What He's Been Missing

King moved a little. Let out a loud sigh.

“King,” I called a little softer. My fingers were freezing. I could see his little eyes. Smell him even through the cold. “Here, boy! Here!”—that’s how I’d called him when he was young and we’d learned every inch of my family’s five acres on expeditions that included two chunks of cornbread I’d stuffed into my pockets—one for me and one for King. “Here, boy! Here!” I got closer to the little eyes. Dirt was everywhere. There was a pinching ant on my hand, but I knew better than to panic or it would pinch me for sure. “Here, boy! Here!” I got closer to the little eyes.

King moved back. Sighed louder.

“King! It’s me! Rachel! I know you know me.” When I was close enough to him, I reached out. “Here, boy! Here!” I reached. I inched in some more. I reached. When I almost got to King, he let out a low growl at first, but then he snapped and snarled and barked so loud I flinched. The ant bit my hand and I hollered. King growled and snarled and barked again. This time he didn’t stop. Forgetting I was under the porch, I went to stand and hit my head on one of the beams. I might’ve been knocked out and probably had a mild concussion, but I kept moving. So fast, I crawled back from the little eyes until I could see the sun on my hands.

“Pop out, you know better than to crawl under the porch with that dog!” Grammy Annie-Lou was waiting for me with the shotgun. “That’s how you got bit when you was five.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

“Lord, what’s that on your hand?” She grabbed my hand. Blood was dripping from the sides.

“I got bit.”

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nbsp; “King? He ain’t never bit nobody before!”

“No. It was an ant.”

The blood was covering a little mound where the ant had dug into me trying to defend itself.

“Can’t believe an ant done all this,” she said, inspecting the bite. “I told Juan not to be buying that cheap fertilizer from Walmart. Turning all the ants here to crazy. I think they ships it from China. Ain’t nothing good gonna come to America from China. They hate us. Why would you buy a bunch of cheap stuff from people who hate you? Poison you for sure. Now we got overgrown pinching ants. You know Walmart is the devil?”

“I know,” I said. I’d heard her position on Walmart before. After her best friend Claudine had to close her dress shop downtown when “we got a Walmart” (that’s how people in the country announce it when a Walmart comes to town) and she couldn’t beat their prices, Grammy Annie-Lou has been talking about how Walmart is the devil in some way or another.

“Let me go in the house to get something for this overgrown pinching ant bite,” she said, handing me the shotgun. “I’ll be right out.”

I bent down and looked under the porch for King again.

He’d turned around to face the front of the house.

“Whatever,” I said, slumping down against the side of the porch, and set the rifle on the dirt between my legs.

There was a small lake that Grammy Annie-Lou liked to call the Winslow River in the back of the house. My father had always pointed out that it wasn’t even on the maps of Georgia. He also pointed out that he’d fallen in love with my mother on Winslow River. He’d taught her how to pitch two pebbles at one time and watch the ripples bounce against one another. To him, it was just a game he’d played in the tiny lake in his mother’s backyard. But to my mother, it was how she could explain everything in the world. He’d once told me she’d said, “We all connected. All of us. One person hurt, we all hurt. One person happy, we all happy.” He hadn’t understood what she was saying at the time. They were just twelve years old and my father had been held back two grades in school. He didn’t even know why my mother was talking to him, but he never let her out of his sight after she explained the ripples in Winslow River that way. He said that what she’d said made it seem less like a little lake and more like a big river. The same was true about Social Circle, Georgia. The world. He married her the day after her high school graduation. He dropped out of high school and got a job two months later when they discovered that she was pregnant with me. When I came along, he said that times were hard and nothing came easy, but those were the best months of his life with my mother. Just watching her hold me and sing to me made him love her so much he knew he’d never want to live without her. And three months after I was born, when she died of an infection she probably got when she delivered me, he didn’t want to live. And he was about to kill himself. Had strung the rope up over the low beam in the barn nearly a half mile away from Grammy Annie-Lou’s house. He was about to climb to the loft and jump out with the rope around his neck when he heard King barking. King was just a puppy then. He was the sickly runt in a litter of puppies one of the deacons at the church had been selling in the parking lot one afternoon after Sunday School. On account of my father being nineteen and a widower with a baby, the deacon just gave King to him, thinking the dog might live just long enough to help my father through his pain. When my father heard King’s bark for the first time in that barn when he was about to hang himself from the low beam, he knew something was wrong. “What is it, boy?” he called to King from the loft. King slipped underneath the barn doors and started barking wildly. “What is it?” my father repeated. And when he would tell the story, he’d always say, “And then King just stopped barking. He looked into my eyes in a way that told me to listen. And so, I did. Then I heard—it was you, Rachel. You was just three months old, up in your cradle in Grammy Annie-Lou’s bedroom, crying your little eyes out, screaming so loud for your daddy to come home. No way I should’ve heard you. No way the stupid runt should’ve known to come and get me. I walked out of that barn and moved your cradle down to my room. No way I’d leave you again.”

“King, I need you to come out from under this porch,” I said, crying and still looking at the lake. “I need you to just come out and get in the car with me, so I can take you to the doctor. I need you not to fuss at me. I know you mad. I know I left you here. But if you don’t stop this, we gonna have to put you down.” I kicked the shotgun to the side and pulled my knees to my chest. Buried my head in the palm of my hands to hide my tears from no one. I didn’t even know why I was crying. King was older than midnight. He had one good eye and six good teeth left—and that was the situation the last time I’d seen him on Christmas. There was no reason for him to still be alive. And probably no one really cared if he died. “Please come out, King! Please!” I started sobbing so loudly, I wondered if Juan, the boy who helped my grandmother fix things around the farm, could hear me from the barn.

“Rachel.” I heard my name called so softly it sounded like I was in heaven with my mother and father.

I looked up and there was Ian, the sun shining behind his head.

“Ian?”

“Yeah.” He knelt down beside me. He had on his work clothes and glasses. The same hat he was in at Bird’s.

“What are you doing here?”

“You sounded like you really needed me,” he said. “I canceled class and hit the road. I saw Ma Lou in the house. She told me you were back here.”

“I didn’t mean for you to do that.”

“I didn’t mean for you to ask me.”

I fell into his arms, crying harder and telling him about the ant under the porch with King.

“You can’t climb under a porch with a dog,” Ian repeated my grandmother’s advice to make me laugh.