“What’s your favorite place, Mom?”
“Oh, I have a lot of favorite places, Roy. Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico.”
“Is there a place that’s really perfect? Somewhere you’d go if you had to spend the rest of your life there and didn’t want anyone to find you?”
“How do you know that, baby?”
“Know what?”
“That sometimes I think about going someplace where nobody can find me.”
“Even me?”
“No, honey, not you. We’d be together, wherever it might be.”
“How about Wyoming?”
“Wyoming?”
“Have you ever been there?”
“Your dad and I were in Sun Valley once, but that’s in Idaho. No, Roy, I don’t think so. Why?”
“It’s really big there, with lots of room to run. I looked on a map. Wyoming’s probably a good place to have a dog.”
“I’m sure it is, baby. You’d like to have a dog, huh?”
“It wouldn’t have to be a big dog, Mom. Even a medium-size or small dog would be okay.”
“When I was a little girl we had a chow named Toy, a big black Chinese dog with a long purple tongue. Toy loved everyone in the family, especially me, and he would have defended us to the death. He was dangerous to anyone outside the house, and not only to people.
“One day Nanny found two dead cats hanging over the back fence in our yard. She didn’t know where they came from, and she buried them. The next day or the day after that, she found two or three more dead cats hanging over the fence. It turned out that Toy was killing the neighborhood cats and draping them over the fence to show us. After that, he had to wear a muzzle.”
“What’s a muzzle?”
“A mask over his mouth, so he couldn’t bite. He was a great dog, though, to me. Toy loved the snow when we lived in Illinois. He loved to roll in it and sleep outside on the front porch in the winter. His long fur coat kept him warm.”
“What happened to Toy?”
“He ran after a milk truck one day and was hit by a car and killed. This happened just after I went away to school. The deliveryman said that Toy was trying to bite him through the muzzle.”
“Does it snow in Wyoming?”
“Oh, yes, baby, it snows a lot in Wyoming. It gets very cold there.”
“Toy would have liked it.”
“I’m sure he would.”
“Mom, can we drive to Wyoming?”
“You mean now?”
“Uh-huh. Is it far?”
“Very far. We’re almost to Georgia.”
“Can we go someday?”
“Sure, Roy, we’ll go.”
“We won’t tell anyone, right, Mom?”
“No, baby, nobody will know where we are.”
“And we’ll have a dog.”
“I don’t see why not.”
“From now on when anything bad happens, I’m going to think about Wyoming. Running with my dog.”
“It’s a good thing, baby. Everybody needs Wyoming.”