Grace arrived back home, tired. Every day, a little more tired. She had some medication. Richard had brought it over himself. Paid for it, too.
“You’re going to go broke doing that for your patients.”
“What a lovely way to go bankrupt,” he said.
She’d almost wanted to kiss him for saying such a thing.
Maybe she’d take her medicine. He said it would help. And if it didn’t, then she didn’t have to take it.
She stepped out of the car and stared at the palo verde that had grown tall and graceful in the front yard. It needed so little care. So little water—and there it was, blooming in a drought. Why couldn’t people be that way? Why couldn’t they just take what little there was and grow?
She turned the key to her front door and pushed it open. She saw her dog lying in the middle of the room. “Oh,” she whispered, “so you’ve left us.”
“She’d stopped begging for food. I knew it was just a matter of time.”
Mister looked up at Grace as he knelt beside the dog. “I was twelve when you got her. She slept on my bed until I moved out.”
“To marry Liz.”
“That dog never liked Liz.”
“Well, dogs are like people. They’re not always right.”
Mister smiled at his mother, then kissed the dead dog and took her in his arms.
“Where do you want me to bury her?”
He followed his mother into the backyard. “There,” she said. Mister looked at the bare spot in the corner.
“What happened to the Spanish broom?”
“Aphids. I couldn’t save it.”
He nodded and laid the dog down. Dead now, with no hope of heaven. Dogs were lucky—they didn’t need to live forever. They weren’t as greedy as people.
He hadn’t noticed Grace wasn’t standing next to him anymore.
“Grace?”
He saw her walking back into the yard with a shovel. She handed it to him. She wondered if now wasn’t as good a time as any to mention the word cancer.
They let themselves fall into silence. They’d always done that, let each other go their separate ways—even when they were together. Mister thought of the day Grace had brought the dog home. A present for Sam. He loved dogs. And that dog had loved him back. Howled for days after he died, looked for him, mourned for him. But after a while, she was fine, and she turned to the survivors in the house for all her needs—her walks, her food, her daily doses of affection. And Grace, she remembered the day she found the dog—in a box someone had tossed in the trash bin behind her office building. Not that she ever went in that alley. But that afternoon, she’d shredded some of her old files and decided to throw them out herself. And there was the puppy, filthy and whining, thrown away like a piece of trash. She’d reached for the dog and took her inside and bathed her in the sink of the women’s bathroom. The puppy couldn’t have been more than a few days old. She’d brought the dog home at lunch and placed her in a box in the backyard. Sam and Mister went crazy, crazy when they found her. They spent the whole evening trying to pick the right name. But it was she who had named her. “Mississippi,” she said as they argued. They’d both looked at her and laughed. “Perfect!”
“You think this is deep enough?” Grace thought he looked like a piece of gold against the evening sun, sweat pouring down his face and neck. Her grandmother had always said sweat was sweet and holy. She’d always thought her grandmother was a little crazy. She didn’t think that anymore. Children were so hard on adults. They expected so much and understood so little.
“Grace?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you condemning yourself for something that happened in the past again?”
“Of course not?”
“You’re not a good liar, Grace.”
She looked down at the hole Mister had dug for Mississippi. “I think that’s deep enough.” She watched Mister pick up the dog and place her gently in the grave he’d dug.
He began shoveling the dirt over the dog.
“Let me,” she said.
He didn’t argue with her.
He watched her shovel the dirt over the body of the dead dog. She was getting a little thinner. It was as if she was becoming the light.
“Grace, do you think it’s true what the curanderos say about animals?”
“That they carry us across the river into paradise?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s a nice thought, isn’t it, Mister?”
“Maybe Mississippi will be there, to take us across the river. To take us to Sam.”