Dog on the Cross by Aaron Gwyn Page A

breathing, raising a garden, and going to lunch with friends. Whenever I stared in her eyes, got close enough to see my own reflected back, I knew something had left. Much of the time, she reminded me of the familiar house on the block that a new family moves into and makes unrecognizable. It’s the same structure, same paint and lawn. But the presence of the occupants changes the building so completely that it suddenly feels from another country. It even has a different smell.
    Hearing a sound like something dragging carpet, I turn to see ushers closing the sanctuary doors. Theywalk down opposite aisles and take seats at the front of the church, begin to watch, along with the rest of us, a portly gentleman rise and make his way onto the platform. He has thick glasses, a thick head of hair slicked toward his crown. I can tell he feels awkward performing the service. Grasping the edges of the podium, he forces up the corners of his mouth, eyes trailing to the casket below him.
    As he leads us in prayer, I think how I’ve seen such glances before—reverent and troubled, anxious beneath the facade—men who suppose they’re looking at the shells of sinners, spirits writhing in an eternal blaze.
    I SPEND THE REST of the afternoon trying to reach my mother, slipping away from the reception hall to a chipped pay phone in the breezeway of the community center. The phone just rings, and when I try an hour later, I get a busy signal. At home, it’s the same buzzing, so that evening I drive over to check on her. I have to knock several times before she answers and lets me in.
    Standing in the hallway, still in my dress clothes, I allow Mother to walk on ahead as I take a few moments to examine pictures on the walls. When I was a child, she began framing photos of our relatives. Now there are hundreds nailed up—you can track any family member from old age to youth. The ones nearest the door are black and white, photographs ofpeople dead by their fifties. But as you walk, the pictures become color. There are ones of mother as a very young woman, a slim girl in a flowered dress standing on the running board of a Plymouth. Next to these are photos of her brothers, a sister I was never able to meet. Janet committed suicide in her twenties, hanging herself from the cedar in front of her house. She looks a good deal like Mother, though her features are a bit darker and she’s fuller through the hips. There’s a nice photograph of her as a child, sitting on a pier in shorts and bathing suit, feet dangling in black water. It’s one I’ve studied a thousand times, though I continually forget to ask Mother where it was taken. In it, Janet’s laughing and glancing to her side, eyes crinkling at their corners. Someone has placed an arm on her shoulder, but here the photo cuts off. I stare at the arm and then a few more pictures, trying to find one of Kenneth. Finally, I pull myself away and walk down the hall toward the living room.
    Being inside the house has become stranger of late. It sometimes strikes me that everything about my life has advanced, changed in various ways, but Mother’s home is roughly identical to how it’s always looked. The carpet is the same orange-and-brown shag, the shelves stacked with the same knickknacks. The television is a Sony—I bought it for her last Christmas—but you can still see the twenty-yearindentations from the old set. When I walk by the kitchen, I notice a box of cereal on the counter, this counter the same metallic flake I remember slicing bread on as a child. It takes me a while to register that the cereal—advertisements for cell phones on the front—is actually from this decade.
    I walk into the living room and settle into Mother’s recliner, begin listening as she tells me about her day. She’s sitting on the couch beside me holding a glass of water, one leg crossed beneath her, left hand at her brow. Her fingers are