Gravedigger's Cottage by Chris Lynch Page A

squinched his face all up, like he was exasperated with me. He could be a real little old man sometimes.
    “Yes,” he said, “I am.”
    “Good. Then that’s settled. Let’s go home and I’ll make you and Dad and me hot chocolate.”
    He started walking ahead of me. He picked up a decent-sized piece of blue sea glass. He showed it to me. It wasn’t completely worn the way the best sea glass should be—the edges were still kind of shiny and dangerous—but it was a beautiful cobalt blue and close enough for what you can find of sea glass anymore since people got all good and conservationist and insufficiently conscious of sea glass.
    “I’m going to the bonfire,” he said to me firmly, and turned to walk on.
    Must have been the new house, the new situation, making Walter McLuckie bolder and more adventurous than ever before. Maybe living in the Gravedigger’s Cottage was making him feel like he had some kind of new powers.
    Because this was a tall statement. For one thing, this bonfire—well after dark, without any adults present—was not even possibly the kind of thing Dad would say okay to. And that would mean doing it on the sly.
    Walter McLuckie was never a sly guy.
    And it would also mean doing it without me, because I wasn’t doing it.
    “Well, I’m not,” I said.
    “Fine,” he said.
    Not fine. Not fine at all.

Tank
    T ANK WAS THE I-dare-you-to-kill-this indestructible pet gift I got from Dad.
    It was a dare that should never have been made.
    He was a sturdy tortoise, no doubt about that. He was stepped on a good many times, old Tank was, but he’d just suck himself up and wait for the danger to pass, then be on his way again. He ate greens—dark lettuce, spinach, broccoli, asparagus, snow peas, green beans. If they were a little bit wilted, he was okay with that. He had a particular fondness for green peppers which, if I chopped them up really small for him, he would eat with the gusto of a starved dog.
    He ran for green peppers. He would smell them from his little nap area, which was a long pine box that once had a bottle of wine in it, and he would just bolt like a thoroughbred toward his bowl.
    I may be exaggerating. I may, in the glow of hindsight, in the afterglow of Tank’s afterlife, be making his achievements more notable than they actually may have been.
    But he was great. He didn’t gallop, maybe, but he really did charge after his green peppers. He was like a perfect child. Ate exactly the best things without a peep. Couldn’t even make a peep if he wanted to, although he wasn’t silent. I used to take him up and put him on me while I slumped extra far back on the couch in front of the TV. He would climb up my sweater, working so hard, his determined pointed beak pushing on up the mountain of me, then through the tangle of my hair, then around my neck as he searched for a better place to be. Then I would scoop him up, hold him to my ear, and listen to him.
    The tiniest little breaths. Huh-huh-huh, he would go, right in my ear. Only audible if I had his head basically placed right inside my ear. Huh-huh-huh, Tank huffed. I never failed to giggle. I wanted to squeeze him so much, but we never could quite work that out, the proper squeeze.
    Huh-huh-huh. Made the whole ocean sound in a conch shell seem like the honking of city traffic by comparison.
    So he was quiet, and he was polite, he was no trouble and great company. He could go ages and ages without eating, he never drank except for what he could get from his veggies, and he never even tipped over and stranded himself on his back except when Walter did it just to watch. Even when that happened, I was the only one to get mad. Tank just kept on with his steady walking motion with his feet up in the air, as if he were still getting somewhere, until I turned him over and gave Walter a clap on one ear and an earful in the other ear that I can promise you hurt a lot worse. Yet Tank paid no mind, went on, on his way without ever trying to