So let’s rewind things to last Sunday when my Aunt Connie came over to hang out with me and my six year old sister, Lizzie, a.k.a. “The Lizard.” My parents were at a luncheon for someone my mom knows through her second cousin’s aunt’s grandmother or something. The Lizard was up in her room playing with those stupid microscopic dolls with the rubber clothes, and my aunt and I were in the family room looking through some old family pictures that she had brought over.

One of the pictures fell on the floor and I picked it up. It was a picture of my parents when they were a lot younger. My dad’s beard was brown instead of mostly gray with a little bit of brown like it is now. And he was a lot skinnier too. My mom had way too much hair to ignore, and those glasses—what was she thinking?

The trees behind them were bare, and everyone in the background was wearing sweaters and scarves. My dad was holding a medium-sized whitish dog in his arms. It was one of those “mop dogs” with thick cords of fur dangling off its body. I asked my aunt about it and she got a weird look on her face, like someone thumped her on the back with a two-by-four. She blinked a couple of times, gave the picture a real quick glance, and then went back to categorizing the pictures. I asked her again.
Without looking up at me she said, “Oh, I don’t know. Some dog your parents were watching for some friends who were out of the country, I think. Your father’s always loved animals. I remember one time when we were kids he brought home a squirrel whose tail he said he’d accidentally run over on his bicycle. Don’t ask me how he managed that.”
I got the sense that she was just trying to distract me from the dog in the picture. The more I looked at it, the more I noticed how happy my parents seemed. My dad’s eyes really sparkled in the sunlight, and my mom’s whole face seemed to glow with this weird energy. Even the mystery dog looked happy, his pink tongue poking through the curtain of fur. And that’s what made me want to find out more: there was something about that dog.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said. “What’s with the dog?”

Maybe it was the way I asked the question. Maybe it was the look on my face. Or maybe it was because Aunt Connie knows me so well that she realized that she’d never get a minute’s peace unless she answered me. You see, my Aunt Connie and I go way back to...well, I guess to when I was born. She was the first person my folks let baby-sit me. That was when she was out of work so she visited a lot. Of course, I don’t remember all this, but I know from the stories and the pictures. And when I was three, I had my first sleepover at her apartment in the city.
Anyway, Aunt Connie took a deep breath—I mean, a really deep breath—and put the box of pictures on the floor.

“You, nephew of mine, are that dog’s namesake,” she said.

I quickly flipped through my brain’s internal dictionary for the word. Namesake. Namesake. Something to do with a name. But what? Aunt Connie probably saw the confusion on my face and decided to clarify things.

“You know where your parents lived before you were born, right?” she asked.

“Hoboken,” I nodded. My parents always talked about Hoboken like it was some magical, far away land. I visited it with them once. A lot of cars, everything close together. Definitely nothing magical about it.

“I used to take the bus from Manhattan once or twice a month for lunch or dinner or just to hang out with them,” she said. “So the winter before you were born, I went out there and got to their building and rang the buzzer downstairs and climbed the four flights of steps and knocked. Your father opened the door a crack and a bolt of white fur shot out of the apartment and raced around my legs, I don’t know, twenty times.

Your father laughed and laughed. He bent down and swooped up the furry thing. He lifted the dog’s face up to mine and said, ‘Say hello, Caper.’”

At that point, Aunt Connie stopped talking and bit her lower lip.

“Caper, do you understand what I just told you?”

I nodded, but only because I thought she wanted me too.

“That winter there was this one mega-snowfall in March. The snow came up to my thighs. So you can imagine how hard it was for a lot of people, much less little dogs, to get around. Everyone was cooped up for three days, and that dog needed to run in a serious way. But when your father took him downstairs to go out after that snowfall, the dog bolted out the front door, slid on a patch of ice, and skidded out into the street where he...”

“What happened?” I asked.