…“MAX II. I’ll take good care of him. Promise.”
The letters were stamped unevenly, the way they come out of those engraving machines at the pet store. Linda and I stood over the grave, staring at it, while the wind pushed leaves across the yard.
“Someone knew him,” Linda said quietly. “Someone loved him.”
Then I noticed it: a small gap at the bottom of the back fence, half hidden by the hydrangeas. I had never seen it before. The dirt around it was packed flat, the way a path gets when something walks it every day.
On the other side of the fence lived the Alvarez family. They had moved in two years ago. I had waved to them maybe a dozen times. I didn’t even know their son’s name.
I knocked on their door that afternoon with the blue collar in my hand. A boy of about ten answered. When he saw what I was holding, his face crumpled.
His name was Eli. And for two years, without my knowing it, Max had been visiting him.
Every morning after I left for work, Max squeezed through the gap in the fence and spent hours in Eli’s backyard. Eli’s mother worked nights and slept during the day, and Eli was homeschooled after a hard year at his old school. Max was, in Eli’s words, “my best friend who didn’t make me talk.”
The blue collar had been Max’s original one. He lost it two summers ago, and I had replaced it with a new one, the one I buried him in. Eli had found the old collar in his yard and kept it in a shoebox under his bed, because he was afraid that if he gave it back, Max would stop coming.
When Max stopped coming in March, Eli didn’t know why. Nobody had told him. He waited by the fence for weeks.
“I saw you dig under the tree,” he said, looking at his shoes. “I figured it out.”
He’d gotten a puppy in September, a scruffy brown mix from the shelter. He named him Max II. The morning he finally worked up the courage to give the old collar back, he lost his nerve at my door and left it on Linda’s porch instead, thinking it was mine. He’d held it in his fist the whole walk over. That was why it was still warm.
Then he’d crawled through the fence one last time and left the puppy’s first collar on the grave, so Max would know he wasn’t being replaced.
I sat on the Alvarez family’s front steps and cried harder than I had at the vet’s office in March.
I didn’t fix the gap in the fence. Now it goes the other way. Every Saturday, Max II squeezes through into my yard, and Eli follows him, and we sit under the oak tree while the puppy digs holes I pretend not to see.
Eli told me last week that Max II isn’t as good at listening as the first Max was.
“Give him time,” I said. “Max wasn’t either, at first.”
