I miss Jerry a lot; he was my best friend. The sheriff said he fell out of the tree and cracked his head on a root. That’s not the way it happened, but nobody believes me. Now Dad says we’ve got to let things be and move on.

I can look up the next block across the street and see that big tree from our front yard; the top goes way up over that old house. Its leaves have almost all fallen now, but no one has bothered to rake them up. The yard is all brambles and tall weeds ‘cept for under the oak tree where nothin’ seems to grow.

Most of the paint has peeled off the walls of the house, but you can tell it had been painted white once. It’s weird that the windows still have glass in them. Everyone says the house is abandoned; they said that when we first came to town, but I’ll never believe it. Nobody has ever seen a light in the window. Some things don’t need light to live by, that’s why.

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“Daddy, Rosie ate the Easter eggs,” Elizabeth announced as I shuffled into the living room still in my bathrobe. She and Sarah were sitting cross-legged on the couch in their nighties examining the contents of their Easter baskets: multi-colored jelly beans, an assortment of foil-wrapped candy eggs, a giant chocolate bunny, and Peeps, little yellow marshmallow chickens.

I looked behind the door, behind the TV, the base of the floor lamp, and the back corner of the couch. Empty nests of green Easter grass marked the locations where just a few hours earlier I had hidden pastel-colored eggs. I rushed into the kitchen. Lying on her belly, her tawny muzzle flattened on the linoleum floor in front of her water bowl, our Golden Retriever, Rosie, looked up at me with her big brown eyes and thumped her furry tail just once. “Br-a-a-a-p!!” she belched, and looked away.

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A lone man sat at the Formica table in the galley. His thin face was framed by ratty-brown hair that curled on the shoulders of his dirty, blue-woolen shirt. He held a fork upright in his left hand a steak knife in the other while he continued to chew on a last piece of meat. Like a European, I thought.  He turned his face toward me, but did not speak. I wondered if he was seeing me. Or, was his gaze fixed on something else, some place or time far, far away?

“He’s a hungry one,” the cook said, grinning at his guest. “But, we got him warmed up, and fed, I think.” The inviting smell of coffee and fresh baked bread gave the steel-walled galley of the Aqua-Train tug a comfortable feel.

“The mate found him sleeping under a railcar on the barge,” the captain explained. “He must have snuck aboard while we were loading cars in Prince Rupert.”

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