“Is that not your wife, Mr. Foster?” the lawyer repeated, louder now. On the small screen of my phone, the figure at the gate had pulled back the hood of her sweatshirt, and the porch light fell across the face of Kendra, the wife of Bryce, as clear as a photograph. She held a paper napkin folded around something in her left hand. Buster took it from her fingers, politely, the way he had taken biscuits from strangers all his twelve years. Bryce stared at the phone. All the blood left his face, and he gripped the arms of the leather chair as if the room had begun to tilt.
“That is not her,” he said. “That is somebody else. It is dark, it is a bad angle.” The lawyer, Mr. Prentice, a calm man of seventy with half moon glasses, did not argue. He took a sheet of paper from his folder and set it on the desk. “Mr. Foster, before you say anything more, I must read you a clause I drafted at the request of your father in the spring. He asked me to include it in case something of this kind ever happened.” Bryce said, “Dad? What kind of thing?”
The lawyer read slowly. “If the dog Buster should die by the act, the neglect, or the encouragement of any beneficiary of this will, or of any person acting for such a beneficiary, then that gift shall lapse in its entirety. The house shall pass to my wife, Marilyn, and the remaining funds of the trust shall be given to the humane society of Buncombe County, to be used for the care of old dogs.” He laid the page down. “Your father added one sentence,” he said. “He said, Bryce will understand.” The room was so quiet I could hear the clock on the wall.
A kind man writes his last wishes in plain ink, and love keeps standing guard long after he is gone.
Kendra confessed that evening in the office of the sheriff. She had read the will months before, when Bryce left it on the kitchen table, and she had decided that the old dog was the last thing standing between them and the house. She bought the antifreeze at a hardware store in Hendersonville, paid cash, and wore a ball cap. Bryce, she said, had known nothing, though once he had remarked, “He is old, he will not last the winter,” and she had taken the words as permission. The deputy let her finish. Then he read her the rights, and the ball cap was entered into evidence.
Bryce came to my kitchen on Thursday, alone, with his jacket zipped to his chin. He did not sit. “Marilyn,” he said, “I knew. Not the plan. But on Saturday morning, when I saw her face, I knew. And I said it was you, because I could not bear to say it was her.” His voice cracked. “I called you the thing I was most afraid my own wife had done.” I looked at him, this man of forty one whom I had met when he was twelve, sullen, holding a skateboard. “You were the son of my husband,” I said, “and you still are.”
Kendra received three years for felony cruelty to animals and was ordered to pay restitution. Bryce did not contest the lapse of the gift. He signed the papers himself. The house of Jim, the old white farmhouse on Haw Creek Road with the screened porch, passed to me exactly as Jim had meant. The rest of the trust, a little over eighty thousand dollars, went to the humane society with a note that Jim had dictated for the occasion: “For the ones with gray muzzles.”
I did not know how to be alone in that house. For three weeks I walked from room to room with the ghost of Buster at my knee, setting out the second water bowl out of habit. On the twenty first day, I found his leash on the hook by the door and sat on the floor of the hall with it in my lap and wept until the light changed. Then I wiped my face and made a pot of coffee. The grief was still there. But I had stopped treating it as something that wanted to be cured.
In January, a woman from the humane society called about a ten year old beagle mix named Pepper. He had been found tied to a mailbox in the snow, and no one had come for him. “He is a senior,” she said gently. “Nobody wants a senior.” I drove to the shelter that afternoon with the heater on high. Pepper sat in the corner of a kennel with his chin on his paws. When I knelt down and said his name, he lifted one ear. I filled out the forms right there on the hood of my car.
Pepper took up the place on the side of the bed that had belonged to Jim. He snores. He steals socks. He has never once learned to fetch. But on the first of March, as I sat on the porch with a blanket, he rested his gray chin on my knee and sighed the long sigh of an animal who finally believes in the roof over him. I put my hand on his head. “You will do,” I said. “You will do very well.” Somewhere in the pines, a cardinal answered.
Bryce still comes on Sundays. He sits on the other end of the porch swing and does not say much. Last month he brought a bag of dog biscuits and set it on the rail, and neither of us spoke about the first dog. Then he reached over and scratched Pepper behind the ears, and Pepper leaned into his hand. “Dad would have liked him,” Bryce said. I looked out across the garden, where Jim had planted the tomatoes and the deer had eaten the tops, and I said, “Dad would have liked you better than you think.”