After my wife died, a dog began sitting at the end of my driveway.
It started about two weeks after the funeral. I came home from work and it was there — medium-sized, dark-coated, sitting at the end of the driveway where it meets the sidewalk, facing the house. Not our dog. We'd never had a dog. I didn't recognize it from the neighborhood.
I approached it. It didn't run or growl. It watched me with an expression I want to describe as patient but that seems too simple — there was something attentive in it, something focused, that went beyond patience. It let me come close. I held out my hand. It smelled my hand once and then looked at the house.
I put out water and food. It ate and drank and went back to sitting.
It was there every evening. By the third week it would come to the porch when I got home, sit with me while I sat outside, and leave at dark. I let it in once. It walked through the house slowly, methodically, smelling the rooms. It spent a long time in my wife's study. It came out and went to the door and I let it out.
It never slept there. It arrived in the evening and left at dark, every night, for three months.
My sister visited in the fourth month. She saw the dog and said: "That's strange." I asked what was strange. She said the dog looked like a dog our family had when we were young, a dog we'd had before I met my wife, a dog she and I had both loved that died when we were in our twenties.
She said: "It looks exactly like her."
The dog left for the last time on the one-year anniversary of my wife's death. It sat on the porch with me that evening as usual. When I went inside, I looked back through the window.
It was looking at the door. Then it turned and walked away down the street, and I've never seen it again.
I don't know what it was. I don't know who sent it, if anyone did. I know my house felt different after it left, in a way I don't have good language for — not worse, exactly.
Just emptier than before.