10/15/2026
On the first anniversary of my wife’s death, a stray dog appeared on my doorstep. He ignored the food I offered and kept looking past me, toward her empty chair.
Then he let out a small whine.
“I’m looking for her, too,” I said.
Since Ellen died, I’d been living on frozen dinners and sleeping on the couch. When our daughter called, I usually let it ring. I couldn’t bear another conversation that ended with her worrying about me.
That morning, I opened the front door to take flowers to the cemetery.
He was lying against the bottom step. Gray muzzle. One torn ear. A slight limp. No collar.
I brought him water. He drank, then looked inside again.
When I picked up my keys, he followed me to the car.
At the cemetery, he lay beside my shoes while I pulled weeds around Ellen’s headstone. When it was time to leave, I had to call him twice.
“Come on,” I told him. “She isn’t coming home.”
I wasn’t sure which of us needed to hear it.
That afternoon, my neighbor brought over a bag of dog food.
“You finally let him in.”
“Finally?”
She glanced at the porch.
“Ellen used to sit out here with him. Called him Buddy. He was a stray. Once, he got wire wrapped around his leg, and she asked me to help take him to the vet.”
I remembered the little containers in our refrigerator.
Whenever I asked, Ellen said, “That’s for a friend.”
“I’ve been feeding him since she passed,” my neighbor continued. “But afterward, he always comes over here.”
“How long has he been doing that?”
She looked toward my closed curtains.
“Almost every day.”
I sat down on the step.
For months, I’d been coming and going through the garage. That morning was the first time I’d opened the front door in longer than I could remember.
Buddy hadn’t known it was her anniversary.
He had simply kept coming back.
That night, I put a blanket beside my bed and called my daughter.
When she asked how I was, I finally told her.
“I’ve been lonely, sweetheart.”
Buddy stayed.
He got me outside every morning. I helped him up the porch steps when his leg hurt. I started cooking again, with him waiting hopefully beside the stove.
Now, every year on the day we lost Ellen, I make two sandwiches. One goes next door, to the woman who kept her friend fed until I opened the door.
Then Buddy and I take flowers to the cemetery.
We sit for a while. I tell Ellen about our daughter, the leaking kitchen faucet, whatever small trouble Buddy has gotten into.
And when we leave, he always looks back.
I stop and wait for him.
Ellen waited for him plenty of times.
I figure I can, too.
