A Three Dog Life Read Online Free

and again in stories I never finish. I remember bathtubs with iron ball-and-claw feet, a gas fire, a kitchen with (I think) a cream and green enamel stove at which my grandma made three different kinds of meat for Thanksgiving. She also beat an egg into a small glass of sherry for my grandfather to drink every day, a ritual we children were fascinated to watch. In the backyard was an oak planted when my father was born, and over a cement wall in the way back was the Long Island Rail Road. I know the house disappeared years and years ago, but I want to find the bit of wall we peered over, and down what was probably not so steep and long an embankment as I recall, to watch the passing trains. I stare out the window every time we go through Flushing. Long gone the radiators that my grandma banged on every morning to wake her five children. Long gone the smell of baking bacon. Long gone and dispersed that family. But I remember the smell of the gas fire, the stairs that led to the second and third floors. The slate sidewalks we roller-skated on around and around the block. "Flushing, Main Street," the conductor calls out every time, but I can't find the place that matches my memory. Sometimes I imagine my father sitting next to me on the train. He doesn't say anything, what can anyone say? But his presence comforts me for a while.
    By the time I have reached the hospital, Rich is waiting for lunch. There is no memory of Pago Pago. He is happy to see me and he wants toast. He stands in front of the large metal trays that usually contain food, holding his hands above them, checking to see if they are getting hot. He looks under the counter, touches a few things, holds his hands again over the trays. "This is where it comes from," he explains to me. I show him the toaster then, but he is stubborn. "It will come in a minute," he says. "This is where it comes from." Soon the techs who make lunch arrive and Rich sits down at the table. We eat our chicken cutlet sandwiches together in the community dining room. He eats well, two sandwiches, all the potato salad, seven or eight graham crackers. His beard is white, his head often bowed. He doesn't look like himself anymore, but I am growing used to the man he has become. He is tired so we take a nap together in his bedroom. "My narrow bed, narrower after lunch," he says, and we lie down together. After half an hour Rich gets up and I hear him repeatedly opening and closing the drawers in his small dresser. "I'm looking for a blanket to cover you with," he says.
    Tonight home is another restaurant in my neighborhood, as familiar as grass, little candles burning on every table, lots of people leaning toward each other, talking their heads off. I like this. I sit by myself at the window. I know every inch of the sidewalk, all the stores—it's where I want my ashes scattered after all—starting here at 112th Street down to H&H Bagels on 81st and Broadway. Across the street I can see the pale blue and purple neon of the Deluxe Diner, the yellow lights of Pertutti's, where my husband and I used to eat several times a week. On the corner is Tom's, bad food but famous because of
Seinfeld.
It's getting to be spring. I order another Manhattan although I am already where I want to be, in that dappled place that precedes inebriation. When I go home I will look at the bookcases my husband and I bought thirteen years ago and remember with what relish he tore down the homemade shelves installed by an old boyfriend (a hundred nails in every foot of wood). He painted the bathroom a pale pink, canceling the crazy electric blue someone else had made it years ago. He was making his mark, erasing traces of other periods in my life, the outward and visible manifestations that troubled him and worried his aesthetic. Under his happy and relieved gaze I threw out my deep plush armchairs, one purple, the other a deep royal blue. Their springs were sprung and their arms were balding but they reminded me of