Meredith rubs Abel’s small back the way you would caress a house cat and I realize I haven’t seen him with his hair so long, black and curly around his ears. Hon is as content to sit bolt upright on the ottoman as he was in the passenger seat of the car for three hundred miles. He is watching Abel watch him, his brown eyes on Abel’s blue eyes.
“So this is him?” Meredith asks and I realize that I haven’t ever once put a hand as gentle on Hon as she is on Abel. Not once since I took him out of the hospital. My finger’s play with the pilled edges of the armrests in the plump olive chair and I think about reaching out fro the scruff along his back, but I’m afraid he would notice that I was trying, perhaps too hard.
“Yeah,” I want to get up and ask her if she wants a glass of water in her own home, anything to get me out of the chair and into another room for a moment.
“He’s your dream dog.”
Meredith laughs and I can see the lines in her face move in the same way they did at the wedding, when I held Abel, and didn’t have a dog.
“ But I guess that’s not the reason I’m here anymore, huh?” I ask and Meredith picks Abel up by the armpits and sets him into her lap. Abel almost old enough to walk on his own and his fingers twitch towards Hon, but Hon doesn’t move from his spot.
“You have any idea where he would have left it? Closet or something?”
“Del, you think I’m some kind of absentee? I’ve checked everywhere. Even the closet.” He eyes are on Abel but her voice is firm and pressing hard on me.
“San had a lot of things that he kept to himself. I’d see money sometimes, pictures, and then he’d place them somewhere and I’d never see them again. But I found them all, in the backs of cupboards on in the rafters of the attic. I just haven’t found the gun. And I haven’t been able to sleep knowing that.”
She stops caressing Abel and he gurgles and bends at the waist towards Hon, his arms full out, smiling. Hon doesn’t move at all.
“I keep having this dream where Abel finds it beneath the sink and is sitting in the kitchen with it, holding it with both hands. I walk in and walk slow and Abel smiles, and his figures fidget around the metal, and I can’t breath as he hefts the gun up and it goes off.”
Hon’s ears go flat and for the first time he moves his head, looking out the side window into the wilderness outside, the tree line swaying in the wind.
“He never shoots himself Del, he always shoots me.”
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