LAVELL LEFT THE DOG on the patio in its shroud when he went down to the woods to dig the grave. He carried the shovel against his shoulder and walked in a way that reminded Mrs. Dupree of a baseball player strolling to the plate—no swagger though, just a man on his way to his job. He wore dungarees and a green collared shirt that was snipped off at the shoulders. It was left over from his stint at Walt’s Tree Service; his name was stitched on it.
She didn’t mind the shirt or the tattoo of the playing card joker on his upper arm because he was steady and he looked after her flowers and trees and lawn as if they were his own. She’d gotten his name off the bulletin board at church. He went to AA meetings there. He’d been with her for about two years now, since the spring of 1999, which was longer than the tenures of the three previous yardmen put together, one of whom had also come from the church bulletin board, and she’d never smelled anything on him except peat moss and male perspiration. Sometimes he would be hard to get on the phone—he worked for another woman at church, a real estate agent—and Mrs. Dupree might catch herself wondering if he’d gone off on a bender. Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic: she knew that much. But she would let the thought go, before it corrupted her belief in him, usually before he called back. Down deep, she felt, he was a good Christian man. She’d concluded that he’d tried to be attentive to his mother, who had died of lung cancer, even though he’d been, by his own admission, drinking most of the time that she was ill. Now, he looked after his father, who was all but crippled from thirty years of bending over at the Ford plant. And he supported his daughter, Kendra, who was a special-needs child, whose mother, his ex-wife, was, he once put it, a special-needs kind of woman. (He’d taken that comment back almost as quickly as he’d let it out. “I ain’t so perfect myself,” he said.) He’d told her these things as he watered or weeded or mulched. Sometimes, she’d kept him on way past his quitting time, talking to him about her own bout with cancer and how she’d overcome it or about the deficiencies in the diets of American children or about the problems she had faced in trying to keep her husband healthy. Lavell was a good listener. He would listen to her even as dusk was falling, even as his truck sat in her driveway growing rust in the damp river valley air. And he could be counted on to come over if she had an emergency, as she had had yesterday evening, when she’d found Duff convulsing on the patio.
This happened after she’d returned from taking Ida to the bus. She remembered coming into the kitchen and pouring a glass of distilled water and then mixing a teaspoon of powdered vitamin C into it. She had a frog in her throat. When she’d spoken to Ida that day, she’d talked in a raspy whisper. The sounds she produced had made her anxious, as if she’d been trapped inside an imposter.
When she’d finished the glass of water, she’d gone into the library to put on a CD. She often listened to music around dinnertime. Sometimes she listened to the local classical station, though the host at that hour was a bit of a modernist and there was only so much of that she would willingly give her ears to. She was set in her ways, she supposed. She liked the old repertory. Beethoven thrilled and shook her, Puccini could make her cry, Mozart cheered her up. During her husband’s last week on earth, she had listened to music all the time. (She herself had been ill during that period, and had hardly been able to drag her body out the door to his hospital room.) Her elder son had complained about the volume at which she’d played the music—Beethoven, Christmas carols, The Messiah. “How about we listen to nothing for a moment,” Crawford had said. It wasn’t a question. When Crawford and Morgan were children, she’d sometimes played music at dinner and asked the boys to identify the composer. Crawford would always guess wrong.
Yesterday, before she found Duff convulsing, she’d put on a Beethoven piano sonata, the D minor, with its dark chords and moments of near silence and sudden plunges at the heart. Morgan had given it to her for her birthday last month, her eightieth. He’d taken her out to dinner, a bistro over on Bardstown Road owned by a woman he’d grown up with. For her husband’s eightieth, she’d rented the ballroom at the country club and invited three hundred people. It had been a surprise—he was easy to fool—and praise and love had warmed his face as he made his way around the ballroom with a glass of Coca-Cola in his hand. A couple days later, she’d had to tell him that it was time for him to come down from his cloud, from his Coca-Cola high; it was time for him to get Duff to the vet for a bath and a nail trim, it was time for him to take her car over to the vehicle emissions inspection station, it was time for him to call the Better Business Bureau about that carpet cleaning service that had gypped her. After her birthday dinner with Morgan—no dessert, she couldn’t eat sugar—she’d come home and watched Larry King Live.
She’d gone into the kitchen during the adagio movement. It was then that she’d seen Duff. He was lying on the patio, next to the wrought iron bench she’d bought in New Orleans some years ago, which nobody ever sat on because it was too uncomfortable. Six o’clock sun fell on Duff’s small white body and on the hibiscus that had bloomed feverishly ever since Lavell had repotted it.
Duff was nearly fifteen, one hundred and five in dog years, as she explained to friends and children and deliverymen alike. He had become incontinent during the last year or so, and she’d kept him outdoors during the day when the weather was good. Recently, there’d been a stretch of weather so beautiful—it was May now, the week after Derby—that she had actually lifted her arms in praise one morning. The skies had been as blue as those at the beginning of the world must have been, and the air was full of sweet smells. Two nights ago, after a meal of scrod and spelt bread and then a walk around the yard, she had lain on her bed, which her husband had fallen off of three times during his last months, the smell of pittosporum on her clothes from when she’d brushed against it, and slept for two solid hours, until she heard a weak, croaky bark. She’d left Duff outside. He’d not even been able to keep up with her as she’d hobbled around the yard, cane in hand. When she’d let him in, she’d apologized and given him some leftover scrod, which he didn’t touch. Later, she’d put him in the cage she’d had to buy because of his incontinence.
When she saw him convulsing on the patio, she felt as if she’d taken an arrow in her hip, right where the orthopedist had inserted the titanium ball and stem. When she finally got to him, he was stretched out to almost beyond his full length, as if he were trying to escape from his old, ruined body. Jolts of electricity seemed to pass through him. The jolts lifted his head off the flagstones and curled his lip and she saw his gums and yellow teeth. When the convulsion stopped, she lowered herself to her knees, a procedure that she rarely attempted these days (at church she prayed seated and took Communion standing), and put her hand on his taut belly. “Oh, Duffy,” she said. Duff had been mostly her husband’s dog, and she’d sometimes been brusque with him, as she had with Bill. She had a short fuse. She was prickly and thin-skinned and grudge bearing and mad about a thousand and one things. For some of these sins, she asked for God’s forgiveness almost every day.
She’d called Morgan first. He’d moved back to town several weeks ago. She’d been excited when she’d heard he planned to do so, for neither of her children had lived anywhere near her for the past thirty years. Then Morgan had informed her that the move was likely to be temporary. He hadn’t come home to take care of her in her dotage. He was doing research for a book—a memoir about his father. The idea of this had left her feeling flushed in the face. She guessed she’d come off badly in the book, though probably not as badly as she would if Crawford were the author. Morgan was more like his father, she believed. Crawford bore her imprint. Perhaps she would be dead before the book came out, if it did. How many more years did she have?
Morgan hadn’t answered the phone. She talked to his machine. She didn’t like talking to those things. They made her feel ghostly, like she wasn’t all there. She said, “Morgan, Duff is dying.” She tried clearing her throat. “He’s convulsing. Outdoors. I can’t lift him. This is Mom. Please call me.”
She might have tried the vet next, though it was after office hours, or phoned a neighbor—Gerald Boardman, for instance, one of her husband’s bridge cronies, who had professed his desire to serve her in whatever way he could. Pitt Miller, the assistant minister over at St. John’s-on-the-Hill, would have come. It was him she’d called the night her husband had fallen in the kitchen and could not get up. But she phoned Lavell instead. Lavell lived two miles away, in one of Adele Barr’s shabby creek-side rentals, property that Adele planned to convert to condominiums. Adele was a wheeler-dealer, in Mary Louise Dupree’s opinion. She didn’t approve of Adele’s huge car, which you practically had to be airlifted into, or of Adele using her cell phone in the church parking lot on Sunday morning. Or of how hard Adele seemed to work Lavell. Which was why Mrs. Dupree could get him for only one afternoon a week, sometimes two, if it was a week when his boss was letting him breathe a little. Lavell would say to her, “I sure would like to come see you on Thursday, Mrs. Dupree, but Mrs. Barr’s got me booked solid. I’m going to promise you Friday afternoon.” And he would come as he’d promised, in his blue truck that looked as if it had been in a hundred hail storms. She liked the sound it made as it came rattling down her driveway.
Lavell wasn’t home, so she was forced to talk to another machine. It was somehow easier talking to Lavell’s than to Morgan’s, though she went on for too long and was cut off. Probably he’d gone out to dinner, to eat the fast food that she’d told him was just like putting poison directly into his system. Or maybe he’d gone to an AA meeting. There was one at seven o’clock most weekday nights.
She’d stood at the patio door and watched Duff quiver and then she’d gone to get his towel. She’d wrapped it around him so that only his head was showing. It was the old beach towel that he slept on in his cage. She sat on the wrought-iron bench and talked to him as he continued to convulse. She said, “It’s all right, Duff. You’ll be with God and Bill soon.” She told him about a dream she’d had about her husband, how she’d seen him walking along railroad tracks in an old raincoat. She believed Bill knew where he was going; he wasn’t lost or at loose ends. He wasn’t wearing his sun hat, either. “His beautiful white hair was combed,” she said to Duff.
It became dark and the convulsions seemed to intensify. Twice she leaned forward and touched Duff and then she sat back and talked to him through her tears. She could feel the night through her thin shirt. She was a wisp of a woman, ninety pounds in her walking shoes. The phone rang and she nearly tripped going in the door to get it.
When Lavell arrived at her house, Duff had stopped moving. Lavell carried Duff into the garage and laid him under the shelves she kept her gardening things on. They decided he would come back tomorrow, during his lunch break, to bury Duff.
“That won’t be too late, Lavell?” She imagined animals gathering outside the garage door during the long night, trying to figure out how to get in. The next-door neighbor had looked out her kitchen window one day this past winter and seen a coyote at the head of her driveway.
“No, ma’am, he’ll be all right in here for a few hours.” The reason Lavell hadn’t come over until now was that he’d gone to a conference at his daughter’s school. And then he’d taken her to play mini-golf and eat a cheeseburger. He was wearing a nice plaid cotton shirt with sleeves and clean dungarees. She couldn’t have guessed from what he said about the conference that Kendra had recently bitten the special-needs teacher on the ankle or that his ex-wife, Claudette, had said to him afterwards, in the parking lot, while lighting a cigarette, “I tried one of those patches, but it didn’t work.” But Mrs. Dupree could see in his posture that he was worrying about something. He hadn’t told her much about Claudette, but she did know that Claudette was about to marry a mechanic at the Toyota dealership where she was a secretary.
They stood in the doorway of the garage. Her husband’s car was gone—she’d given it to Morgan—but she still parked hers over to the right. She still slept entirely on her side of the bed, too. The extra space filled her with dread. It was like space that would swallow her if she tried to occupy it.
She said to Lavell, “My husband used to get up at six-thirty in the morning to take Duff out. Right up to the end.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lavell said. He was edging the tiniest bit toward his truck. It was thoroughly dark now, except for where she stood, in the light from the garage. “I sure am sorry.”
She felt dizzy for a second, and she almost reached for Lavell’s arm to steady herself. It was hunger that made her this way, she thought. She hadn’t eaten in hours.
THE BEACH TOWEL Duff was shrouded in dated from when she and Bill had taken the boys to Delray Beach, in Florida. This was in 1964. They rented a house two blocks from the Atlantic. It was a shack, essentially, with a little screen porch and a sand yard in which a couple of shaggy palms grew. It disappointed her; she thought they could’ve done better. The roof over the porch was tin and when it rained—there was a doozy of a storm during their stay—it clattered wildly on the roof, as if they (and she in particular) were under siege, as if the sky were releasing pent-up devils that broke to pieces as they fell. She was like that back then, nervous with ideas, prone to frightful dreams that she kept to herself. Late at night, during calmer weather, it was possible to hear the ocean—if Bill wasn’t snoring, that is. She was always the last to bed. One night she put down her book—was it one by that bishop in California, Pike, the man who later disappeared in the Judaean wilderness?—and put on a sweater and walked toward the beach. She was still in her dinner clothes, though she’d exchanged her heels for sandals. She’d had scallops for dinner—she shouldn’t have, because they always gave her bad dreams. (Both the boys had eaten lobster tails and for dessert banana cream pie. Crawford had tried ordering a Coke with grenadine, but she’d made him have milk.) When she left the house, she didn’t have a plan, except to walk on the beach and feel the ocean air on her sunburned body. She hoped to tire herself out. But the way the waves curled and foamed made her feel eager and untired, and when she came abreast of the Del-Mar Hotel, with its lengthy veranda, she had an idea that there was someone waiting for her to walk onto it in her dress, which was printed with magnolia blossoms. On the sidewalk she brushed the sand off her feet and slipped her sandals back on. She crossed the street—jaywalked right in front of a police cruiser—and mounted the steps to the hotel porch. Older voices, men’s, were discussing Castro and the Communists in bitter tones. One man said mysteriously, “Think what they could do if they got hold of the goddamn orange juice industry.” Mary Louise Dupree herself was a staunch anti-Communist, as was her husband, though unlike Bill she’d first flirted with the other side; at college, she’d drunk strong coffee at the house of an economics professor, who had a circle of friends (“townies,” mainly) who were said to be party members. She wondered if the men on the veranda could possibly detect that about her, how easily she’d been sucked in. She saw one of them studying her, and she went on into the lobby, where the man she had imagined on the beach, the one who would take her away and listen to her describe the kinds of dreams she had when she ate scallops, was sitting on a sofa, reading a magazine and smoking. (He’d have to give up smoking; she couldn’t permit it.) He was wearing a sports jacket over a polo shirt and his hair was dark and wavy in a European kind of way. He looked up when she came through the door, and in his nod to her, which was a nod she felt all the way to her toes, she saw his gentleness and intelligence. It was clearer than day that he’d been expecting her. She may have actually smiled at him, she wasn’t quite sure now, but she kept going, into the powder room, its walls pink as the inside of a conch. She splashed handfuls of water on her face and then sat in a stall for several minutes. She left the hotel by another exit, and the next day, when she went to the drugstore to buy lipstick and sunburn lotion, she also bought a straw hat for Bill (she was tired of seeing him in the soiled porkpie tennis hat that didn’t even protect his nose from the sun) and the beach towel that Duff was now wrapped in. The towel was an idle purchase, not a necessity—they had four—but an extra one might come in handy. It was blue, with a border of cockleshells.
SHE GOT UP from the table where she’d been eating her oat-flake-and-lecithin porridge and yeastless toast. It was past noon. She hadn’t got out of bed until eleven—Ida didn’t come on Saturday—and she was still in her bathrobe. She stood at the patio door and looked across the green yard toward the green woods. Lavell, having apparently finished digging, stood with his shovel next to a young holly, where the grass gave out and turned into creeping charlie and pokeweed and brambles. She used to go walking in the woods in early spring, before the snakes came out and the undergrowth rose up, and after Thanksgiving, when the snakes slept and the undergrowth had subsided. There was a fallen tree, down by the trickle of a creek, where she sometimes sat, trying not to think of her cares or the life that was slipping away from her, where, while birds discussed the weather, she sometimes said St. Francis of Assisi’s prayer, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.” But she’d not gone down there for years, and she was not likely to ever go again, with her hip the way it was, unless she was to be carried on a litter. The thought of herself on a litter, two strong men hauling her through the woods, made her feel almost light-headed.
SHE WALKED WITH her cane when they went down to the grave site. It was an extra something to hold on to as she negotiated the slope. Lavell had his arms full of Duff. He carried Duff on his forearms, palms up, as if Duff were something being borne along a church aisle. A corner of the beach towel hung down, revealing her dog’s forelegs, and she felt an urge to tuck it in. But she was distracted by a molehill. She slowed to squash the upheaved earth beneath her black shoe. She’d had a couple of her former yardmen set traps for the moles, but she’d just about given up on trying to get rid of them. They dug relentlessly—Lavell had said one six-ounce mole could undo sixty feet of earth in a day—and she had to admit that she admired their industry. And whenever she thought about moles for too long, a picture from The Wind in the Willows came into her head: she would see Mole picnicking on a riverbank with Ratty, spectacles on his sensitive snout, curlicuing slippers on his feet. And then she would think of the moment in the book when poor Mole, on some ill-fated adventure with Ratty, tripped and cut his shin. Sometimes when she stomped on a molehill—when she was alone, that is—she would say it wasn’t personal.
“I meant to try Morgan again this morning,” she said. “I wonder where he is.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Lavell said.
“Beau ran away one time,” she said, not thinking to identify Beau for Lavell, thinking only of the wandering collie that had so complicated her existence forty years ago. “That was before the time he ran away for good. Crawford was so upset. He yelled at me, telling me I shouldn’t let Beau out or else I should put him on a leash in the yard. And Morgan, who was about ten then, said, ‘He’ll come home, Craw, don’t worry.’ Morgan was always trying to calm his brother. A lot of people thought he was the older one. He wanted things to go smoothly, you see.”
“That’s how I like them to go, too,” Lavell said. “But not much does most of the time.”
She glanced at him. It always caught her by surprise when Lavell said something a little on the bitter side. Sometimes he’d take it back, like when he made that comment about his ex-wife being a special-needs kind of person. Usually he was so quiet. When he was down on his knees in her garden, with his hands in the dirt, head bowed to his work, she imagined a man who had found his way out of trouble—all those days and nights of drunkenness, blackouts, pain—to peace. She imagined he had cast bitterness aside to get there.
Even so, she didn’t think Lavell was wrong about the way things generally went. She believed in God, she felt His presence in the very air she breathed, she felt Him lead her to the right words when she prayed, but nothing on earth hardly ever did go smoothly, did it?
“We have to have faith,” she said.
“That helps,” Lavell said, a stick cracking under his boot.
They were at the bottom of the slope. To the right was a sinkhole, which over the forty-odd years she’d lived here had widened to the point that she now thought of it as a maw. Some years ago, on the advice of a landscaper with whom she no longer did business, she had planted flowering trees around the perimeter, but only one, a redbud on the lower side, had not been lost to it. She had filled the hole with yard debris for a while. Then Lavell had cleared it out and seeded it with wild grasses. The hollow wasn’t really visible from the ground floor of her house. Only when she walked past did she let herself contemplate the dank underground spaces—there were caves beneath her property, experts had told her—to which the sinkhole led. These were places where even a mole, even a slippered and spectacled one, would not be tempted to go, even on a frolic.
They traversed twenty yards of solid green earth—the grass was abundant here, comforting—before reaching the grave site. She said, “Of course, Morgan wasn’t attached to dogs the way Crawford was. Crawford loved dogs more than people. ‘They don’t criticize you,’ he said.” She lifted her cane tip off a clump of old leaves and set it down among stalky, downy-headed dandelions. “Now he’s got a cat. ‘Dogs are too much trouble,’ he says.”
“They are some work,” Lavell said. He stood beside the hole he’d dug, Duff still in his arms. It was warmer today, a little humid, the sky puffy with the possibility of rain. The hole was twice the size of the one into which her husband’s jar of ashes had been placed. She was going to go into a jar, too, and then into a little square hole that Frank, the sexton at St. John’s, would dig next to her husband’s. She wondered what sort of jar—urn—her sons would choose for her. Crawford had picked a ceramic one for his father. When he had come home from the funeral home, he’d said to Morgan, “The guy was hoping I’d pick the six hundred dollar walnut urn with the brass handles, suitable for the cremains of a federal judge, but I picked the three hundred dollar crockery jar, the second-cheapest one in the display case. ‘That’s a very nice choice, sir,’ the guy said. I also made ‘a very nice choice’ when I picked out the second-cheapest casket to burn him in.”
“You want me to set him down now, Mrs. Dupree?”
“I guess it’s time.” The frog had gone from her throat, hopped out overnight. But she still didn’t feel in the clear. She had to be so careful about what she put into herself—a drop of vinegar, not to mention a pinch of sugar, could send her up the wall—and there were so many viruses and bugs waiting to catch her out, if she should let down and not keep up with her regimen of vitamins and herbal potions. Sometimes—today, for instance—she believed she could see in the sky, in the shapes of the clouds, that something was about to befall her. The clouds seemed glutinous, even phlegmy.
Lavell knelt with Duff, then looked up at her and said, “You want me to leave the towel?”
“I think he should take it with him. He slept on it.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Duff fit easily lengthwise, but the hole was snug widthwise. It seemed to her that Duff didn’t lie quite flat.
Lavell, who had a certain gift for anticipating her requests, said, “You think I should make it a little bigger maybe?” He rested his hands on his dungarees. There was a smear of dirt high on his forehead. He was fast losing his hair, she was sorry to note. One thing about the Dupree men was that they were blessed with more than enough hair to hide their skulls. Lavell was going to be down to skin and bone in a couple years. It was a prejudice, but a bald man always made her feel a little skittish. There was a man down the road, a retired actuary, whose head was as bare as a bird’s egg, who could not help telling off-color jokes in mixed company.
“Maybe we should,” she said. “If you don’t mind.”
“No, ma’am. I misestimated there.” He lifted Duff out of the hole and laid him next to the pile of dirt.
They were silent as Lavell made the hole more commodious. A single bird, a cardinal, called from the woods in front of her. She couldn’t locate it. Then a mockingbird took over, flooding the air with everything it knew.
Lavell returned Duff to the hole. “That seems better.”
“Thank you, Lavell.”
“No problem.”
The mocker went on and on, sweetly retailing gossip. The other day, one had flown smack into her dining room window, while she was sitting at the table, answering sympathy notes about Bill. She’d received hundreds and had fifty more to acknowledge. Mockers were fiercely territorial; they would attack their own reflections. They wanted to be all birds at once, the only bird on the block.
Lavell picked up his shovel again and said, “Are you ready for me to cover him?”
She gazed at the lump wrapped in the faded blue towel. She saw the ocean, heard it soughing in her ears. She saw her husband stumbling out of the water, pushed forward by waves that had started over by Africa (according to her younger son’s theory), a slender, unmuscled man, white or pink where he wasn’t hairy (but mostly white, because she’d made him cover up on the beach), no threat to fish or children, a man who as a boy had spent a week in a hospital bed with his head immobilized between sandbags after an eye operation and who could later, without his glasses, see only a hallucinogenic version of the world, who had been blindly in love with her from the very beginning, who called her “Gorgeous” or “Sweetheart” even on days when those terms were far from accurate. She watched him pick his way among beach umbrellas and sunburned flesh, his swim trunks clinging to his narrow body, and then he was there, all of him that she could see or hear—his dripping paleness, the wen on his shoulder, the news that the water was “invigorating.”
“I thought we might say a prayer first,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” Lavell said. “That would be good.”
“Dear Lord,” she said, shutting her eyes, waiting for God to sit down next to her in the dark that filled her head. “Thank you for giving our little dog fifteen years on your beautiful earth, and for letting him keep Bill and me company as we have moved closer to you. Thank you for keeping him out of harm’s way all those years, except for a few scrapes that couldn’t be helped. Thank you for letting him spend time with Morgan and Crawford and my three dear grandchildren, especially little Caroline, who loved him so, who loved to come down here and sit with him under the dawn tree. Thank you for letting him know Lavell, too, and his quiet, steady ways. And Ida, whom he followed around the house and gazed up at when she was at the stove, in hopes of a treat. Please take unto yourself, dear Lord, our little dog’s soul, and let him walk again beside you and the man he loved.”
Lavell had kept his eyes shut and his head lowered until she’d mentioned his name. And then he’d looked up, also because he’d heard a door slam. When he heard a door slam nowadays, he almost always thought of his ex-wife slamming the bathroom door in his face when he told her he couldn’t live with her anymore because she’d been unfaithful to him and his child. He’d quit drinking by then. She’d slammed the door in his face twice, the second time after calling him a goddamn loser. Now the world was silent, even the birds had hushed, and Mrs. Dupree’s face was wet with tears. He was hungry. He’d not eaten lunch before coming over.
Mrs. Dupree reached into the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a little square of paper. She hung her cane on her forearm and unfolded the square. “I copied this down from the prayer book last night.” But she couldn’t read it—she didn’t have her glasses with her—and she thought she would foul it up if she tried to say it from memory.
“Would you mind?” she said, giving him the prayer.
Lavell had some trouble with her handwriting—particularly with the word “fellowship,” which she’d abbreviated “f’ship”—but he made it through.
“Amen,” she said, firm in her belief that God would grant Duff, as the prayer so beautifully put it, “an entrance into the land of light and joy.”
But she turned away when Lavell began to scoop dirt onto Duff. “I’m going up,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am, I’ll be done here in a moment.”
She turned back and said, “Maybe we can plant something there one of these days. Witch hazel might be nice if the darned deer would leave it alone.”
She went past the sinkhole that like a pitcher plant sucked in everything that came near its lip and she continued on up the hill. Above her, on her patio, she saw a man in a pink shirt and glasses. She knew it was Morgan, but for a moment she saw her late husband inhabiting her son’s slouchy thinness. He, her husband, was awaiting her as she trudged up the slope with her metal cane and her day’s worth of complaints—her back hurt, her hip hurt, a spring cold was stirring in her chest even though the frog had gone out of her throat. But as she came closer the resemblance between her son and husband faded. It was only Morgan on the patio, her diffident, divorced, elusive but not unreliable son, who would return to his New York “bachelor’s pad,” as she thought of it, when he was done with his book project. She often wanted to tell him things, tell him all her heart’s troubles, but there was something in his face that usually kept her from it. She wanted to tell him, for instance, how she had seen his father in a dream walking along railroad tracks with a little suitcase in his hand, and how he was smiling even though he was alone and in his shabby raincoat. God had granted him an entrance into the land of light and joy. That was how she read it, anyway. The tracks disappeared into light as rosy and tender as baby’s skin. The suitcase was an odd detail, though—it was round, a blue bag sprinkled with paste-on stars, like what a little girl of fifty years ago would take on an overnight.
“I’m sorry about Duff, Mom,” he said. “I didn’t check my messages until too late. I was out to dinner with Lucy last night.”
For his book? She didn’t want to probe into his private life too much, so she didn’t ask.
“Lavell helped me out,” she said. “He came over last night and took off from his lunch today.” She heard a harsh note in her voice. She was a little winded from the hike up. She gazed at the espaliered magnolia that grew against the sitting room wall. It always made her think of herself in a girdle and shoes that pinched. But it blossomed without fail.
“Maybe you should get another dog,” Morgan said.
“No, I’m too old for that. I wouldn’t have the time or strength to house-train a dog.” She turned and saw Lavell coming up the hill with the shovel on his shoulder. She had faith in Lavell. He’d show up and dig holes for her when she needed him to. Maybe she’d write it in her funeral instructions that he was to dig the hole that she would go into.