“They grew up to be crazy to look at. Some huge mix with wild hair like some kind of wolfhounds, or maybe those big long-haired sheepdogs. Or both. They were nothing like the two we lost, but maybe it’s better that way. They barked like crazy, and they grew up to be big, goony clowns, but we loved them. They liked to run with my dogs and me, and that’s what really mattered. To me, I mean. To Zoe, they stayed close to the cabin and made her feel safe.
“They were good dogs in their own way.
“Then she had two more sets after that.
“She had a pair of big dogs when your grandad Connor finally talked her into coming out of the woods and into town. He’d spent years trying to get her to take that spare bedroom his mother had left behind, but Zoe wasn’t having any of it. But then she got into her late seventies, and the strain of living out there in the middle of nowhere finally wore her down. There’s only just so long you can chop your own wood to stay warm and carry your own water from a hand-pump well. Time catches up with everybody. Even Zoe Dinsmore. She lived with your grandma and grandad for a decade, and it was a good decade. I can say that for a fact because I was there. Not living there, but there enough.
“She made peace with one of her daughters before all was said and done, but the other one never came around. Still, both daughters let her see her grandchildren, and that’s no small matter. And then she finally left the world at age eighty-nine. Quietly, at home. Just like her dogs. I thought Connor would be devastated. I thought Roy would be devastated. Hell, I figured it would kill me. But we were fully grown adults by then. We weren’t little boys anymore.
“That’s not to say that grown-ups don’t feel the pain of loss, or that being grown gets you out of a thing like grieving. All I’m saying is that we had her when we needed her the most—when we were scared and lost and all the grown-ups around us were letting us down.”
“That’s funny,” he says. But not really like it’s something you would laugh about.
“How so?”
“It just seems funny how all the grown-ups were always warning you about Grandma Zoe. Like she would hurt you somehow.”
“Right. Good point. And meanwhile they were damaging us every day without even knowing it. And it was Zoe who helped us come home to ourselves. Yeah. I guess that is funny. Here’s why we were more or less okay when she died. We had no good options when we met her. We didn’t have tools or skills to figure out the world, or get by in it. When she died of old age, we had more of that stuff. Because we’d gotten so much of it from her.”
“But then you never got married,” he said.
It’s one of those direct—bordering on rude—statements a grown-up would know better than to make. It’s also incorrect. I did get married. Twice. But both times were long before he was born.
“I got married twice,” I tell him, “but it never really took. They weren’t bad marriages, exactly, and the splits were amicable enough. I still talk to both my exes from time to time. I think we have these ideas about success and failure, and sometimes we fall into the trap of thinking one size fits all. Some guys like Connor were born to be family men. Then there are guys like me who do really well with a couple of good dogs. So that’s the way I went. I went with the couple of good dogs.”
Roy is on about his tenth club soda. An event like this is harder when you don’t drink. I should know, because I don’t drink around Roy. At all. After all these years, I’m sure he wouldn’t care if I did. But I care.
It’s just one of those things you do for your brother, out of respect.
Zoe and my brother Roy always had the same clean date in the program, which is a very weird thing for a guy to share with his sponsor. But they both started their time that night Zoe walked back into the meeting and got Roy to share for the first time, and they never messed it up and had to start over from scratch.
Zoe had a little more than thirty-five years clean and sober when she died.
That means my brother Roy has fifty years and counting.
He and I are talking partly about Connor and partly about Zoe Dinsmore. We have been for nearly an hour. Someone who didn’t know me so well might think I wasn’t taking Connor’s death all that hard. But Roy knows me. He knows it just hasn’t hit me yet. When Zoe died, it took me two weeks to get that she was really gone.
The kids are all in bed, even the teenager, and I’m thinking it might be close to that moment when we can make a gracious exit. But we haven’t done it yet.
“You think her old place is still standing out in the woods?” he asks me.
I’m more than a little bit surprised by the question.
“Yeah, of course it is. I go by it every day on my run.”
“Why do you take the same path every day?”
Roy is not a guy who would take the same path every day.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I just do. I thought you knew.”
“No, I knew you run every day. But I’m not out there following you, you know. I figured you mixed it up.”
“Be
