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Once I bought the dog, there was no turning back. Even a get-well beanie-baby bloodhound from the hospital gift shop becomes an imperative for me: he must now be delivered to the woman who shared Mom’s hospital room, even though Mom’s back home healthy and I’m just here for paperwork. The dog cajoles me that his faultless sniffer can track a few tumor cells per billion, so I follow him to six and a right off the elevator, and sure enough, outside Gloria’s door, her husband is collapsed in a chair weeping, and my shabby gesture feels like flowers to her funeral. Dearly beloved, I’ll say, Gloria—if I have her name right—the oldest of seven siblings, never felt the need to bear children because, she told my Mom, she had raised her brothers and sisters. Wasn’t she special. Over several dreary afternoons, while Mom (Bed One) chatted with callers about their bouquets, Gloria (Bed Two) raged to me against her brain, brain surgeons, hospital indignities, and about her “kids,” who were too put out to visit her this lifetime, and about her job at the diner and the waitresses who wished her well and who had sent the punny card with the little dog who said: Heal! Back to today. The trail has led the dog and me to Gloria’s door. Her husband, weepy but chipper, tells me: Go on in. Take ten minutes for me. She’s alert and expectant. And when I see she sees it’s only me, I wish I were all six of them bursting in with trivial gossip and thoughtless positivity, but I and the little dog who knows better than anyone else what’s going on inside her head will have to do. She hugs us like a mother to my own sweet mother’s son.
Original Copyright © February 25, 2007
Revised Copyright © March 03, 2026
This car is too big for our abbreviated family. Dad drives, and I sit in the back where he can see me, as if I would budge, just the two of us since the accident that reduced us by half. Beside him is empty. Beside me too. He has a metaphorical way of holding the wheel at twelve o’clock with his left hand backwards like he’s itching for a hard right or fighting a skid, like he’s shaking his fist at whatever’s ahead, ready to flip the bird. Equally newsworthy, his favorite parking space is alongside any unattended female, and we always find ourselves in the checkout line with the cutest cashier. I learn what I observe, not what I’m told. It’s clever for a man his age to tell them what we’re up to, to frame himself as a single dad buying game cartridges with his son. When they smile, if it’s at him, he appreciates me with gum and batteries. Just once he should tell them why he’s single and who was driving if not drunk then nearly, and who was climbing over the seat to be with him when we ran into a barricade that was meant to stay put and did. We saved no one, Dad and I. We flew through the moon roof like dollar-store superheroes with the wrong set of skills. I would have been belted in, like now, like Mom and Junior were. Dad never believed in them. The belts, I mean. He doesn’t look at the passenger seat. He doesn’t look at me. But if he has to brake suddenly, which happens a lot, he reaches back to restrain Junior, while I’m the one sitting here. I don’t get it. The living were always better off without Dad’s kind of protection.
Original Copyright © February 21, 2007
Revised Copyright © February 23, 2026
Very Short Novels 