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  “Hi,” Charlie replies.

  “Ready to check out?”

  “Not yet. I only have eight books here. I can take out two more, and I need to learn about gardening. Do you have any books on vegetable gardens?”

  The librarian helps Charlie find two books and that night Charlie begins to pore through them. Mr. Elliot sits next to him on the couch while Sunny curls up next to Charlie’s leg, making herself quite small.

  “Dad, it looks like we can plant peas again in the fall,” says Charlie, “when the weather gets cool. Did Mom ever do that?”

  Mr. Elliot frowns. “Maybe,” he says. “I’m not sure. You can ask her when she calls tonight.”

  And Charlie does. It’s the first time he’s spoken to her since she drove off with Aunt Susan.

  “Plant peas again?” she repeats when Charlie tells her about his trip to the library. She sounds weary.

  “Yes,” says Charlie. “I was just wondering, because the book says peas like cool weather, and they have a short growing season.”

  “You’re right about that. And yes, sometimes I do put peas in again. You just have to clear out the old vines first. Charlie, I’m . . . I’m glad you’ve taken over the garden.”

  “Thank you,” Charlie replies politely, as if he’s talking to his principal or to some relative he’s never met before.

  By the beginning of August, Charlie has ticked several more things off of his list—catching fireflies, camping with Danny, and building a footstool with Mr. Hanna. Charlie secretly decides to give the stool to his mother when she comes home. Amazingly, Charlie and his father have plans to go to the county fair in two weeks. Most important, in Charlie’s eyes, is that the vegetable garden is doing nearly as well as it did when Mrs. Elliot was in charge of it.

  “Mom!” says Charlie excitedly when his mother phones one night. “I picked so many cucumbers today that Dad and I had to give most of them away. I took some to Mr. Hanna, and Dad’s going to give some to the guys at work. And we have peppers and lots of tomatoes and you should see how much squash we’re going to have this fall.”

  “Honey, that’s wonderful,” exclaims Mrs. Elliot, and Charlie thinks she sounds stronger and happier every time he speaks to her.

  “Mom, when do you plant the fall peas?” asks Charlie. “Is it almost time to do that?”

  “In just a few weeks. And,” says Mrs. Elliot, adding a flourish to the word that Charlie can almost see, “we’ll be able to do that together. I’m going to be coming home soon.”

  Mrs. Elliot is home in time to go to the fair with Charlie and his father. She climbs out of Susan’s car, hair and eyes shining, looking cheerful and, Charlie thinks, maybe a bit plumper. He has just decided not to mention the plumpness when his mother, releasing him from a long hug, says, “Susan made me gain five pounds!” She laughs, and Charlie realizes he can’t even remember the last time she laughed. Surely it was before RJ died.

  Charlie’s parents are holding hands now and smiling at each other and Charlie thinks his mother looks just like a girl, like one of the teenagers at the high school where he went once to see a play called Our Town.

  Aunt Susan stays for the night. She plays catch in the yard with Charlie and Sunny and makes strawberry shortcake for dessert. Charlie, who has learned something about cooking this summer, makes a salad with vegetables from the garden, and when Aunt Susan tastes it she announces that it is stunning. Mrs. Elliot, who walked all around the garden with Charlie earlier in the afternoon, proclaims that the vegetables are the best ever and that Charlie must have the greenest thumb in the whole family.

  “Next summer we can work on the garden together,” says Charlie to his mother and she flashes her smile again. She flashes it once more when Charlie presents her with the stool at bedtime. “Mr. Hanna showed me what to do,” he tells his mother, “but I did all the work myself with no help.”

  “This,” says Mrs. Elliot, holding the stool in front of her and turning it around and around, “belongs in the living room, where everyone will be able to see it.” She sets it in front of an armchair. “A place of honor,” she says, and adds, “I feel like a queen with my very own personal footstool.”

  Before Charlie knows it, the county fair has come and gone (he and his parents go to it and Charlie wins a stuffed blue monkey by shooting at moving targets with a water pistol), and the start of school is just a day away.

  Charlie and Sunny sit together on the front porch on that last evening of vacation, listening to the voices of Mr. and Mrs. Elliot in the kitchen as they clear the dinner dishes. Charlie strokes Sunny’s muzzle, and then the baby soft fur behind her ears. “What are you going to do all day tomorrow without me?” he asks. Sunny squints her eyes and gazes at the horizon. “You keep Mom company, okay?” Charlie continues. “It’ll be just you and her until I come home from school.”

  Charlie sits on the porch with Sunny until he can see fireflies winking among the fir trees, and his mother comes to the door and says, “Big day tomorrow, Charlie. Better get to bed early.”

  And so the summer ends and the autumn begins, and now the days seem more like they did a year ago, except that RJ is not a part of them. But somehow his absence feels less out of the ordinary than it did at the beginning of the summer. Maybe because RJ’s chair at the kitchen table has been moved into the hallway, and some of the things in his room have been given away. RJ has not been forgotten, though. His photos, his trophies, even his sneakers and his report cards, garnish the farmhouse, but Charlie thinks these things seem like souvenirs of his life rather than remnants of it.

  At the end of the first day of school, Charlie calls good-bye to Danny and to Mr. William, the ancient driver, and jumps down the steps of the bus to find his mother waiting at the end of their drive with Sunny. His mild humiliation over the presence of his mother (no other parents of fifth-graders were waiting to meet their children) is quickly erased by Sunny’s exuberant greeting. She squats on the ground, tail sweeping the gravel, and when she can no longer stand it, she jumps to her feet and then straight up in the air before twirling around and landing with three short barks of joy. Nearly every kid on the bus sees Sunny and the next morning they all talk about her. Charlie is so lucky to have a dog like Sunny, they say. Sunny must be the best dog ever. They ask how she learned her tricks and what other things she can do.

  When Mr. William deposits Charlie at his drive on the second afternoon, Sunny is waiting by herself. The third day of school is a half day, and to everyone’s surprise, Sunny is waiting anyway. “How does she know when you’re coming home?” Danny asks Charlie. “How did she know you’d be early?”

  Charlie grins as he jumps down the bus steps. “It’s just her way,” he replies.

  Charlie and Sunny run to the farmhouse and when Charlie enters the kitchen, he finds his mother standing at the stove, stirring and stirring something in a pot. She’s staring at the wall over the stove, and as Charlie watches her, he realizes the fire isn’t on under the pot. His mother is in some other place, and Charlie feels separated from that place by a great distance, as if he’s looking at his mother through the wrong end of a telescope.

  Charlie feels a hollowness in his stomach and knows his face is turning pale, but then his mother turns to him and says, “Guess what Sunny did today.”

  “What?” asks Charlie tentatively.

  “She spent half the morning hiding her toys and the rest of the morning pretending to find them again.”

  Charlie laughs carefully. “Where did she hide them?”

  “In all the places we hide them when we’re playing with her. I think she was trying to amuse me.”

  “She’s keeping you company,” says Charlie, feeling more like himself again.

  “And she’s doing a good job of it.” Mrs. Elliot smiles and it’s her young girl’s smile again.

  Three weeks into September on a Saturday that is warm and humid but nevertheless carries the scents of autumn, Charlie and Sunny go for one of their walk
s in the woods. They haven’t done this in a while, and Charlie takes great pleasure in packing a sandwich and a book and setting off with Sunny. “In a few weeks hunting season will begin,” Charlie says, “and we’ll have to stay close to home.” He and Sunny find the flat rock that they like and Charlie spends the afternoon reading The Twenty-One Balloons while Sunny naps beside him.

  They’re on their way home—they’ll be late for dinner if they don’t hurry up—when Sunny lets out a yip and draws up short.

  “What is it, girl?” asks Charlie. He bends down for a look and sees a wounded possum twitching in the leaves. “Leave it!” he commands Sunny, but Sunny leans in closer and picks up the possum in her jaws as gently as when she takes a snack from Charlie’s fingers. She ignores Charlie’s demands to drop the possum, and resolutely carries it, squirming, all the way back to the house.

  “She rescued it!” Charlie exclaims to his parents.

  “It’s a good thing she decided to rescue a possum,” says Mr. Elliot. “They aren’t likely to carry rabies. Any other wild animal and this wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  “Still, she rescued it,” says Charlie. And he and his father nurse the possum back to health before Sunny’s knowing eyes.

  Autumn marches on and one day Charlie looks at the calendar and feels a prickle of concern. In a week RJ’s birthday will be here; in a week RJ should be turning fourteen. Charlie watches his parents—especially his mother—closely, but their faces do not harden and his mother’s laugh does not disappear, so Charlie relaxes. When RJ’s birthday finally dawns, Charlie enters the kitchen uncertainly. He sees that his brother’s chair is back at the table. “As a reminder,” says his mother. “This day shouldn’t go unnoticed.”

  Mrs. Elliot is quiet that day, and Mr. Elliot looks grim and stays longer at his job at the Daileys’ farm than Charlie had expected. But that is all that happens. By the time Charlie goes to bed the chair has been replaced in the hall, and Charlie thinks, We’ve had Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter and graduation and the Fourth of July without RJ, and now his birthday has passed too. Almost a year without RJ, only the first anniversary of his death left to observe in some way. When that day arrives, Charlie and his parents place flowers on RJ’s grave in the cemetery, and Mr. and Mrs. Elliot cry briefly, but Charlie thinks his mother still looks robust and is relieved when, upon returning home, she reminds him to finish his homework and offers to go over his spelling list with him.

  A year—a whole year—has now passed and somehow Charlie and his parents have walked through the dark woods and emerged into sunshine, Sunny at their sides.

  11. BONE

  After I left Mr. Bruce I ambled down the street, enjoying seeing close-up all the things that so far I had seen only from the windows of Franklin’s apartment and the windows of his car. Here were buildings (Franklin called them stores) with people hurrying in and out of their doors. Here were lots of cars, some moving and some standing still. Here were people, here were dogs, here were trees, here were cats in doorways, here were buses and trucks and motorcycles. (Franklin called motorcycles “belching machines” and gave them a wide berth when he approached them in his car.)

  What fun it was to be out among these things instead of looking at them through a pane of glass. I walked slowly, pausing frequently to sniff walls, sidewalks, trees, and fire hydrants. Each good long sniff told me a story, mostly about what other animals had visited the spot recently. I smelled dog, which was no surprise. I could see plenty of other dogs on the street, although they were all attached to leashes. I was the only one without a leash and a collar. But I could also smell cat and squirrel and possum and something else rodent-like that I couldn’t identify. This was very interesting.

  After taking a particularly long sniff at the base of an oak tree, I wandered over to the store buildings. I poked my nose through any open doorways I found. Most of the doors were closed, though, and the people on the sidewalk who opened them stamped their feet and said, “It’ll be good to get out of the cold.”

  I was about to pass yet another closed door when something caught the attention of my nose. It was a wonderful, tantalizing smell. I stuck my snout in the air and sniffed and sniffed. What was this place? I waited patiently by the door and hoped it would open, just as I had sat by Franklin’s door, hoping it would open. I didn’t have to wait long. Very soon a woman and two little girls walked by me, and the woman entered the store and held the door open for the girls. I scooted in behind them.

  Oh, these odors were better than the ones at the garbage heap at the Merrions’, or the kitchen at Thad and Isabel’s, or the pet food store to which Franklin had taken me, or even the dump. Inside glass cases I could see loaves of bread, trays of cookies, and rows of buns and cakes. The air was warm and carried the scents of butter and sugar and spices.

  If I couldn’t live with Franklin, maybe I could live here.

  I had just stepped up to one of the counters for a closer look at the things beyond the glass when a lady in an apron, who was loading even more goodies onto the shelves in the cases, called out in a very loud voice, “No dogs allowed! Please take your dog out of here. This is a food establishment.”

  The woman and the girls and several other people looked around and around until the lady in the apron said, this time more loudly, “Ma’am? Your dog?”

  The woman who had let me into the store said, “Me? That isn’t my dog.”

  “Well, whose is it?”

  When nobody said anything, the loud lady hustled around in front of the counter. “Let’s see where you belong, dog,” she said, and reached for the place where my collar should have been. She frowned. “Hmm. No collar. I suppose I should call somebody. You come here with me.” She tried to pull me behind the counter, but her hands did not feel gentle, and suddenly, as much as I wanted a piece of cake or a loaf of bread, I bolted toward the door. To my surprise it opened just as I reached it, and I squeezed my way past a family who were entering the bakery, and streaked down the street.

  I didn’t stop running until I reached what looked like the last of the store buildings. It was set apart from the others, and although I couldn’t catch any good scents wafting from it, I was hopeful that someone inside might offer me food or water. So I stood on my hind legs and gazed through the window. I could see shelves and counters holding small, glittery things like the ornaments Isabel wore on her fingers and wrists and ears and around her neck. A young man, very thin with wispy hair and a frown between his eyes, was sitting in a chair holding a book. He was the only one in the building. He glanced at me, then looked back at his book. When he glanced up again a bit later and saw that I was still gazing at him through the window, he slammed the book down and opened the door in a way that reminded me of George the morning he threw Squirrel and me out of the car.

  “Go on! Get!” he said, and he leaned over and swatted my rump with his book.

  I was very thirsty and had hoped that maybe I would find a bowl of water on his floor, but now I ran away from the man. I ran until I reached a corner, then I turned the corner and kept running until the store buildings were far behind me. The sky was beginning to grow dark and my paws were cold. I hadn’t noticed the cold on my brief jaunts into Franklin’s yard to pee, or on the short walk from Franklin’s apartment to his car, but now it seeped into the pads on the bottoms of my feet. I stood still for a bit and lifted my paws off the icy ground one at a time, but I didn’t feel any warmer. The wind was blowing now, rushing around me like Estelle the cat chasing her tail, and I began to shiver.

  I walked along a dark street, passing houses with lighted windows. I thought about trying to get inside one of the houses, but the memory of the man with the book was fresh, and so I kept walking and shivering, feeling my tongue grow dry and my belly start to rumble. When I reached what seemed to be the last house on the road I noticed a dish on the front stoop. Cautiously, I approached it. It was full of water. I took a long drink, but then I left the house behind and walked
until I reached woods. I found that in the woods there were no streetlights, no lights at all; nothing but trees and black blackness and me.

  I spent the night in those woods. I had never spent an entire night outdoors. At the Merrions’, Squirrel and I had slept in the shed, and after that I had been an indoor dog. But now I was outdoors and alone. And very, very cold. I tucked my nose under my tail. I pulled my feet to my belly. But my ears stung and I trembled and shook. And I heard nighttime sounds that kept me wakeful until the first rays of sunshine shimmered among the branches of the trees. I had been very aware that I was separated from the owls and raccoons and skunks, from the coyotes and fishers and other stray dogs, by the black blackness only, and that was no protection.

  In the morning, at first light, I rose to my feet and set off. I did not want to stay in the woods, so I followed my own scent (noting especially the spots where I had stopped to pee the day before) back to the road with the houses. Once I reached the houses, though, I didn’t know where to go.

  I began to feel nervous and soon I was running up and down the same street, back and forth, back and forth. I sniffed and ran and turned around and sniffed and ran and turned around again. I was panting, and my belly was emptier than it had ever, ever been.

  I heard a car on the street behind me and I scurried along the sidewalk and then across a lawn toward a house. I watched the car from a distance. It slowed down and stopped.

  “Come here, pooch!” A woman opened the car door and leaned out, extending her hand to me. “Here, pooch! Come here. I won’t hurt you.”

  I backed even farther away. And then I smelled meat. Turkey? Hamburger? I wasn’t sure and I didn’t care. I started to drool.

  “Come here, pooch,” said the woman again, and I realized that the meat was in her hand.

  I took several steps toward the car.

  “Good boy. Come on.”