The dog bed had come home with me the day after the funeral. Little Daisy, the terrier, had passed curled against Mrs. Bailey in her sleep, the two of them going together, and no one could bear to throw the bed away. So I took it, meaning to keep it as a keepsake, and set it in my closet.
Now I carried it to the kitchen table and turned it over. Along the bottom seam ran a zipper I had never noticed, the kind meant for washing the cover. I pulled it open and reached into the stuffing.
My fingers found an oilcloth packet, flat and firm. Inside was money, more than I had ever held at once, and a photograph, and a folded letter.
The photo was of me. Taken from her front window on some ordinary morning, walking Daisy down the block, neither of us knowing she was watching. On the back she had written, this is what saved my life every day.
Her letter I read three times. You gave my old girl her legs when I could not, and in doing it you gave me a reason to get to the window each morning, so this is not payment, it is thanks, and I am asking you to do one more thing with it.
She wanted the money to go, most of it, to the county shelter. The one where she had found Daisy as a pup, seventeen years before. She wanted it given in the dog name so that other old people, alone the way she had been, could be matched with old dogs no one else wanted. So that nobody would have to face the quiet by themselves.
I did it. Every dollar she asked for, delivered to that shelter in Daisy name. They cried in the office. They have a program now, a real one, pairing senior dogs with senior folks, and there is a little brass plate on the wall with the name of a terrier who lived to seventeen and a woman who loved her.
The part she left for me I did not expect and did not want, but she had written that I was not allowed to give it all away, that she knew me too well, so I kept what she told me to keep. It sits in savings. A cushion. The first one I have ever had.
I have a dog now. An old one, gray in the face, that no one at the shelter thought would ever get chosen. His name is Buddy and he sleeps in Daisy bed, the seam sewn shut again, and every morning we walk the same block.
Some mornings I catch myself glancing up at her old window. Old habits. Old friends.
I like to think she still watches us go.