The roses were the spot.
My grandmother planted them the year my mother sent me up here for the first summer. She told me, when I was eight, that they bloomed blue if you fed the soil right and pink if you let it go alkaline, and that hers had been blue for thirty years because she paid attention.
She paid attention to a lot of things.
Duke dug under the biggest one.
Astrid held the flashlight.
I went inside.
My grandmother's quilt was on the back of the couch. She'd pieced it together herself out of old flannel, a quilt for the winter she stopped going out as much. Penny slept on it as a puppy. Penny slept on it last week.
I lifted it off the couch.
I knelt on the kitchen rug, wrapped her in it the way my grandmother wrapped me in it on the couch the summer I was nine and had the flu. Tucked it around her shoulders, around her tail. Lifted her, quilt and all, against my chest, and carried herout into the backyard the same way I'd carried her in from the truck the first night she was my dog and not my grandmother's.
The hole was deep enough.
Duke stepped back from it.
I went down on one knee and laid her in.
I stayed there a beat.
Astrid was behind me with the flashlight on the ground at her feet, the beam pointing up at the underside of the rose leaves so the light came down on us softly. Duke had the spade upright in the dirt, both hands at the top of the handle, head down.
I put my hand on the quilt at the top of her head one more time.
"Bye, Pen."
Nobody moved. Duke's head was still down. Astrid hadn't shifted the light. They were giving me the moment the way good people gave you a moment, without making you ask for it or feel watched while you had it.
I stood up.
Duke filled the hole. He did it in slow, careful shovels. When he was done, he tamped the dirt down with the back of the spade and laid a flat river stone on top of it.
He set the spade against the side of the house, brushed his hands on his jeans, came over, and put his arm around the back of my neck. The grip a man uses on another man at a thing like this. He didn't speak. He squeezed once. He let go.
"You good for tonight, brother?"
"Yeah."
"Call me if you're not."
"I will."
He looked at Astrid. He looked at me.
"I'll get the back gate."
He went around the side of the house. The gate latch clicked behind him. His truck door. The engine started. We heard thesound of him pulling out of the driveway, turning down Maple, and then he was gone.
Astrid hadn't moved.
The flashlight was still on the ground between us. The beam was still pointing up at the leaves.
"Do you want me to go, too?" she said. Quiet.
