The Dog That Whispered by Jim Kraus

such a serene view back here…I mean, looking at the house from the street.”
    “Like a hidden jewel,” Gretna bragged. “An undiscovered gem. Overlooked.”
    Wilson was fairly certain his mother was dropping hints, but what she was hinting at eluded him.
    Thurman stood next to Gretna and growled up at her.
    “Of course you can, you sweet dog. Of course.”
    And with her permission, Thurman took off at a run toward the pool and launched himself into the water.
    Wilson was no more than a second from shouting at Thurman, telling him he was a bad dog for jumping in the water and didn’t he remember that Wilson expressly forbade him from swimming and that these water hijinks were not allowed, but then he realized that his mother had given the poor beast permission to swim.
    Emily laughed at the sight of Thurman’s energetic grin as he paddled about.
    “Retrievers and water,” Wilson muttered, setting his coffee cup on the stone step and hurrying back into the garage for towels.
    When he stepped back into the house holding three emergency towels, his mother was halfway across the room.
    “Isn’t Emily nice?”
    Wilson shrugged.
    “Well, she is. And she’s a widow. With children, Wilson. You know what that means.”
    Wilson shut his eyes for a second and considered what to say in response. He quickly decided not to say anything at all.
    “She has children, Wilson. Young children. Younger. Youngish. I could be a grandmother. Isn’t she nice?”
    Wilson scowled in her direction.
    “I am sure she is a lovely person, Mother.”
    Gretna nodded firmly.
    “And Thurman promised me, Wilson. And Thurman would not lie about grandchildren.”
    Wilson looked at his mother, then at Thurman, who was joyously dog-paddling in the water, then at Emily, who indeed was attractive and pleasant, and then back to his mother, finally making the connections that she had been implying, and then trying to determine if they were both sliding into the same memory abyss at the same dizzying rate of descent.
    At that moment, in the afternoon, on a warm spring day, he was pretty sure that they were.

Chapter Twelve
    H AZEL HAD two more official days of her much-longer-than-customary-at-this-office vacation, and only a few more things to attend to…before she had to come to some sort of decision…about what to do…now that everything had changed. Everything in her life was now different. Changed. The old had gone and the new, the “now,” wasn’t here just yet, but it certainly was about to arrive.
    Hazel hoped she would be ready for it.
    Her mother’s house had been broom-swept, and then some, in accordance with the Realtor’s request, and the windows had been professionally cleaned by a van’s worth of workers, each carrying a bucket, a rag, and a squeegee—perhaps clean for the first time in decades. Her mother’s eyesight at the end had been failing, so a smudgy window was the least of her worries.
    A landscape crew had come in and spruced up the small lawn, trimming shrubs and edging around trees and beds. They had planted two new shrubs by the end of the walk and placed flowers into two large terra-cotta pots on either side of the front stoop. Hazel had had the front door repainted.
    The house appeared as nice as Hazel could recall ever seeing it. But it was empty, and her steps echoed as she made one more pass through.
    I could have painted a few of the rooms…
    The Realtor had waved off her offer.
    “This paint is okay. A little faded, and that’s not bad. People will repaint anyhow. Everyone wants to make a fresh start when they move in.”
    There were no tasks remaining in her mother’s soon-to-be former house, nothing left for Hazel to do, so she locked the front door and drove to the cemetery. Cemeteries are quiet places, maybe more so on Thursdays, she thought.
    Unless there’s an active funeral taking place .
    She drove to where her mother’s grave was located, stopped the car, and walked slowly over the grass to the