Free Dog Bless You by Neil S. Plakcy Page A

the warden notified me that my father had died I
don’t think I cried at all.
    I didn’t realize how much I missed my father until I returned
to Stewart’s Crossing, into the house full of memories. I kept wanting to ask
his advice, to watch him fix something. I hunted through the artifacts in the
garage, looking for old home movies, hoping I could hear his voice. But he was
gone for good.
    When we got home, I put a fresh bowl of water in Rochester’s
crate and tossed in a couple of chew toys. “Come on, boy, time to go into your
house,” I said, standing by the open door of the crate. “Come here.”
    Rochester was a pretty well-behaved dog. But he was
still only two years old and he had his wild moments, and though he slept in my
bedroom at night, and had the run of the house while I was around, I was afraid
that if I left him in the house on his own, I’d come home to mayhem and
destruction.
    He was sprawled on the floor about ten feet from me,
his head resting on the tile. “Come on, Rochester, let’s go.” He ignored me. I
walked over and grabbed a handful of fur and flesh between his shoulders—where
I’d been told his mother would have gotten hold of him as a pup. He resisted, splaying
his paws on the tile floor.
    “I’m only going to be gone a little while,” I said.
    He looked up at me with his big brown eyes, as if to
promise he’d be good on his own. “Will you be a good boy?” He thumped his tail
a couple of times, and I gave in. “All right. But if you make a mess you’re in
big trouble.”
    He rolled on his side and yawned, and I walked out to
my car.
    My hometown is still compact, with a single traffic
light at the corner of Main and Ferry Streets, and a cluster of one- and
two-story buildings that date back to the colonial era, when the Stewart family
ran a ferry service across the Delaware. I grew up in a suburban neighborhood
about a mile south of downtown, and I used to ride my bike into town after school
to buy candy at the five and dime, to check books out of the gingerbread
Victorian library by the lake, or sit on the banks of the lazy, slow-moving
canal and daydream about places that canal could take me, if I only had a mule
and a barge.
    River Antiques occupied a restored barn that had once
served as a way station for mules traveling on the canal, which ran from Easton
down to Bristol. It had been a feed store when I was a kid and the countryside
around Stewart’s Crossing was still peppered with farms. Mark had bought it a few
years before, after his grandmother died and left him a houseful of antique
furniture and a business opportunity.
    I parked at a spot on Ferry Street a block away and
walked up to the store. The bell over the door jangled as I walked in, and the
door from the back opened. I was surprised that it wasn’t Mark Figueroa who
appeared, but Owen Keely, my neighbor’s son. He was tanned and fit and
something about his ramrod-straight posture seemed out of place when surrounded
by doilies and delicate statuettes. He wore cargo shorts, sneakers, and a
T-shirt that read “Don’t Bro Me if You Don’t Know Me.”
    For a moment I worried that I’d interrupted him in the
middle of a robbery, but then I stopped myself. “Hi, Owen. I didn’t know you
worked here.”
    “Just part time. It’s been hard to find something
regular.”
    I nodded. “Yeah, I’ve been reading about how tough it
is for vets to find work after they get out. It’s a real shame.”
    “Especially vets who get screwed up in the service,” he
said. He leaned on the counter. “I got hooked on crystal meth in the Army, and
they kicked me out for it. Went to the VA for a while trying to get rehab but
they’re swamped. My parents ended up sending me to a private place to get
cleaned up.” He shrugged. “But people, you know? They just look at the
dishonorable discharge and the drugs and stuff, and they don’t want to take the
chance. There’s plenty of vets who don’t have my troubles who