Breathless by Dean Koontz Page B

Sneakers, his head in her lap. With her right hand, she tenderly, ceaselessly stroked the dog’s head.
    His mom didn’t know Grady stood in the doorway. The dog surely knew, but he would not turn from the woman’s consoling hand.
    Grady could think of nothing to say. As quietly as if he were the ghost of a boy, he retreated from the kitchen, returned to bed.
    A few nights later, waking at one in the morning, he silently went downstairs and found her as before, with the dog.
    He stood for a while in the doorway, unannounced. It felt right that he should be with her yet at this distance, watching over her as she stared through the window at the night.
    During the next month, he joined her a few more times, as silent and unnoticed as a guardian spirit. When he returned to his bed, he always wondered when his mother slept. Perhaps she didn’t.
    One night he went downstairs and found the hall lamp off. His mother wasn’t in the kitchen, nor was Sneakers.
    Grady assumed that she had changed her routine. He, too, was sleeping better than in the weeks immediately after his dad’s death.
    A year passed before he again discovered her and Sneakers at the kitchen table, in the dark. She had never entirely stopped coming here in the emptiest hours. Perhaps she came more nights than not.
    This time he said, “Mom,” and went to her side. He touched her shoulder. She reached up and took his hand in hers. After a moment, he said, “Do you think … he’ll come to visit?”
    She had the softest voice: “What? A ghost? No, sweetheart. This is my past and future window. When I want my past, I see your father working out there in the vegetable garden.”
    They grew tomatoes, carrots, cucumbers, radishes, and more, for their own use.
    Grady sat at the table with her.
    “When I want my future,” she continued, “I see you tall and handsome and grown, with a family of your own. And I see myself with your dad again, in a new world without struggle.”
    “Don’t be sad,” Grady said.
    “Oh, honey, I’m not sad. Have I ever seemed sad to you?”
    “No. Just … here like this.”
    “When I say I see myself with your dad again, I’m not saying that I wish it. I mean I truly see it.”
    Grady peered through the window and saw only the night.
    “Believing isn’t wishing, Grady. What you know with your heart is the only thing you really ever know.”
    By then she had taken a job in the office of the lumber mill. She spent five days a week where Paul died. They needed the money.
    For a long time, Grady was concerned about her working at the mill. He thought she suffered the constant reminder of the twisted spikes and the broken saw blade.
    He came to understand, however, that she liked the job. Being at the mill, among the people who had worked with Paul, was a way of keeping the memory of her husband sharp and clear.
    One Saturday when he was fourteen, Grady came home from apart-time job to discover that Sneakers had died. His mom had dug the grave.
    She had prepared the body for burial. She wrapped the beloved dog in a bedsheet, then in the finest thing she owned, an exquisite Irish-lace tablecloth used only on Thanksgiving and Christmas Day.
    Grady found her sitting on the back-porch steps, cradling the shrouded body, weeping, waiting for him. Two people were required to put Sneakers in the grave with respect and gentleness.
    As the summer sun waned, they lowered the dog to his rest. Grady wanted to shovel the earth into the grave, but his mom insisted she would do it. “He was so sweet,” she said. “He was so sweet to me.”
    Determined to be strong for him, she never allowed Grady to see her crying for his father. She couldn’t hide her tears for the dog.
    His father had given her the dog. On lonely nights, the dog had grieved with her. Now she’d lost Sneakers, but in a way, she had also lost her husband again.
    Later, Grady sat with his mom in the dark kitchen. The dog’s grave lay in a direct line with the window, at