My husband’s sister told the whole table at Sunday dinner that bringing a newborn home to his two dogs was the dumbest thing I’d ever let him do. “Those dogs will go for her face, Inez, and that’s on you.” She came over the day we brought our granddaughter home, phone already out, and nobody was ready for what she filmed.
Horace had barely said a word about it for nine days.
Any time the dogs came up, he’d run his thumb along the table’s edge and say, “Let’s just see.”
Seymour and Hobbs belonged to him long before I married into his house in Muncie.
Seymour slept on Horace’s feet the winter his first marriage ended, when he didn’t get up till noon.
And both of them lose their minds over the delivery truck, the ice maker, a moth on the screen and the smoke alarm’s low-battery chirp.
So Diana had a point. I hated that she had a point.
“Ten bucks says the old one snaps,” she said from the doorway, phone up.
Horace didn’t answer her.
He sat on the end of the couch with my daughter’s girl across his lap, eight days old, holding her like she might spill.
Both dogs came skidding off the rug like always.
Then they STOPPED.
Seymour is twelve and half deaf, and he took the last bit of floor like it was ice.
He set his chin on Horace’s knee and stared at that baby and DIDN’T MAKE A SOUND.
Diana’s phone came down an inch.
“Is he gonna bite her?” she said.
Hobbs is the young one, the one who ate a stick of butter off the counter at Easter.
He crawled in on his belly, sniffed at her toes one time and then pushed his head under her little striped sock until her heel rested on top of it.
And he STAYED.
Nobody moved.
Horace hadn’t spoken since the door.
He was looking down at her, tears dripping off the peak of the ratty white cap he wears to the hardware store.
He kept his face turned down to her.
“These two lay EXACTLY LIKE THIS every single night,” he said. “Back before—”
Seven o’clock, every night
“Back before Mom,” he said.
That was all of it. He didn’t need the rest.
His mother sat on that same end of the couch every night for the three years she lived in his house.
Seymour put his chin on her knee. Hobbs got his head under her foot.
Every night, until the last week of September a year ago, when she stopped coming out of the front room.
Neither dog had done it for anybody since. Not for Horace, not for me.
I was standing by the kitchen door with a burp cloth on my shoulder.
I put it down on the back of the recliner, because my hands needed something to do, and I went and knelt by the couch.
Hobbs rolled one eye up at me. He didn’t move his head.
Seymour didn’t know I was there. I was on his deaf side.
The baby slept through every bit of it. Her mouth was open. Her sock was halfway off.
I pulled it back up over her heel slow, so I wouldn’t bump Hobbs.
“Well,” Diana said.
She still had the phone up, lower now, about level with her chest. The red dot was still going.
“Ten bucks,” I said. “You said ten bucks.”
“Don’t start with me, Inez.”
“You’re still recording.”
“I’m allowed to record my own brother.”
Horace wiped his face with the back of his wrist. The cap brim went crooked. He left it.
My daughter was upstairs asleep. It was her first real sleep since the hospital.
The baby had come three weeks early and hard. The only reason Horace was holding her at all was that I had begged my girl to lie down for one hour.
That was the deal. One hour. If the dogs did anything, I’d yell.
The dogs did something. I didn’t yell.
Diana came two steps into the living room. Hobbs’s ears went up, and she stopped.
“He did that with Mom, too,” she said. “The old one. Right up until he didn’t.”
Horace lifted his head for the first time since the door.
“Diana,” he said.
“I’m just saying. Nobody wants to talk about it, so I’m saying it.”
She turned the phone off and looked at me, not him.
“Cute. It doesn’t change what that old one did to Mom’s ankle.”
The front room
Horace’s mother moved into the front room of the house in Muncie the spring she turned eighty-three.
She’d fallen twice in her own kitchen out in Yorktown, and the second time she lay on the linoleum from supper till the newspaper came.
Diana wanted her in a place. She had brochures. She had a tour set up.
Horace went and got her in his truck instead and set up a hospital bed where his dining table used to be.
Seymour was ten then and already slowing down. Horace got Hobbs that summer, a spaniel pup off a farm by Albany, because his mother liked having something warm by her.
I came along the April after.
I met Horace at a fish fry at the Methodist church. He asked me if the coleslaw was any good, and I told him no, and he ate two helpings of it anyway.
We got married at the courthouse. His mother came in her wheelchair and wore a corsage I pinned on her myself.
So I didn’t just marry a man. I married a front room, a hospital bed, a pill organizer the size of a cookie sheet and two dogs who already had their places worked out on the sofa.
I didn’t mind. I’d done this for my own mother. I knew how.
Horace’s mother had cold feet, always, even in July.
Her ankles swelled, and regular socks cut lines into her skin. The only ones that didn’t were the men’s work socks out of the bin at the hardware store, six to a pack, gray with a red stripe at the top.
Horace bought them by the dozen. She wore them to bed and to church and to the doctor.
Hobbs figured out early that if he pushed his head under her foot, she’d leave it there and he’d get warm.
So he did it every night at seven, when Wheel of Fortune came on.
Seymour came about a minute after, slow, and laid his chin on her knee.
She’d call the puzzles before the contestants did and rub Seymour’s ear with two fingers. If Horace came in during the bonus round, she’d shush him.
That was every night. I could set the oven timer by it.
Diana lived twenty minutes away, in a split-level with a sunken living room nobody was allowed to walk through in shoes.
She came by on holidays. She always had her phone up.
Christmas, Easter, Mom’s birthday. Diana filmed everybody opening everything. She said it was for the cloud.
She also ran the Sunday dinners, at her house, every week, for the whole family.
Her husband, their two boys and the boys’ wives, a cousin or two. And after the wedding, Horace and me.
I want to be fair to her. She set a place for me from the first Sunday.
She also told a cousin, while I was in the bathroom with the door open a crack, that I’d married into a paid-off house with a free nurse’s job attached.
Her husband was the quiet one at those dinners. He carved and he passed the rolls.
Every Christmas he slipped Hobbs a rawhide under the table and thought nobody saw.
Horace’s mother died the last week of September a year ago, in the front room, in the bed, with Horace holding one hand and me holding the other.
The hospice nurse had been coming three times a week by then. I kept every paper she left in a white binder, because that’s what I do.
Diana planned the funeral. She was good at it. She made a slideshow of photos and videos set to an old hymn and burned DVDs for everybody.
Ours came home in a paper sleeve with her marker on it. MOM 1939–2025.
Horace set it on top of the TV that night. Nobody had played it. It was still there.
I looked at it now, over Diana’s shoulder, while she put her phone in her purse.
“I’m leaving,” she said. “You two can figure out who’s telling her.”
“Telling who what?” I said.
She didn’t answer me. She went out the front door and let the storm door bang.
Her car door slammed in the drive. Neither dog lifted his head.
Diana’s texts
My daughter came down at four with her hair flat on one side and her phone in her hand.
She stopped on the bottom step and looked at the couch.
Horace still had the baby. Hobbs was still under the sock. Seymour had gone to sleep with his chin where it was, snoring.
“Mom,” my daughter said. “What is this.”
“They’re fine. Look at them.”
“Aunt Diana texted me.”
She wasn’t really my daughter’s aunt. Diana had made a point of telling her to call her that, back at the shower in Fort Wayne.
My daughter came over and held the phone out to me so I could read it.
There were nine messages from Diana, going back a week.
A news story about a family dog in Ohio. A news story about one in Kentucky.
A chart of breeds that “account for most infant bites,” which had spaniels on it, about halfway down. A long one I didn’t finish.
And one from that afternoon, from right outside our door, sent before she even came in.
I’ll be there. Somebody needs to be.
“She’s a nurse,” my daughter said. “Isn’t she?”
“She did billing for a dentist. Twenty years ago.”
“She says the old one has a record.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t know what it meant.
My daughter reached down and took the baby off Horace’s lap, and Hobbs’s head came out from under the sock, and he whined one time and lay back down on the rug.
She took the baby upstairs. I heard her close the door.
I’ll tell you what I did next, because it’s the part I’m least proud of.
I went in the kitchen, where Horace had gone to get himself some coffee, and I asked him to put the dogs up at the vet’s for the two weeks my daughter was staying.
The vet on McGalliard boards them. Thirty-two dollars a night each. I’d already looked it up on my phone, back on the Sunday Diana said it.
I said I’d pay for it out of my own account.
I said it was two weeks. I said it was just till my girl felt better.
Horace stood at the counter with his coffee and ran his thumb along the edge of it, back and forth.
“No,” he said.
I had been married to him for two and a half years. He had never told me no about anything I asked him for.
Not the paint in the bathroom, not my mother’s china cabinet in his hall, not anything.
“She’s scared, Horace. She’s twenty-nine and she just had a baby and she’s scared.”
“I know it.”
“So it’s two weeks.”
“They didn’t do anything.”
“I know they didn’t.”
“Then what are they going to the vet for?”
I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t Diana’s, so I didn’t give one.
He poured his coffee out in the sink. He hadn’t drunk any of it.
“Not them,” he said. “Not again.”
Officer Schumacher
He went out to the garage after that and turned the radio on.
I sat at the kitchen table a while. I was thinking about again, and about a record, and about Diana saying You two can figure out who’s telling her.
Horace keeps the mail in the drawer under the microwave. Bills on the left, everything else on the right.
I don’t go through it. I want that understood. In two and a half years I had never gone through it.
I went through it.
The envelope was near the bottom of the right side, under a church directory and a warranty card for the snowblower.
It had the county seal on the corner. Delaware County Animal Control. It was dated October of last year, three weeks after the funeral.
It was addressed to Horace.
A complaint has been received regarding a dog at this address, described as an older male spaniel, alleged to have bitten an elderly resident of the household on or about September 18.
I read that line three times.
The complainant has identified herself as a family member of the resident. This office conducted a site visit on October 22 and the animal was observed. No action is being taken at this time.
Then the last paragraph.
Please be advised that a second substantiated complaint regarding this animal within twenty-four months of this notice will be referred for a dangerous-dog hearing.
It was signed by an Officer Schumacher.
October 22. I worked out where I’d been that day. I’d been in Fort Wayne at my daughter’s, for her first ultrasound.
So somebody from the county had stood in my living room and looked at Seymour, and Horace had never told me.
I went and got the white binder from the closet in the front room. The bed was gone by then. Horace had taken it apart in October. Maybe the same week.
Hospice notes go in by date. I found September 18 without looking hard.
The nurse came that morning at ten. I was there. I remembered her.
Bruise noted L ankle, approx 3 cm. Pt reports she hit it on bed rail during the night. Rail padding added. Family educated.
Family educated meant me. I was the one who bought the foam pads at the medical supply store and zip-tied them on.
Horace’s mother had bumped her ankle on that rail at two in the morning trying to get up and use the commode by herself, because she didn’t want to wake me.
She told the nurse. She told me. She was embarrassed about it.
Seymour hadn’t been anywhere near that bed. Seymour can’t get up on a bed. He’s not been able to get up on anything but the couch for two years.
I took the letter and the binder out to the garage.
Horace was sitting on an upside-down bucket, not doing anything. The radio was on the farm report.
I held the letter up where he could see it.
He didn’t ask where I got it.
“Did she ever see this?” I said, and I held up the binder.
“She didn’t ask for it.”
“Did you tell the officer about the rail?”
“I told him Seymour don’t bite. He looked at Seymour. Seymour went to sleep on his shoe.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
He turned the radio down. He took his cap off and turned it around in his hands by the brim.
“Because she’s my sister,” he said. “And Mom wasn’t cold yet.”
He put the cap back on.
“Read the bottom again,” he said.
A second substantiated complaint within twenty-four months will be referred for a dangerous-dog hearing.
Thursday, 4:10
Officer Schumacher called the house phone on Thursday at ten after four.
I know the time, because the baby had just started her four o’clock fuss and I was walking her up and down the hall.
My daughter answered. She came and found me with the cordless held out in front of her like it was hot.
“It’s the county,” she said. “For Horace.”
Horace was at the hardware store. I took it.
The officer was polite. He had a slow way of talking, like he’d been told a long time ago to say everything twice.
He said a second complaint had come in Tuesday night about the same animal at the same address, an older male spaniel, and a younger one this time too.
He said the complainant reported that both dogs had charged at a newborn infant being held on a couch.
He said the complainant had attached video.
“Can I see it?” I said.
“Ma’am, I can’t share a complaint file.”
“It’s my granddaughter. In the video. On my couch.”
He was quiet a second. I could hear him typing.
“I’ll be out Monday at ten to observe the animals,” he said. “If you’ve got anything you want me to see, have it ready then.”
After he hung up, I sat on the stairs with the baby on my shoulder.
My daughter sat a step below me.
“Was it Aunt Diana?”
“Who else was in the room?”
“She sent it to me, too,” my daughter said. “Tuesday night. I didn’t open it.”
She opened it now and held it so I could see.
It was two seconds long.
Horace at the end of the sofa, the baby on his lap. Then both dogs off the rug, coming hard, Hobbs’s back feet sliding on the floorboards and Seymour’s ears flying out.
And then it stopped.
It stopped right there, with Seymour’s front paws in the air.
It didn’t show the floor that he took like ice. It didn’t show his chin on Horace’s knee. It didn’t show Hobbs on his belly or the sock or the heel or any of it.
Under it, Diana had typed: This is what I walked in on. I’m sorry but somebody had to.
My daughter watched it again. And again.
“That’s not what happened,” she said.
“No.”
“I mean, it is. It’s just not all of it.”
“Your aunt held that phone up for a good forty seconds after that,” I said. “I saw the red dot.”
My daughter’s face did something I hadn’t seen it do since she was about eleven and found out who’d really eaten her Halloween candy.
“She sent me a video,” she said, “to make me take the baby home.”
“Probably.”
“Mom. She sent it to me before she sent it to the county.”
I looked at the time stamps. She was right. Diana had sent my daughter the two seconds at 9:14 on Tuesday night.
The email to the county had gone at 9:31. The officer had read me the time off his screen.
Seventeen minutes. That’s how long it took her to decide.
The baby was asleep on my shoulder. Hobbs was lying across the bottom step below us.
I handed the baby down to my daughter and went in the living room.
I took the DVD down off the TV.
MOM 1939–2025
Horace came home at six with a bag of birdseed and a new low-battery nine-volt for the smoke alarm.
He found me sitting on the floor in front of the TV with the remote and the DVD case open.
“I can’t,” he said.
“I know you can’t. I’m not asking you to.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“Diana made this.”
He stood there in the doorway with the bag in his arms.
“She filmed everything,” I said. “Every Christmas. Every Easter. She put it all on here. You know she did.”
He put the birdseed down on the recliner.
He didn’t sit. He didn’t leave.
My daughter brought the baby down and sat at the end of the couch, at the end, without thinking, and both dogs came and lay at her feet and didn’t touch her.
I put the disc in.
The hymn started. “In the Garden.” I hadn’t heard it since the funeral home, and I had to stop it and start it over because I couldn’t see.
Photos first. Her as a girl in Yorktown in a coat too big for her. Her wedding. Horace at about six on a pony at the county fair. Diana in a cap and gown.
Then the videos, short ones, stuck between the pictures.
A birthday, her blowing out candles and missing half. Easter, the dogs going after a plastic egg.
And then Christmas. Christmas of last year, nine months before she died.
The living room. Our living room. The same couch, before I got the slipcover.
His mother at the end of it, in her robe, in the gray socks with the red stripe at the top.
Seymour’s chin on her knee.
Hobbs flat on the floor with his whole head pushed up under her left foot, so her heel rested on the top of his skull.
The camera was low and close. Whoever had it was kneeling on the rug.
And you could hear her. Clear as anything. Right under the hymn.
“Look at them, Mom,” Diana’s voice said. “They’d die for you, you know that? Look at the old one. He’d die for you.”
And Horace’s mother said, “He about has,” and laughed.
Diana laughed, too. And the camera turned around, the way phones do, and there was Diana’s face for one second, close and lit up blue from the screen, and Diana was crying.
Then a photo of the Christmas tree. Then the hymn went on.
I paused it.
Nobody said anything. My daughter had her hand over her mouth.
Horace was still standing. He’d taken his cap off at some point. I hadn’t seen when.
“Play it again,” he said.
I backed it up and played it again. They’d die for you. He about has.
On the third time, my daughter said, “That’s her. That’s Aunt Diana.”
“That’s her.”
“She knows they do that.”
“She filmed them doing it.”
Horace lowered himself onto the arm of the recliner. Right on the birdseed. He didn’t move it.
“She was on the floor,” he said. “She was the one on the floor that night. She sat right there with her phone and Mom’s foot practically in her face.”
He looked at the dogs at my daughter’s feet.
“She came over Tuesday knowing what they’d do,” he said. “She came over knowing they’d come running and she knew where they’d stop.”
“She just needed the first part,” I said.
He put his cap back on. His hands were shaking a little, and he got the brim crooked again, and this time he fixed it.
“She was holding the phone, Inez,” he said. “She knows.”
Diana’s table
I called Officer Schumacher back on Friday morning and left the clip on his voicemail by holding my phone up to the TV.
Then I scanned the hospice note at the library, September 18, the bed rail and the foam pads, and emailed it to the address on the letter.
He called back at noon. He said it would help. He said Monday stood.
He said the thing that would help most was the rest of the complainant’s video.
“She’ll say that’s all she’s got,” I said.
“Then that’s all she’s got,” he said. “I’ll ask her.”
Sunday came. Horace didn’t want to go. I did.
So we went, the two of us, at four like always, to the split-level with the sunken living room. My daughter stayed home with the baby and the dogs.
I brought a pie. I brought the DVD in my purse. I brought the binder.
Diana opened the door with her sunglasses on her head in November and looked at the pie first and then at me.
“Well,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d show your face.”
“It’s Sunday,” Horace said.
The whole table was there. Her husband at the end with the carving knife. The two boys and their wives. A cousin from Anderson who’d driven up.
Diana sat us across from each other this time, not together. Nobody mentioned it.
We got through the roast. Diana did most of the talking, about a woman at her church whose son-in-law left her, about gas prices, about the baby.
“How’s that baby?” she said, to the table, not to me. “Still got her face?”
One of the boys’ wives laughed and then stopped.
“Animal control’s coming to the house tomorrow,” I said.
Diana put her fork down.
“Good,” she said. “Good for them. Somebody in this family has to be the grown-up, and it is not going to be the woman who’s lived here two years and thinks she knows those dogs.”
“I’ve lived with them every day for two and a half.”
“And I’ve known that old dog twelve. I knew him when he was a puppy chewing my good shoes. I’m the one who saw what he did to Mom.”
“What did he do to Mom?”
“You know what he did.”
“Tell the table.”
“He bit her. On the ankle. In the night. She had a bruise the size of a half-dollar.”
I took the binder out of my purse and opened it to September 18 and slid it across the tablecloth past the gravy boat.
Diana didn’t look down at it.
“That’s your handwriting,” she said.
“That’s the hospice nurse’s. Her name’s on the bottom. You can call her.”
“So the nurse wrote down whatever you told her.”
“Your mother told her. She hit it on the bed rail at two in the morning getting up on her own.”
“She was confused by then. She was on morphine. She’d have said anything.”
“In September she was doing the crossword in pen.”
“Oh, so now you’re the expert on my mother.” Diana looked down the table at the cousin, at the boys. “You see what I’m dealing with? She’s here a year and a half before Mom passes, and now she’s got a binder.”
Horace hadn’t said anything. He was looking at his plate.
Diana kept going.
“And then she brings a newborn into that house. With those dogs. Over everybody’s objection. I sat right here at this table and told her, all of you heard me, and she did it anyway, and now she’s mad at me for being right.”
“Were you right?” I said.
“I have it on video.”
“Two seconds of it.”
“It’s what happened.”
“Your phone ran forty seconds after that. I saw it.”
“I stopped it.”
“The red dot was still on when you said Is he gonna bite her.“
Diana’s husband set the carving knife down on the board.
“I’m not doing this at my own table,” Diana said. “You want to make me out to be some kind of liar in front of my family, in front of my boys, over two animals who are not even yours—”
I took the DVD out of my purse and put it on the table next to the binder.
She knew her own marker.
“I want to play something on your TV,” I said.
The rest of the forty seconds
Nobody moved until her husband got up.
He walked down into the sunken living room in his socks, which you’re allowed to do, and he took the DVD off the table on his way.
“Honey,” Diana said, and then stopped.
He didn’t turn around.
He put the disc in himself. He’d carried that slideshow into the funeral home. He knew where the Christmas clip was. He went right to it.
The table could see it over the half wall. Everybody turned in their chairs.
Look at them, Mom. They’d die for you.
He about has.
Diana’s laugh, and then Diana’s own face, crying, lit up blue.
He paused it there.
One of the boys said, “Mom, that’s you.”
“I know it’s me.”
“That’s the same thing,” the cousin from Anderson said. “That’s what Inez said they did with the baby.”
“It’s not the same,” Diana said. “That was Mom. That was before.”
“Before what?” her husband said.
It was the first thing I’d heard him say at a Sunday dinner that wasn’t white or dark.
She didn’t answer him.
He came back up the step and stood behind her chair and held out his hand.
“Give me your phone,” he said.
“Absolutely not.”
“The county man called here Friday. I picked it up. He wants the rest of the video.”
“There is no rest.”
“You’ve never deleted a video in your life. You’ve got the boys’ first Christmas on there. You’ve got our wedding off the old camcorder.”
“It’s my phone.”
“Then you play it.”
She didn’t. She sat there with both hands flat on the tablecloth.
“She liked it there better,” Diana said.
Nobody said anything.
“She told me. Last Christmas. I was on the floor with the phone and she said, I’d rather sit here with his dogs than in that house with all your rules. To me. On my knees in front of her.”
Diana looked at Horace.
“You took her. I had the tour all set up. She was going to go to a nice place by the river and I was going to visit her every day, and you went and got her in your truck like you were the only one who loved her. And then you went and married a woman who could do it better than me.”
“Diana,” Horace said.
“Don’t you Diana me. And she sits in the front room and plays with your dogs and calls the puzzles and that’s the last real thing I’ve got of her, her telling me she’d rather have them. And I’m supposed to just let them lie on her couch with a new baby like nothing happened?”
“Nothing happened,” her husband said. “That’s the problem. You drove over there for something to happen.”
He was still holding his hand out.
Diana took the phone out of her purse and put it in his hand without looking at it.
He scrolled for a while. He didn’t have to ask her for the code. He played it at the table, full volume, with the phone flat on the cloth next to my pie.
Forty-three seconds.
The skid. The stop. Seymour taking the floor like ice. His chin. Hobbs on his belly and the sock and the heel and the staying.
Is he gonna bite her?
And then Horace, crying, These two lay exactly like this every single night. Back before Mom.
And Diana’s voice, close to the phone, so low the table had to lean in.
Well, shit.
Her husband pressed something and then something else.
“What are you doing?” Diana said.
“Sending it to the county.”
“You’ll get them put down over my dead body. That’s what you think I wanted?”
“I think you wanted them gone,” he said. “I think you’d have taken that.”
He set the phone down in front of her.
“It’s sent,” he said.
The next Sunday
Officer Schumacher came Monday at ten.
Seymour went to sleep on his shoe again.
He said he’d seen both videos, and the hospice note, and he’d be closing both complaints. The letter came Thursday. Unfounded. It’s on our refrigerator under a magnet from the vet on McGalliard, the one who never got to board them.
The Sunday dinners at Diana’s ended. Nobody called to say so.
One of the boys’ wives sends my daughter pictures of her own kids sometimes. The cousin from Anderson told somebody at church I’d turned Horace against his own blood.
I’d had a chair at that table every Sunday for two and a half years. It was the only table in Muncie that ever set a place for me before I married into anything. I miss it more than I’ll say to Horace.
Horace hasn’t talked to his sister. He doesn’t talk about not talking to her.
My daughter went home to Fort Wayne three days early. Not because of the dogs. Her husband got back from his crew in North Dakota, and the baby needed her own crib.
The next Sunday, I made a roast at our house. I set the table for five, out of habit, and then took two plates back off.
Horace sat at the end and ran his thumb along the table’s edge, back and forth, while it rested.
At four the doorbell rang.
It was Diana’s husband, by himself, holding a rawhide in a grocery bag.
“She doesn’t know I’m here,” he said. “Is that all right?”
Horace got up and pulled out the chair across from him.
“It’s Sunday,” he said. “Sit.”
If this one got to you, share it with somebody who has an old dog that knew before anyone did.
For more stories about the small moments that carry a lot of history, read “I Bought Her A Cupcake. She Said Her Mom Had Bigger Things Than Her” and “My Husband Pinned That Lamp On My Cardigan Himself, An Hour Before His Stent”. And for a family gathering that takes a different kind of turn, there’s “My Son-In-Law Handed Me The Club’s Junk Rifle So Forty People Could Laugh”.
