The Dog Who Would Not Eat

He ate the way he had always eaten, like a horse, like a dog who had never missed a meal in his life, pushing the bowl across the linoleum with his nose until it fetched up against my knee. Tina laughed out loud with her hand over her mouth.

And then Brad, who is six feet two and works at the steel mill and had not, I would guess, sat on a floor since grade school, pulled out a chair, thought better of it, and got down on the linoleum on the other side of the bowl.

He did not say anything. He put his hand on the dog’s back and left it there.

I looked at that hand. It was Dennis’s hand. The same square nails. It was resting in the very place Dennis’s had rested, coming down over the rail of a hospital bed.

“He told me,” I said. “At the end. He said, I paid for him, and that’s about all I did.”

Brad nodded without looking up.

“He should have told you. He should have told you a lot of things, and so should I. I let twelve years go by being polite.”

“We didn’t make it easy,” Tina said.

“No. But I was the grown-up.”

“We were twenty-six and twenty-three, Colleen,” Brad said. “We were grown.”

Nobody had an answer for that, so we watched the dog lick the bowl.

When he had finished, Duke walked over to his bed by the table and turned around in it three times and lay down with a groan, and in about a minute he was asleep. I had not known how hard I had been listening for that sound until I heard it.

Getting up was a production. Brad got to his feet first and held his hand down to me, and I took it.

“I have a ham,” I said. “I have half a roaster of funeral potatoes and more bars than the Knights of Columbus could eat. It is nearly two o’clock and I do not believe either one of you has had a bite today.”

They looked at each other.

“We ought to get back,” Brad said. “Kim’s got the boys.”

“The boys are in school until half past three, and Norfolk will be there.” I got three plates down from the cupboard before either of them could think. “Sit.”

They sat.

It was cold ham and warmed-over potatoes on my everyday plates at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. But the last time those two had eaten a meal at a table with me was the supper after our wedding, in the back room of the steakhouse out on the highway, twelve years before. They had sat at the far end and left before the cake.

Tina said grace. I had not asked her to. She just bowed her head and did it, the same short one Dennis always said, the one he must have taught them when they were small. I had to look at my plate.

For two hours we talked about him. Brad told me about the farm sale and the pups in the stock tank. I told them about the laundry room floor, and the king of England, and Brad laughed with his mouth full.

I told them he drove to Norfolk every Christmas Eve with a sack of presents on the seat and came home quiet, and that I had never once asked to go along.

“Why didn’t you?” Tina said.