28

“If he’s so smart, why don’t you check out doing obedience with him?” Sally Perkins, Alice’s coworker at the library, pushes the cartload of books to be reshelved. It’s midafternoon, a slow time on a weekday, too early for the kids who come in to play computer games instead of doing their homework, too late for the senior citizens who come by the little bus; the nonworking mothers are about the only people drifting through the stacks, killing time before the little kids get off the bus, poking through the romance novels and the self-improvement books.

Alice has been telling Sally all about Buddy’s spontaneous trick of standing on his hind legs and spinning. She is ahead of Sally in the stacks, straightening out the disorder of improperly shelved books. How come patrons can’t put them back where they found them? The one marked 941.45 HE belongs left of 941.45 HI. Alice reverses the order of the nonfiction on the shelf. “He already knows the basics. Sit, stay, down.” Buddy even heels, although she’s never asked him to. Every time he performs a trick or obeys a command, Alice tries not to make too much of it. If he’s this clever, someone spent a lot of time with him. And that line of thinking makes her nervous. It isn’t hard to put herself in the place of whoever has lost this dog.

“Then you could go into an advanced class. It’d be fun.” Sally has been a dog person all her life. Alice is discovering that a lot of her friends like to label themselves “dog person.” Like Mary Jackson. Alice has known Mary all her life and knows that she’s never been without a dog, but it wasn’t until Alice began to talk about Buddy that Mary opened up about her beloved shih tzu, as if she was talking about her kids. Sally, too, was going on about Ralphie, her rescued pit bull. Suddenly, this common ground has added a dimension to their friendship. Or maybe filled a gap.

After it happened, Alice’s friends stopped talking about their children. Alice knew that it was their way of being sensitive to her loss, and their way of keeping Alice’s bad fortune away from themselves. It was something beyond trying not to remind her of what happened, as if silence would prevent her from thinking about it every minute of every day. It was also their being afraid of her, of what had happened to her, afraid that it proved that their children were vulnerable. That the worst thing could happen. It hadn’t helped that Alice had withdrawn into herself, finding any conversation at all abrasive to her tender nerves. She did not care about the price of peas at Potter’s. She couldn’t raise the least bit of interest in the latest small-town scandal, when the church secretary was discovered embezzling funds to support her scratch-ticket habit. Alice found herself angry at everyone, thinking, Do they not know what has happened? How can they care about a television show or the outcome of some baseball game? For a long time, Alice resented everyone for having a life without a lost child.

“I don’t know. Is anybody doing dog training around here?” Alice switches a couple of out-of-order books. “Besides, he’s trained enough for us. What would be the reason?”

“Just to have fun. You could enter him in obedience shows. They earn letters, like college students earning a BA or a BS. Dogs get a CD—companion dog—or something. Or maybe he’d be a good therapy dog. You could take him to the nursing home.”

Alice imagines her silver-and-white dog resting his head on the knee of some wheelchair-bound elder, the expressive little black eyebrows making him look interested in whatever the oldster might say. It seems like something the dog would do well. He sits with his chin on her legs all the time, those mismatched eyes studying her face, as if he expects her to do something. Alice thinks of the feel of the dog’s soft fur under her hand, how easy it is to get lost in stroking him.

Sally reshelves a book from her rolling cart. “I’m thinking that I might get another dog. There are so many out there needing homes. What if I got another and we could go together?”

Alice pokes David McCullough into his correct space on the biographies shelf. “What would you get?”

“Probably another pit bull. Maybe a puppy rescued from that New Bedford raid.”

“So you’ve been thinking about this?”

“No. Well, maybe. Hearing about those puppies just got me thinking. And when you got Buddy, my dog-parent juices started flowing again.”

Alice takes the last book off the cart and studies it. Merle’s Door. She tucks it under her arm; she’ll take this one about an author’s observations of life with his free-ranging dog home to read. She’s already zipped through Marley & Me and is grateful that the dog she found isn’t a giant slobbery Lab, but a well-mannered, dignified Shetland sheepdog. She’s pored through the one book in the library about the breed and now she knows that Buddy is a blue merle and that blue eyes are common. She has confirmation of what she already knows: This is one smart breed of dog. One that likes to have a job.

She thinks that Sally is right: It might be fun to do something with him like obedience or therapy training. “I’ll think about it. Might be fun.”

When she couldn’t get pregnant, Alice read every book on the topic. When she found herself a late-in-life expectant mother, she scoured every book on pregnancy. By the time Stacy was six months old, Alice didn’t have the time or energy to read. After it happened, well-meaning friends foisted memoirs and essay books on her, books meant to explain the inexplicable, to make it comprehensible and maybe even acceptable. They sat piled like unused bricks on the coffee table, where she would occasionally run a dust cloth over their covers. She returned them, one by one, never saying that she hadn’t read them.