Two days pass with more leaps into the pool. Bill makes them with special gusto, grateful to be forgiven by the boy. Ronald throws the ball, cheers when Bill hits the water. He braces on the deck, pulling the rope.

And Ruby. She is very nice to him, using the brush on his back as he sits for her. This is one of the best things, the brush. The mister showed her how, Ruby kneeling next to Bill on the deck, smoothing the stiff bristles along his sides. But she isn’t allowed now to walk him. That’s over. And he is kept sometimes in the garage, hearing the baby inside. At least the mister has stopped using the lead. Bill does his best to do everything right, to not run ahead, or chase geckos. When other dogs and owners approach, he stays at Vinyl’s side.

And then the son and his family are gone. The house is silent. Bill walks through the rooms, ears alert, still smelling them. No baby, or new wife talking in the kitchen to the missus. No chicken video or Cartoon Network. It’s almost too quiet. Over the last ten days he has come to like the action in the house, the extra walks and exercise.

But all of it will happen soon again, at the lake. After the car trip. He doesn’t exactly know this from last summer, but has a sense of continuity based on the mister, and water. Not as people do, but it’s dimly present in his mind, without time sense but real enough. Odors bring it to him. When Vinyl makes a certain meal on the grill, the dog thinks of the Michigan beach, he doesn’t know why. They were all of them there—the son, Ronald and Ruby. But not the wife and baby. They are new. Or when the mister puts on one of the videos he made. He did this the day the family left. “Check yourself out, Bill—” Hearing his name as he drank water in the kitchen, the dog trotted out, finding Vinyl in the TV room. “That’s you—” he pointed the remote. It was him, on the screen. He didn’t recognize himself, but a dog was standing under trees, just behind the log house in Michigan, looking up and barking.

QUIET YES, BUT a lot is going on. Suitcases lie open on the bed. Serving dishes the missus uses in both houses are being wrapped in newspaper and put in boxes. There are telephone calls and final visits from Donegal friends. Bill is no longer being allowed out after dinner. He whines until the missus scolds.

For this reason, he doesn’t know Hotspur is dead.

Glenda Gilmore, still in Cleveland, got the call from Graciella, her housekeeper. The woman was very apologetic. He just run out, I don’t got no chance to grab him, I real sorry, it just happen. Back the next morning, Glenda didn’t come directly from the Fort Myers airport. She drove Cliff’s Explorer straight from the airport to the beach, searching the route she and her husband had always taken with the dog. Then to Naples, north to Lowdermilk Park. Exhausted from the summer heat, she went to the house, changed clothes, and resumed her search. Now south to the last point of Naples public beach access, in Port Royal at 33rd Street. Then north. She asked at hotels and condo complexes, at chickee bars. People shook their heads. Two men offered to help her look if they could first buy her a drink. At Clam Pass, the afternoon heat dangerous in the dense mangrove swamp, instead of taking the tram to the beach, she walked the length of the boardwalk. Running her hand along the rail, Glenda looked down into the coiled hoops of mangrove roots. At the beach, she drank a bottle of Evian and asked everyone there. He’s black, she told them. With white markings on his chest and paws. Very friendly, you’d remember. She walked to the estuary and back, feeling lightheaded. Back in the parking lot, she sat a quarter of an hour in the Explorer, crying now, feeling sick and desperate. Then Vanderbilt Beach. There was so much beach in Naples, ten miles. Realizing then that there was no reason to think Hotspur hadn’t gone farther north, to Bonita Beach, she felt hopeless. She drove home, called the Naples police, the Collier County Sheriff’s Department—even the Lee County sheriff’s office, giving the description.

Spreading mulch, Public Works landscapers found Hotspur on the Davis Boulevard median. Glenda had passed the body without seeing, talking to Cliff as she drove, asking what she should do. The dog had been struck by a car or pickup as he tried crossing, running for the beach where Cliff Gilmore was waiting with the Frisbee, in his shorts, standing in the lap of water, very tan and the hair on his arms pure white like the collie’s chest.

All of this tumbled out of her on Madame’s lanai later that afternoon. You’re the only woman here who doesn’t treat me like a hooker, she said. Like a tramp. I’m so sorry, Madame said. People can be pointlessly mean.