‘What was her name anyway? The beagle?’

‘Clarabelle. As I said, I was ambivalent about her dying. I knew it was only a matter of time. Whenever I called my dad to check up, I braced myself to hear him say she’d passed. Preparing myself to console him and so on. Well finally I call one day, we’ve been talking an hour, and after a pregnant pause he says, “And there’s some sad news about little Clarabelle.”’

‘Oh jeez.’

‘Found her under his bed, died in her sleep. He’s getting choked up as he tells me this. Eventually he just says, “And I think that’s all I’m going to say about that.”’

‘Poor guy. Natural causes, though, right? This isn’t where Dougall comes in?’

‘No, listen. We’re on the phone, and I ask him, you know, did he bury her? And there’s this long silence at the other end of the line. And in that silence I recognize what a grotesque question this is. Of course he didn’t bury her. How could he have buried her? My dad, can’t walk ten feet in a Wal-Mart to pick up a loaf of bread, is supposed to go out in the backyard with a shovel and dig down in the dirt to bury his dead dog? But when he finally responds, what he says is, “Yep,” in this quick, clipped voice. And I don’t ask him any follow-up questions. Because I don’t have to. In that moment I know: I know exactly what he did with Clarabelle. In my mind’s eye I can see it. It unfolds in a vivid flash, the entire scene. I see my dad putting Clarabelle’s body into a black trash bag. It breaks his heart, but what else is he going to do? I see him toting her down the driveway to the garbage can, wheezing the whole way—hobbling, from the pain in his back and from the weight of the bag—and slinging the corpse unceremoniously into the trash.’

‘You don’t think—’

‘What else? He just couldn’t bring himself to admit it to me. Too ashamed. Broken up over it. That he couldn’t give his own dog a proper burial. A little stake in the ground with her name on it.’

‘Her name.’

‘In retrospect, in a weird way, it feels as if MacDougall won or something. Got his revenge. As if this was my dad’s punishment for springing the joke on him, all those years ago. I can’t explain it.’

‘Karma.’

‘Not that MacDougall could have even known about Clarabelle. Or ever thought about me or my dad, for that matter—it’d been years. But I still can’t shake the image of him rubbing his hands together somewhere, grinning at the news.’

‘Working that MacDougall voodoo.’

‘The ironic twist of fate. The cosmic comeuppance. Just as my dad had pretended to be a dog, and ignored the sound of his own name, so he had to lose his dog to namelessness. And not by way of rabies—not by a bite from a wild bat. But by his own hand. That’s the tragic aspect. His punishment was that he had to throw her away himself, like some common greasy pizza box. He who had loved her so much and refused to euthanize her and treated her with human dignity was the very same one who, in the end, had to reduce her to this primordial core. Because by depriving her of a dignified burial, he was depriving her too of her name: she wasn’t Clarabelle in that trash can, just some cold dead animal, which is what she would have to remain for all eternity, decomposing up on the landfill. And he was the one who had done it. He and no one else had cast her out, back into that dark part of herself, and for the rest of his life he’d have to live with that.’