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one

The limousine drives up in front of the house. I am in the jump seat by the door closest to the sidewalk, so I open the door and fumble with the seat I was sitting on. I’m not getting anywhere with it.

“I’ll take care of that, sir,” the driver says. He pounces out of the car and puts his hand on the door I opened. “Don’t you bother with that, Mr. Ross,” he says, emphatically this time.

“I can get it,” I say. “I’m sure I can.” I don’t like him. He needs a haircut in the worst way. Not that I ordinarily care about haircuts, but for the limousine driver at my grandmother’s funeral, I thought they could at least have given us a guy who had had his hair cut.

“Let him do it, Davy.” That is my mother. “We’re not all of us mechanics.” Then she laughs. Everyone looks at her, and she stops.

“There we go, sir.” The driver folds the seat in half a second. I sort of smile at him as though I am thanking him. “Nothing to it, sir,” he says. The bastard. All that “sir” business. I don’t know what he takes me for. Twice before, once at a fancy restaurant and once when I opened a savings account in a bank, guys had called me “sir.” I thought it was pretty phony then, and I still do. This guy working for the funeral home takes the prize though. He must have called me “sir” about twenty times so far this morning. Maybe I’ll get used to it later. Maybe when I’m fourteen. I doubt it.

Everyone files out of the car and onto the front porch. The driver is all smiles and has I’ll-be-seeing-you-in-rosiercircumstances looks, so I don’t even say good-bye to him. Everyone looks at me, and I realize I am supposed to open the door. As soon as I put in the key, old Fred lets out a howl from the inside, and I yell, “It’s OK, Fred. It’s just me.” He stops barking right away, and I can hear him near the door, sniffing away. I wait just a minute before I open the door because I think Fred gets a lot of pleasure from sniffing like that. It gives him a few seconds to decide who’s going to be coming through the door. Then I open the door, and Fred jumps on my legs. He gets so excited that he squirts on the floor.

“Isn’t he trained?” my mother asks.

“Oh, sure. He’s just glad to see me. That’s all.”

My mother walks past Fred as though he weren’t there, and then my uncle and aunt come in, and then my great-aunt and her daughter, or daughter-in-law, I could never figure out which, but I sort of like her because she always kisses me in a friendly way, even though we only see each other on big family occasions. My other uncle, the one from Los Angeles who isn’t married, comes in last. He’s like a stranger. The only thing I remember about him until now is that when I was a little kid he told me not to eat some potato chips on my grandmother’s table one Sunday night before supper. He said there wouldn’t be enough for everyone else if I did. Needless to say, since this is my only connection with Uncle Jess, he never held a top position in my people book. But this time he was OK. I felt sorry for him more than for anyone else. He cried very hard when he saw my grandmother in her casket. He got all riled up and said he should have been coming East every year to see her, and that he had wanted to come up to Boston the last time he was in New York, but he couldn’t because if he didn’t get to London some terrible thing would happen, and it happened anyway, so what was the point. Uncle Jess used to send Grandmother a check every month. He didn’t have time to write letters though, and now he felt guilty as hell. He needn’t have, I think. Grandmother didn’t have much to say about Uncle Jess, just about things that happened a long time ago when he was in high school or growing up. He’s some kind of model. He had his nose straightened, and his hair is all fixed up to look blond. Old Fred keeps sniffing at him, but he hasn’t licked him. I don’t think Fred knows yet whether Uncle Jess wants to be licked. Dachshunds are like that. They respect you if you are not a big dog-lover. If you are though, watch out!

Fred keeps running back and forth from me to all the people. Then I know I’m going to cry. He’s looking for my grandmother. I know it sure as anything. He keeps running around to everyone, and each time he sniffs and then runs back to me and jumps up. I hold him close two or three times, but he pops right out of my arms and runs around again. He finally goes to the door and just looks at it.

“He has to make, David,” my mother says. Big dog-lover.

“I don’t think so.” I have a hard time getting that out because Fred has shaken me up now. Grandmother went away for two or three days now and then. Fred didn’t like it when she was away. He didn’t like it when I was away either. Sometimes I would go to New York for the weekend to visit my mother, and once I went to Canada for a couple of weeks with my father on his vacation, and each time old Fred thought he was being deserted. But then each time I came back. And Grandmother came back. That is the difference this time. Fred knows she isn’t coming back. He looks at me and cries. Oh, God, that hurts. He has this short whine, and he uses it when he wants attention or when something is hurting him. It’s that whine Fred is using at the door, only it seems to me to be deeper. That does it. I can’t take it any more, so I run over to old Fred and fall right down there with him in front of the door, and I bawl my head off. We both do, and once I start I can’t stop. It gets louder and louder, and I have a hard time catching my breath, and my ribs start to ache. Poor Fred. He just keeps crying too. Everyone in the room stands there, dumbfounded I guess. Finally Mother kneels down next to me to pull me up.

“Don’t do that, Helen,” Aunt Louise says. “It’s better this way.”

“Oh, my poor baby,” Mother says. She runs her hands over my back. I look up at her. Her eyes are moist, and I throw both myself and Fred, I guess, into her arms. In a minute I stop bawling and calm down a little bit, so I pull away from Mother. Fred isn’t whining any more either, so I guess that crisis has passed. Everyone is staring at me as though I am a patient who has just come out of ether.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

They all say No, No, No and smile encouragingly, so I begin to feel a little dopey. There isn’t anything to say, so I breathe deeply once and get up from the floor.

“Fred and I will take a run, I guess.” Fred won’t let me get two inches away from him now, so there is no problem in getting him out the front door. Sometimes he is reluctant, especially if he thinks there might be some food waiting to be begged for. Not now though. Poor Fred. I wish he could talk or let me know in some way he understands all the stuff I say to him.