EPISODE 2 — Before the Beard
He was nineteen, and his name was Tommy.
No beard — just patchy stubble he was embarrassingly proud of. No vest — a hand-me-down denim jacket two sizes too big. No Harley — a rusted pickup with a heater that didn’t work, a radio stuck on one station, and a shepherd mix named Buddy riding shotgun.
Buddy was dumb and loyal and perfect. He’d been a stray, half-starved, when Tommy found him behind the feed store. Tommy fed him half his sandwich. Buddy followed him home. That was the whole adoption process.
They were inseparable. Buddy rode everywhere — shotgun, head out the window, ears flying, tongue lolling, living his best life at forty miles an hour. Tommy’s father called him “that damn dog.” Tommy’s mother slipped Buddy table scraps when she thought no one was looking.
“He’s not just a dog, Ma,” Tommy said once.
“I know, baby,” she said. “That’s why I’m giving him the good ham.”
Tommy worked at the lumber yard. Buddy waited in the pickup all day, and at quitting time the whole yard could hear the celebration — barking, tail thumping against the dashboard, pure joy that the boy was back.
Nobody who saw them together would have believed what Tommy would become.
But grief is a forge. And that winter, it got to work on him.
