Treasure Island!!!

in this capacity?”
    I’m not sure when the family had become so bureaucratic, but clearly he needed to feel that my mother had engineered my presence here, that I was in fact her flunky.
    “Ain’t too proud to beg, Dad. She
wants
you to dig the hole and to be a part of the funeral. You know what she’s like.”
    “All right,” he said, pulling himself together. “I’ll do it. Are they ready? Let’s not waste time. Let’s do it now.”
    And that is how we came to bury Richard—or rather how my father came to bury him while my mother and I watched through the kitchen window, making cheese straws.
    “Cheddar or Parmesan?”
    “Why not both?” I answered. “And can we open the Merlot?”
    “I wish your sister would join us. No, not that Merlot. Here, I have a nicer one.” She took out two wine glasses, then on second thought, two more. “Will you ask her? She would feel terrible later . . . ”
    So far the occasion felt both melancholy and snug: the oven’s warmth, my mother’s classical music station, the chipping sound of my father’s shovel. The ground was not frozen, but hard enough that my father satisfied himself with a shallow grave, a choice he regretted a few days later when we saw the neighbor’s German Shepherd, Audrey, trotting the boundary line with a feathery green bundle in her jaws. At that moment, however, the interment seemed just right. I didn’t really want to include Adrianna, but at my mother’s urging, I went and knocked on her door.
    “What?” Her muffled voice emanated pain and self-involvement.
    I pushed open the door. She was sitting on her bed, looking raddled and sad, cradling her phone and a box of Kleenex.
    “Do you want to come to Richard’s funeral?”
    “I just got off the phone with Don. He’s dumping me.”
    “The old man is dumping
you?
Does that fool honestly think he can do better?”
    My surprise gratified her.
    “It’s that business with Mom. He doesn’t want to cope with it. He doesn’t want to process my feelings. I love him, I’m sure if he would just
listen
to me, we could get past it. It was years ago! But of course, I’m angry and confused, and rather than
deal
with that, he’s just running.”
    “What an asshole.” Men really had very few emotional skills. “Come on.” I returned the phone and the Kleenex to the nightstand and pulled her out of the bed. “You’ll feel better if you come. Get your mind off him. Besides you belong with your family at a time like this.”
    In the kitchen I was surprised to discover my father at the sink, washing his hands. My mother stood a few feet away, writing in ball-point pen on the back of a napkin. It appeared that they might have passed a few civil words.
    “Oh good,” my mother said, turning.
    Adrianna didn’t meet her eye, but my mother’s strategy was to let the formalities of a service carry us through the awkwardness. She poured the wine, distributed glasses, and invited everyone to take a cheese straw while she spoke.
    “We’re gathered here today to mark the untimely loss of our family’s pet, whose name was Richard.”
    “Little Richard,” I added.
    “All right,” my mother said, annoyed to be interrupted. “I’ve written a poem in his honor. Please forgive the roughness of the meter.” Every facial feature rippling with self-satisfaction, my mother began to read the tribute she had just “dashed off,” only a portion of which I give here.
     
    Dry his water dish, bag his carrots,
    Our Richard is dead, our king of the parrots.
     
    Beware the occasional poet who has lacked an occasion. Out of my eyeshot she had dashed off a sonnet, a villanelle, and a sestina. We had seconds on our wine before she had come to the pantoum.
    “Which, just to remind us, consists of a series of quatrains rhyming ABAB in which the first and the third lines of a quatrain recur as the—”
    “No,” my father put in, “the second and fourth lines recur as the first and third lines of the succeeding quatrain. Each quatrain introduces a new second line.”
    “You’re right, darling. It’s ABAB, BCBC, CDCD. Right? I
think
I did it right.”
    “Shall I have a look?”
    My mother hesitated, then moved aside so that my father could see. They bent over the napkin together, my father murmuring, my mother inclining her head ever so gently so that her forehead rested against his ear. “Yes. Oh yes. Lovely! You have it. And the closing quatrain rhymes ZAZA.”
    They looked at each other