Julia told me the other night that, after years of meditating, she’d decided that Buddhism was mostly just about being nice to people. I hadn’t joined her on her Zen kick, but it was a useful idea to fall back on when the alternative was imminent assault.

“There was a dog in all this, at some point, right?” I said.

He brushed his hair out of his eyes and raised his head.

“Don’t you have any kind of an imagination?” he said.

In this moment, in this desperate light, he looked his age—that is, my age—if not significantly older. Whatever was inside him, whatever was driving this, was taking a heavier toll on him than it would on me. Or so I hoped.

I let him lead me back out to the waiting room. Julia was reading a pamphlet on heartworm and Kiki was curled up tight under her chair, staring at me from under her beautiful eyelashes.

“I’ll let you know the next time we have a good candidate for you.” He shook my hand and, I swear, winked at me, before walking back toward his office. Kiki stood up and gnawed on my wrist. Ready to go, Dad. We all got into Julia’s Mini and drove in silence.

“Was it awful?” Julia said. “Seeing the dog?”

Out the window, I watched a road crew worker scratch his back with an orange SLOW sign.

“It just looked like it was sleeping,” I said.

A couple of evenings later, I drove out through the hills of horse country to Kenny’s house with Kiki sprawled in the backseat. Julia was back home overstudying for yet another standardized test, mostly, I think, to get out of coming along for the visit. I watched the stretches of dense forest open onto lit-up fields. Kenny and Scruggs, his vicious Jack Russell, were waiting at the end of his winding driveway, standing alongside Kenny’s truck and an old Volkswagen. Kiki bolted through a lowered car-window at Scruggs, who immediately dropped into a sprint across the meadow in front of the house. From a copse of bushes, a corgi burst into the field and chased desperately and ineffectually after them.

“New dog?” I said.

“Nah, that’s Cam’s pup,” he said. “He’s just over for a bit with his wife. Guy’s insane but mostly all right.”

“Jesus,” I said. But how else could this story end?

There was Cameron, posted up in the kitchen in a flowered apron, frying a mess of hamburger meat on the stove and drinking from a bottle of George Dickel. His supposed wife was leaning back against the sink in jeans and a frayed Widespread Panic T-shirt. She had a short shock of gray hair. She smiled thinly at me and waved like she had an invisible cigarette between her fingers. Cameron turned to me, unsurprised.