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After that, it was just the three of us. Benji slept outside Angie’s door, then outside mine, as if he couldn’t decide which one of us needed guarding more. He was the last living thing in our home that had belonged to the man we loved.
On moving day eight months ago, Benji vanished. We searched every street and called his name until Angie fell asleep in the passenger seat with dried tears on her face. Without his collar, without anything to mark him as ours, Benji was simply gone.
Now I held him again and finally understood: it wasn’t those kids pulling Angie away from me. The girl I thought I was losing had, in her own stubborn teenage way, been trying to give me something back.
The blond girl sat beside me. “We found him at a shelter in your old town this morning. Someone had found him in the woods two days ago and brought him there, and the cleft in his ear was what made us sure it was really him.”
Benji was simply gone.
I laughed through tears. “I used to say he looked like he’d been born mid-argument.”
Angie used to laugh at that. The memory hit so hard that I had to stop speaking.
“Why didn’t she tell me?” I finally asked.
“Because she wanted it to be a surprise,” the dark-haired boy said.
“And because she was scared of failing,” the blond girl added.
“She really loved you, Miss Mabel,” one of the boys said.
“I know,” I nodded. “I just didn’t know this.”
“Why didn’t she tell me?”
My eye landed on an old photograph on the mantel. Two years ago, Angie had curled against me on the couch and said, “One day, we’re taking Benji to the mountains. Just us. Just like Dad used to take us.”
I looked at the dog in my lap and realized that promise had not gone with her.
***
The next morning, I took Benji to the mountains. Not alone. I called those kids back.
When they arrived, they stood nervously in the doorway. Instead of hesitating, I opened the door wide. “She wanted to go with all of you too, didn’t she?”
The blond girl started crying immediately. The boy with glasses just nodded.
We drove with the windows cracked so Benji could push his nose into the cold air. At the overlook, wind moved through the pines, and the sky was clean blue. Benji ran ahead in messy circles, waiting for all of us to catch up.
“She wanted to go with all of you too, didn’t she?”
I watched my daughter’s friends throw a stick for the dog she had searched for until her last day.
“I’m sorry,” I said. All four turned. “I blamed you because I couldn’t bear where else the pain belonged. That wasn’t fair.”
The dark-haired boy shook his head. “You lost your daughter.”
“And you lost your friend,” I replied.