Child of My Heart by Alice McDermott

inside the yard with them—literally fell on them, like half wit hillbillies chasing a greased pig, going down on them chest first, their arms spread, and then rolling in the grass as the dogs, with surprising speed and presence of mind, and even a bit of a growl, scooted away. I had to raise my voice (to the boys, not the dogs) to restore order, and then I got both boys and both dogs and Daisy to sit in a circle on the lawn. The poor Scotties were panting by then, and Petey and Tony seemed to be panting, too, with love and desire and their wild blue-eyed affection for all creatures they could pet or caress and, often in the same gesture, hurt. I let Petey sit beside one (Angus, I think; I never could tell them apart) and Tony beside the other (Rupert) and watched them gently stroke their dogs for a few minutes, the dogs quickly growing accustomed to the long, soothing strokes, if not to the little-boy faces hanging beside theirs, hovering as if to plant a kiss. At one point Tony slipped his arm around the dog and tried to pull it into his lap, but I stopped him. These were not really old dogs, I explained, but they had really old owners, and if the boys were not calm they might very well end up with a nose bitten off. I guided their hands over the tops of the dogs’ heads and down their backs.
    “Nice and calm,” I said. Then I introduced Daisy, and the two boys gazed at her out of their trance of affection.
    “My cousin.
    She’s here to help me for the summer.”
    “Hi,” they said, and then Petey added, “I like your shoes,” something of both larceny and lechery in his voice, a tone aided and abetted no doubt by the pirate patch of a black eye. Petey was maybe nine or ten that summer, and had only recently gotten over his habit of asking me, at constant three-minute intervals, “Do you like me?”
    “Do you like my brother?”
    “Do you like my mom?”
    “Do you like me?” He was the neediest of the Moran kids, and they were a needy lot.
    Twice in the past year he had spent the night under the hedge outside my bedroom window, and twice my parents had considered calling Child Services about him. But he was well fed and went to school and his cuts and scrapes and bruises were no different from any of the cuts and scrapes and bruises of his siblings, all of which seemed to be the product of bad luck and ill timing, accident and fate. When I asked Petey what he’d done to his eye, Tony explained for him that he had been running around with two juice glasses on his face, pretending they were binoculars, and had smashed right into a door jamb.
    “You must have been going pretty fast,” I said.
    “He said he was chasing the last remaining looney bird on earth,” Tony said.
    “And who was the looney bird?” I asked Petey.
    He bowed his head.
    “Baby June,” he said, and then, abashed, buried his face in Angus’s (or Rupert’s) neck. Surprisingly enough, the dog, still panting, tolerated it, even thumped his tail a bit and raised one paw as if to stay balanced. Perhaps he realized that in all his eight years at the Richardsons ’, he’d never been quite so necessary. I leaned across the grass and put a hand on Petey’s prickly head.
    “Perfectly understandable,” I said, hoping it would mean, “I like you, Petey.”
    When boys and dogs seemed properly subdued, I gave the ends of the leashes to Daisy and, standing slowly, walked back into the house. I gathered our beach things and made our sandwiches—all the while glancing out the window to make sure everything was all right, because with the Moran kids, you could never be sure. But the dogs were lying in the grass by now, the boys still stroking their coats, and it seemed Petey and Tony and Daisy were actually having some kind of conversation.
    Daisy was idly braiding the leashes together, nodding, and Tony was slowly pulling at the grass as he talked. I wondered if they were commiserating—about too many siblings and harried parents and a family