The remote control was sticky. It always got sticky around five o’clock when the humidity came up through the floorboards of the den and settled on the plastic buttons like dew. I had a slice of meatloaf on a chipped Corelle plate in my left hand and a glass of warm tap water in my right, and my knees were aching in that deep, grinding way that usually meant a cold front was moving down from Michigan.
Buster was sitting right on the gray tweed ottoman, facing the Zenith box like he owned the deed to the property.
He had his front paws planted square on the edge, his tail completely still. Walter Cronkite was off the air twenty years, but whoever was reading the evening roundup had that same flat, nasal drone that used to put my dad to sleep on the sofa after a double shift at the stamping plant.
I didn’t think much of it until the anchor mentioned the grain prices down in Cincinnati and Buster let out a dry, rattling cough that sounded less like a dog clearing his throat and more like an old man commenting on the weather.
“They’re gouging on the soy again,” Buster said.
His mouth barely moved. Just that low, gravelly baritone coming straight out from under his graying muzzle.
I stopped dead right there between the floor lamp and the end table. The Corelle plate tilted. A drop of ketchup rolled off the meatloaf and hit the carpet with a dull little plop, right on the old stain from the cherry Kool-Aid incident back in ninety-four.
“Buddy,” I said. My voice sounded thin, like tissue paper tearing. “What are you watching?”
“The news,” Buster said. He didn’t even turn his head. His brown eyes stayed locked on the flickering screen where some senator was waving a sheaf of papers.
My brain didn’t gear down. It just stripped the teeth right off the transmission. I stood there holding the meatloaf, staring at the back of his brown head, waiting for the studio audience to jump out from behind the armchair or for my neighbor Dale to pop his head through the window with a walkie-talkie. Dale pulled that kind of stupid prank back when we were forty, but Dale had knee replacements now and didn’t climb through bushes anymore.
“Wait,” I croaked. I dropped the plate on the coffee table so hard the water glass jumped an inch. “You can talk?”
Buster finally glanced over his shoulder. He gave me that heavy, weary look my uncle Arthur used to give me whenever I asked how to check the transmission fluid for the third time.
“Of course,” he said.
I backed up until the back of my knees hit the edge of the kitchen doorway. The linoleum felt cold through my socks. I didn’t yell. You don’t yell when the fabric of reality starts unravelling right next to the La-Z-Boy. You whisper, or you run, or you stand there like an idiot waiting for someone to reset the simulation.
I spun around and caught the edge of the kitchen counter. “Helen!” I screamed. My voice cracked on the second syllable, hitting a pitch I hadn’t used since I stepped on a rusted rake tine behind the garage in the summer of eighty-eight.
Helen came out of the back pantry with a yellow sponge in her hand. She had that little streak of Comet cleanser right across her left cheek where she’d wiped her face while scrubbing the grout around the flour bin. She stopped by the refrigerator, her eyebrows pulled together into that sharp little V she got whenever I tracked mud across her newly waxed kitchen floor.
“Keep it down, Arthur,” she said, not even looking up from the sponge. “I’m trying to get the grease off the back burner before the pilot light goes out again.”
“The dog,” I gasped, grabbing the edge of the toaster like it was a life raft. “The dog in the den. He’s talking.”
Helen didn’t drop the sponge. She didn’t freeze. She just let out a long, slow sigh through her nose, the kind that meant I’d left the garage door open during a thunderstorm or forgotten to take the trash cans down to the curb before the garbage truck turned the corner.
“I know,” she said.
The silence that came down over the kitchen was heavier than the one in the den. It was the kind of quiet you get when the power goes out in the middle of a blizzard and you realize the furnace isn’t going to click back on until morning.
“What do you mean, you know?” I managed. My hands were shaking so hard the toaster rattled against the tile. “You knew? You knew he could talk?”
Helen tossed the sponge into the sink. It landed with a wet, heavy thud. She wiped her hands on her floral dishtowel, taking her time with each finger, smoothing the fabric over her knuckles just like her mother used to do after Sunday potluck.
“He’s been talking for five years, Arthur,” she said, leaning her hip against the edge of the laminate counter. “Ever since we put the new cable box in. You were too busy grumbling about the remote to notice.”
My knees felt like warm tallow. “Five years? He told you about the soy prices? He told you about the bypass construction?”
“He told me the mailman was skimming the circulars back in eighteen,” Helen said evenly. “And he was right. We didn’t get a single coupon for three months until that kid transferred to the east route.”
I turned on my heel and stumbled back toward the den archway. Buster was still sitting there on the tweed ottoman, watching a commercial for laundry detergent with a look of mild professional contempt.
I grabbed the doorframe with both hands. “Why didn’t you ever tell me?!” I yelled down at him.
Buster let out a soft huff through his nose, shifted his weight to his left hip, and gave me a look that made me feel like I was twelve years old and had just tried to explain to my shop teacher why I brought home a three-legged footstool.
“You never asked,” he said.
The simplicity of it hit me square in the chest. Not once in five hundred Saturdays had I looked down at that dog and thought to ask his opinion on the middle east or the price of beef chuck. I threw him scraps of fat-trimmed ribeye and told him he was a good boy while scratching him behind the left ear until my arm cramped. I treated him like furniture with a heartbeat.
I lowered myself slowly onto the edge of the brown plaid sofa, the springs groaning beneath my weight. The television was showing a close-up of a blue sedan driving down a winding coastal highway.
“What else can you do?” I whispered. I didn’t even care how pathetic I sounded. The floor was gone. Gravity was optional.
Buster turned his head all the way around, his tail giving one sharp, deliberate thump against the tweed cushion. A little smile seemed to curl the corner of his black leather nose.
“I can drive,” he said.
I jumped up so fast my left knee popped like a dry twig. “No way! That’s it. That is enough. Dogs don’t drive. Dogs chase squirrels and throw up on the braided rug after they eat june bugs.”
Before I could reach down to grab his collar, Buster hopped off the ottoman with the agility of a three-year-old pup. He trotted past me into the short hallway with a brisk, purposeful click-clack of claws on hardwood.
I followed him, half-stumbling over the edge of the hallway runner.
He didn’t head for the back door or the pantry. He trotted straight to the cherry wood key rack by the front door where Helen hung her apron and I kept my spare house keys and the brass fob for the station wagon. He stood up on his hind legs, balanced like a circus bear for three whole seconds, and neatly hooked his front paw through the loop of the blue leather lanyard holding the ignition key to our ninety-eight Buick LeSabre.
He pulled it free with a sharp little tug. The brass jingled against the wall.
He dropped back down to all fours, the key hanging securely from the side of his mouth, clamped gently between his molars. He turned around, his tail wagging in a slow, rhythmic metronome beat, and walked right past my shins toward the front door handle.
“Hold on!” I shouted, diving forward and grabbing the doorknob just as his paw came up to bat at the deadbolt latch. “You can’t just take the Buick! You don’t have a license! You don’t even have thumbs!”
Buster stopped. He let the key slide out of his mouth just enough to catch it by the very tip of the leather strap, letting it dangle like a pocket watch on a chain. He looked up at me with those big, liquid brown eyes that had watched me cry through my brother’s funeral and scream at the television during the nineteen-eighty-four World Series.
“I’m not paying for gas,” he said.
Then he pushed the front door open with his nose and stepped out onto the porch.
Helen didn’t even come out of the kitchen. I heard her turn on the faucet, the water roaring into the stainless steel basin to scrub away the Comet, drowning out the sound of the Buick’s driver-side door swinging open in the gravel driveway.
I stood there in the front hall with my hand on the empty brass hook, listening to the afternoon breeze rustle the lilac bushes outside, waiting for the starter motor to turn over.
