Buddy was twelve years old and stubborn in the way that only old hounds get. His hips were bad and clicked like dry twigs whenever he tried to haul himself off the porch. His breath always smelled faintly of old pennies and stale Milk-Bones he had hoarded in the back of the pantry. He had a gray face that made him look like a tired old judge, and one ear that never quite lay flat after Sam accidentally shut it in the screen door when he was seven.
Sam had cried harder than the dog did that day, howling right along with him on the linoleum until I had to get a washcloth out of the bathroom to clean them both up.
Every single school day, Buddy knew the time before I did. At 3:20 in the afternoon, he would lift his heavy head from the braided rug by the television. At 3:28, he would trot over to the front door and start whining in that low, raspy register that meant business. At 3:36, if I did not have his red nylon leash clipped to his collar, he would bark one sharp, rude bark that sounded entirely like scolding.
Before the hospital, it was sweet.
After the hospital, it was completely unbearable.
Sam was fifteen when the infection took him, and I still do not like writing that sentence down on paper because it makes it sound entirely too neat, and none of it was neat in the slightest.
It was four different hospital rooms, eleven orange prescription bottles lined up like little tin soldiers on the bedside table, a flannel pillowcase he hated because it scratched his left cheek, and me pretending the doctors’ tired eyes did not tell me things before their mouths finally did.
His mother, my daughter Emily, had not been able to raise him after the pain pills got her good and hard. I had Sam with me from the time he was six years old. He called me Grandma when we were out in public at the Piggly Wiggly or the hardware store, but he called me Margie when we were alone in the kitchen and he wanted to make me laugh.
After the funeral was over, everyone brought food. Tuna casseroles with the crushed potato chips on top. Heavy hams with pineapple rings stuck on with toothpicks. A lemon pie from Mrs. Nelson down the road that tasted faintly of metal because my stomach was burning and I was taking too many pink antacids from the chemist.
Then they all left, because people have lives to get back to and houses to clean, and the world does not actually stop just because yours has caved in.
Buddy did not leave, though.
He kept going down to the bus stop right at 3:36.
The first week, I let him go because I told myself the fresh air was good for both of us and I did not have the heart to argue with a dog. The second week, I tugged him back by his red leash before the yellow bus even rounded the corner because seeing those big folding doors open up and snap shut without Sam stepping down onto the gravel made my hand shake for an hour afterward.
By the third week, I found myself getting genuinely angry at an old dog.
It is ugly to admit that out loud, but grief has a funny way of making you look for something small enough to yell at when you cannot figure out who else to blame.
He did not understand calendar dates or death certificates. He just knew the clock said 3:36 and the boy was supposed to come home.
On a Thursday afternoon in late October, the air smelled like woodsmoke and old leaves that had gotten damp in the gutter. Buddy planted his four feet square in the yellowing grass by the mailbox and absolutely refused to budge an inch when I pulled on the leash. The school bus pulled up to the stop with its heavy air brakes sighing in the quiet street. Mrs. Alvarez, who had driven the morning and afternoon route for twenty years, pushed her glasses up her nose and pulled the lever.
No children got off at our stop anymore. There was no reason for her to open that door.
She stepped down onto the asphalt anyway, holding something against her chest with both hands.
She was carrying Sam’s black nylon backpack, the one with the zipper pull he had fixed himself with a large metal paper clip after the original plastic tab snapped off during science class. I thought I had packed that bag away in the hall closet weeks ago. Or maybe I just wanted to believe I had.
Mrs. Alvarez’s eyes were red around the rims, but she was not crying right then. She walked right up to the edge of the yard and handed the bag to me with both hands, like it was made of thin glass.
I said, “Where did you get this?”
She swallowed hard, her throat working under her scarf. “Sam gave it to me back in May.”
May was months before the last hospital stay, back when he was still walking to the corner on his own two feet.
I could hear Buddy sniffing softly at the bottom of the canvas bag, his long claws ticking against the sidewalk flags. Somewhere down the block, old man Henderson started up his lawn mower, let it cough twice, and then shut it back down because it wouldn’t catch.
Mrs. Alvarez looked down at the dog and then back up at me. “He said if he couldn’t ride the bus anymore, Buddy still needed a reason to come down here.”
That particular sentence did something to the inside of my chest that I still cannot find the right words to explain.
I reached down and unzipped the front pocket of the backpack with a finger that felt stiff and cold. Inside were envelopes. Exactly twenty-three of them, stacked neatly together like a deck of cards. Each one had my name written across the front in Sam’s familiar, messy, slanted handwriting that always drifted uphill toward the right corner.
Grandma Margie, first Halloween without me.
Grandma Margie, when Buddy won’t eat his breakfast.
Grandma Margie, if Mom calls asking for money again.
The very last envelope at the bottom of the stack was thicker and heavier than the rest, sealed all the way across with extra strips of clear tape so it wouldn’t pop open in the dark.
On the front of that final one, Sam had written in big block letters: Open this one when you are mad at me for leaving.
I sat right down on the cold concrete curb with Buddy’s red leash still wrapped twice around my wrist, sliding my fingernail under the flap of that last letter while the afternoon shadows stretched long across the street.
