d been shoveling the dirt directly into his face.
A part of her wanted to laugh. Are you the First Clown or the Second, she might have said. But it was overruled by the anger that pinched and clawed with every molecule of her body. She didn’t know where to start.
Fran glanced at her with her usual disdain. “Your coat’s all twisted.”