“You’re not supposed to tell your friends the truth,” Ray, a boy of ten, said to Lucy, his golden retriever, who was the best listener in his entire world. She’d stare back at him and pant in agreement at anything he said. “At least not when it’s the real truth of why you think they do the things they do. You’re supposed to keep it secret because they’re not gonna want to hear that part.”

           The two of them were sitting on the grass in the backyard, and Ray talked to her as he brushed her. Lucy was blowing her winter coat, and they were surrounded with so much loose fur he’d brushed from her that it looked as if they were seated on a picnic blanket made of yellow blond mohair. Every now and then the breeze would lift a tuft of fur into the air and carry it up and over the fence into the neighbor’s yard. He hoped the neighbor liked dogs.

           Ray pulled the fur from the brush and added it to the rest. “Boy, Lucy, we could make a wig for dad out of all this.” He put a handful on her head. “Or one for Mom in case she goes bald like Grandma. She’d like being a blonde. You like it.”

            Ray’s mom and dad thought he and his sisters were too young to notice or under-stand the things they didn’t want them to see, like the hard looks they gave each other when Ray or one of his sisters came into the room when they were speaking in hushed voices that somehow were louder than any shout. But Ray noticed and he understood. His mom and dad liked to drink, wine from the box, light beer that defeated its purpose when they drank twice as much of it, and sometimes hard stuff on weekends, but Ray’s dad had gone away on a trip and since getting back a few days ago he hadn’t been drinking. But his mom had. She kept at it like she hadn’t noticed, and when his dad made a point to say he wasn’t going to have anything when she was opening the tap on a new box of Riesling, she gave him a look as if he’d betrayed and abandoned her to raise three kids she didn’t want to have much to do with. She hated their constant need, their constant questions. She was hiding from too much pain of her own for their questions to simply be questions. Each one was a potential opener to a lid she was trying desperately to keep on.

             Once Ray had asked, “Do you love Dad?”

             “Of course I do. That’s why we got married.”

               But Ray’s older sister had told him otherwise. “Cynthia says you got married because you got pregnant with her.”

His mom’s voice quickly snapped from patronizing to angry. “Cynthia doesn’t know what she’s talking about. She needs to mind her own business and keep her mouth shut.”

               “She said she did the math.”

                 She called Cynthia a little bitch under her breath. She said it quietly so Ray wouldn’t hear, but he did, and if she’d been honest with herself, she’d wanted him to hear. She’d never liked her eldest child and felt huge amounts of guilt over it. She thought a mother was supposed to love her children and she thought she was a bad person for feeling so little when her daughter was born. She hated feeling that way, like something was wrong with her, so she hid it from herself and grew cold toward Cynthia even as she gave birth to her son and youngest daughter. As Cynthia grew older she sought the approval that her mother wouldn’t give her, and the hurt and frustration at not getting it grew into anger and defiance until the two of them openly undermined each other. Once when the fighting got bad, Ray asked his mother if she loved his sister, and she felt so exposed and guilty that her only safe recourse was to fly into a rage of indignation and send him to his room. How could he ask such a question? she’d called after the cowed boy, but he knew why he would and so did she. Everyone did except maybe the youngest. A mother didn’t have to love her children just because they were her children, but she couldn’t accept that and hated herself for it and took her hate out on her daughter until the hate was mutual.

            She’d seen a program on television about dogs and at one point they talked about a mother eating her young and it struck such a chord with her that just for a brief moment it cut through all the lies she’d told herself, all the glasses of wine she’d drank to keep a lid on her feelings, and she admitted to herself that she’d never wanted to have kids and had never wanted to marry the man she married and she hated everything about her life. But it was a short lived admission. She drowned it in wine and by morning it was again deeply buried among the lies that propped up her self-image.

              What had gotten Ray in trouble this time and sent out to the yard to groom Lucy had been another question about love. Like his older sister he had uncovered another uncomfortable truth. His mom had been picking at her morning grapefruit, feeling more hung over than usual and pretending it didn’t show like she’d learned to do from her own mother, when Ray had asked, “Have you stopped loving Dad because he doesn’t drink with you anymore?” If her husband gave up drinking it put her own drinking in far too bright of a light. She resented always being made out to be the bad guy. Now she was being bad for drinking, but she couldn’t imagine her life without it. The idea filled her with such panic she literally could not even think of giving it up.

             Ray cleared the brush of more fur again. Lucy was shedding so much he could pull little tufts free from her flanks and hind legs. “But I can tell you the truth, can’t I girl?”

             Lucy panted contentedly.

             Ray’s mother appeared at the back door. “Come one, Ray. It’s time to take Lucy to the vet.”

            “The vet? What for?”

             “She’s gonna get fixed.”

             “What do you mean?”

              Instead of explaining, she just got short. “That dog is not having puppies. Ever. You hear me?”





                                 
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