“THAT DOG HAS more lives than a cat,” I say to EJ.
“By now, it’s a long-established fact that you can’t kill Bumper. Though Lord knows she’s given us more than one shot at doing the deed.”
We’re at the table in her kitchen. I had no idea what she was cooking up for my first dinner back, but on the drive home I felt as if I could smell, and even taste, fried chicken and collard greens and fully loaded baked potatoes. This room, and this meal, feel even more like home than I remember.
Bumper, a border collie of indeterminate age, is at my feet. My father had rescued her from the shelter in the next town over when I was ten. We’d named her Misty when he’d brought her home. But the second time—or maybe it was the third—she’d dashed under the wheels of EJ’s Suburban and somehow managed not to end up with a single broken bone, she’d become Bumper.
Now my grandmother is pretending she doesn’t notice the pieces of chicken—cooked in her new air fryer, the skin crispy but not too crispy—I keep slipping Bumper under the table. It’s a game the three of us have played—her, me, the dog—for as long as I canremember, from the time it had become just the three of us at this table, and the family was just us.
“I swear I thought I’d taken her out this time,” I say to EJ. “But it’s like the old girl was playing possum. Like it’s a game with her. When I jumped out of the truck and started yelling her name, she came around from the back and hopped right into my arms and started licking my face.”
I wink at my grandmother.
“You know she still loves me more than she loves you, right?”
“Maybe because you still feed her from the table,” EJ says. “That old girl has got all the qualities a dog is supposed to have ’cepting loyalty.”
“To you, maybe. Not me.”
“Eat your greens,” she says.
Then EJ puts down her fork and takes a sip of her water and says, “I never thought you’d live full time under this roof ever again.”
“I forget who it was,” I say. “But somebody wrote one time that it’s life that’s a funny old possum.”
“And Mr. Robert Frost himself, my favorite, wrote that home is the place that, when you go there, they have to take you in,” she says. “Or words to that effect.”
I take a bite out of my last wing and tell her again that after all the fried chicken she’s made for me in my life, this is the best I’ve ever tasted.
Then I ask, “Are you suggesting that youhadto take me in?”
“You know better than that, young man.”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, ma’am, I do. Better than I know my own name.”
I offer to help clean the table, once required duty for me in this house. Just not tonight. When she’s finished with all that and the plates and glasses and silverware have been rinsed and placed in the dishwasher, I pass on both ice cream and coffee but stay where I am at the table while she fixes herself her nightly cup of tea.
When she sits back down, she asks, “How are you feeling, really, hon?”
“Like I’m the one whose nickname should be Zero.”
“You’re gonna be fine,” she says. “You just need more time to heal, and before you know it, you’ll be back to being yourself again.”
I motion her to lean forward then. I do the same. Even a small move like that across the table produces a quick stab of pain behind my shoulder.
I kiss her on the cheek.
“Thisismyself,” I say.
And just like that the toughest person in my life, including all the ones I’d played football with, quietly starts to cry, staring helplessly at me while she does, making no move to brush away the tears even as they keep coming, her eyes not leaving mine, making me the one who feels helpless now.
“This isn’t fair,” she says finally.
She slaps the table hard and yells, “Not fair!”
I look down and realize that my napkin is still in my lap. I hand it across to her. I notice Bumper is sitting up, alert, her gaze going from EJ to me and then back to EJ.
“Dad always told me, from the time I started playing ball, that nobody ever passed a law that sports is fair,” I say. “So I’m guessing the same must apply to life when sports gets taken away like this.”
