What We Bear Alone

The cable guy found me at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday, sitting on my living room floor surrounded by half-packed boxes and a dog that wasn't mine.

"Friend of yours?" he asked, gesturing at the golden retriever curled around my feet like a comma in an unfinished sentence.

"Best friend's," I said. "He died last Thursday. Cancer. The dog's mine now."

The cable guy nodded like he'd heard this story before, maybe last Tuesday on another floor, in another life. He went to work on the wall junction, efficient and silent. I watched his hands, thinking about how Marcus's hands used to look when he was tying fishing flies—precise, knowing, then suddenly shaking with the tremors he tried to hide from everyone except me.

The dog lifted his head and whined, this sound that was almost human, almost a word. I'd been hearing Marcus's voice in the apartment for three days. In the water pipes. In the refrigerator's hum. In the static when I turned on the television to drown out the silence.

"You can bear almost anything," Marcus had told me once, drunk on expensive scotch and the fear of his own mortality, "if you know someone else is bearing it with you."

He'd been wrong about that. Some weights don't divide. Some griefs don't share.

The cable guy finished. "All set. You've got premium now. On the house."

"Why?"

He shrugged. "My brother died last year. Left me his cat." And then he was gone, like something that had slipped through the walls.

I turned on the TV. A nature documentary—bears fishing in Alaska, powerful and purposeful, each one alone in the river despite the crowd. The dog pressed his warm side against my leg, and somewhere in the apartment, I swear I heard Marcus laugh, not sad, just acknowledging the joke we'd finally become.

I sat there on the floor with my inherited grief and my borrowed dog, and finally, I bore it alone together.