Year of the Dog by Shelby Hearon

didn’t. I looked down at my puppy and had a lot of conflicting feelings that didn’t need to be looked at, not at this time on what I hoped would become our first night together.
    We took bowls of fresh peaches and Ben & Jerry’s World’s Best Vanilla out on the steps, cooled now by a light wind. James did his usual routine, squirming around, needing to consider the locust tree under which Beulah was getting busy, checking to make sure he still knew how to maneuver a spoon into his mouth, trying to get the spoon to stand up on his napkin. Then he seemed to inhale a lot of night air in order to make a kind of offering: to talk about himself. “When I, uh, went over on the International Living program, I kind of did the same thing. Got away from stuff, the way you did coming here. Started over. I picked the Low Countries because everyone else had opted for France and Germany, they were the big ones back then, now it’s Asia. Then I got over there and saw my name—spelled that way, M-a-a-r-t-e-n—all over the place. There was a café, we had coffee at a café, called that, Maarten’s. And when I came back I sort of dropped the old stuff. You know?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œI was gonna learn Dutch. I was gonna go to Dartmouth, maybe, get some big international degree. But once I started working with the program, helping other kids get over there,I never got around to it. I finished school in upstate New York and came here. I been here ever since.” He sucked in his breath and then drained his Magic Hat.
    I was touched. At what it clearly cost him to open up a bit, admit he had some kind of past. Touched that he shared his own escape from whatever felt bad in his life back then. Looking at him now, white as some patient stretched out on a gurney in Emergency, I felt as if I should check him for signs of life. “Thanks,” I said, and looked away a bit to give him time to recover.
    Back inside, in the kitchen, I dug my spoon into the last cool bite of ice cream, came over to him and kissed him deep on the mouth. “Sugar helps,” I suggested.
    In the living room, we listened to Mary Chapin Carpenter singing “Alone But Not Lonely,” while Beulah napped at our feet, her face on James’s shoe. I talked about how much I missed my work, how I liked watching the days get shorter since we didn’t have such shifts in daylight at home, about how my puppy had added a playmate named Edgar to her life. And James went back to safe things, like what he and Pete had to do during the coming school year to get their new crop of students ready to go abroad. I liked him a lot, for going on with his life, whatever it was he’d needed to leave behind. But I’d lost the urge to ask him to help me wrestle the sofa into a bed.
    Maybe another night.

15
    MR. STURGIS, THE pharmacist back home, phoned me with some sad news. He’d tracked down my number from my daddy at the hardware, so that he could tell me personally. He regretted to have to let me know that Bayless, our best doctor, had passed away. No surprise to Mr. Sturgis, or to me, since both of us had heard him hacking up the lining of his lungs over the phone. Still, sad. Mr. Sturgis reported that he, along with Mr. Grady, Bayless’s patient, and a few others, would be serving as pallbears. (That’s how he said it: pallbears. ) I took that last part as good news, since Mr. Grady, who happened to be a black man, might, in my parents’ day, have sat in the back of the church, it being Methodist and him used to his own African Methodist Episcopal Church, and people would have said, “Good Morning, Grady,” to him. But he wouldn’t have been a pallbearer, at the request of the deceased, whose most trying patient he must have been. Mr. Sturgis thought maybe I’d like to contact the widow, Mrs. Bayless. But it wasn’t the widow but Bayless’s nurse, who wasn’t really a