They have, in fact, been awful to her: even I can see this, and perhaps that’s one reason I’m such a good boy, observant, spying out the unstated rules: I want to please them, but I’m afraid of them, too. One night she’d come home late, with a boyfriend before Jerry, and did I dream that commotion in the night? Shouting, the squirrel-killing gun pulled from the closet—now there’s a boy who’ll never show up around here again. And once some boy had given her a young boxer, a sweet, feisty scrapper of a dog I adored—Sally’s pet, of course, but I’m not yet in school, home all day, and he’s mine when she’s gone. He’s all chest, bandaged ears upright, shiny muscled flanks, and I name him Buster, after the boy pictured in ads for Buster Brown shoes; I have a pair of such shoes myself, and when we bought them I was given the gift of a plastic egg, which opened to reveal something completely forgettable. On one of our singing evenings, the dog had jumped up onto the swing where my mother and I sat, wanting to sit in a lap; he caught a paw between the painted green slats, panicked when my mother tried to extricate him, and bit a bruised half-moon onto the skin of her upper arm. The next day we were packed into our green Studebaker, the slender metal bar in the windshield up front dividing the world into yes and no, father and mother, dog and no dog. Sally and I sat in the back with the boxer between us, and my father drove out into the country someplace, a long way from home. He pulled over, got out, and took the dog from Sally’s arms and set it down in the grass by the side of the asphalt—tall grass, dandelions, and wild white carrots. Then he got back in the driver’s seat, slammed the door behind him, and drove away. Did we look back, Sally and I? Maybe the dog was already off into the brush, exploring, so that if we looked we wouldn’t even see him get smaller as the car hurried away.