Characters in The Sun Dog

… she had knitted herself, there was ten dollars from his grandmother in Des Moines, and his Aunt Hilda sent—as she always did—a string tie with a horrible clasp. She had sent the first of these when Kevin was three, which meant he already had …

The one time there had been a deer, his father’s friend Bill Roberson had been lying up in the blind.

Better than I thought. I won four hundred but I lost twenty to Bill Untermeyer. He bet you’d come up with the dough first thing this morning and I bet him I wouldn’t see it till the end of the week. If I ever did.’

He was preoccupied with this, already talking to Brandon Reed in his mind, but not so preoccupied he didn’t see the gratitude which lighted his son’s worried face.

Still— Cedric McCarty, retired industrialist par excellence and Mad Hatter extraordinaire, watched the photographs develop with that same childlike eagerness, but when they finally came clear, he looked amused and even perhaps a little contemptuous and Pop knew with the infallible intuition which had developed over almost fifty years that …

… who landed in Massachusetts Memorial Hospital short most of one ear when her equally elderly cat, Claudette, supposedly went on a rampage during a séance . . . Pop believed some of these things, disbelieved others, and mostly held no opinion—not …

Eleusippus Deere said quietly: “And the planchette that put out poor Colette Simineaux’s eye a few years ago—that was nothing but a piece of fiberboard.”

… just damning himself for a fool, telling himself he must really be slipping if a city man like that Donahue could skin Pop Merrill. And sometimes he imagined the fucker telling his poker-buddies about how easy it had been, hell, they were all just …

They had a great many more “ghost photographs,” as Eleusippus Deere called them, perhaps as many as a thousand in all, but apparently even they had realized a room the size of their parlor was limited in …

… words . . . they reminded her of something, something she associated with her five-year-old niece, Ellen, but she couldn’t catch hold of it. “For what model, Mr. Merrill?” She sounded brittle and actressy to herself, but Pop Merrill didn’t even …

… house end of the long Chaffee driveway, and all the way up that driveway he thought he could hear Emory Chaffee laughing in loud mindless cheery bellows of sound: Haw! Haw! Haw! Haw! His heart slammed in his chest, and his head felt as if someone was …

Dear Kevin, At the bridge game Jane Doyon asked if Meg and I would like to have dinner with her at Bonanza as her husband is off to Pittsburgh on business and she’s knocking around …

“And if you light that stinking thing in here,” he said, “I’ll have Joe yank it out of your mouth and dump the coals down the back of your pants.

Kevin surprised himself again—this time by bursting into tears. • • • By the time John Delevan got his son calmed down it was ten minutes of eight, and he had resigned himself to at least being late for work.

And suppose Mr. Constantine had gone out to Nan’s for coffee with Mr. Keeton from the selectmen’s office? The more she thought about that possibility, the more likely it seemed.

… CHAPTER EIGHT The two weeks following his acquisition of Kevin Delevan’s Polaroid Sun were the most aggravating, infuriating, humiliating two weeks of Pop Merrill’s life. There were quite a few people in Castle …

… the Almighty; where one couple might see the face of Jesus on the bottom of an enchilada, John and Mary Delevan would see only an overcooked enchilada. It was not surprising that Kevin, who had never seen the man in the moon because neither mother nor …

His father joined him. They ordered a loaded pizza shortly after. When Mary and Meg Delevan arrived home at twenty past seven, they both still had the giggles.

… which didn’t contain a tale-bearer or two), but their real names were Miss Eleusippus Deere and Mrs. Meleusippus Verrill. Their father, in his determination to combine devout Christianity with an exhibition of his own erudition, had named them for two of three …

He took no notice of the display but marched straight to the only open counter, where Molly Durham had just finished laying out the watches on their imitation-velvet display-cloth.

… the end of both the study hall and the school-day, he had gone to the teacher he respected most, Mr. Baker, and had asked him if he knew of anyone who repaired cameras. “Not like a regular camera-shop guy,” he explained. “More like a . . . you …

She supposed Mr. Constantine, the pharmacist, was in the store someplace, but the drug counter looked easily a quarter of a mile away, and while she knew it couldn’t be …

They arrived at the chopping block at about the same time Pop was coming out of Mrs. Althea Linden’s backyard and onto Mulberry Street, a block west.

Kevin hazarded. He found he was sweating lightly, as he had done last year every time Mrs. Whittaker announced a pop quiz in Algebra I. “Well, that’ll do.

We jump, and I guess the rest of our family does, too.” “Oh, your Uncle Randy makes your mother look like a piker,” Mr. Delevan said unexpectedly.