“It’s remarkable, didn’t I say?”

Dr. Marks pulls a tube of ointment from his pocket and begins to massage it into the horse’s leg.

“He cut it on a rusted fence wire,” her grandmother says to Isabelle in a low voice.

Dr. Marks mutters to the horse as he rewraps the leg. The horse keeps his head low, as if he is listening. When the vet has tied the bandage off, he stands up and takes the horse’s head in both his hands, bringing his own face close to the horse until they are touching, head to head.

Ruth stands by the bedroom window, her arms clutched across her chest. Behind her, Wilson is crouched on the floor, fiddling with the pieces of a phonograph player. The sky has clouded over after only a few hours of sunshine; it is barely noon, but dusk already seems well on the horizon.

“Are you going to have him look at Maggie?” Ruth squints in the direction of the barn, where her daughter and her mother-in-law have been since just after breakfast. Something clatters to the floor behind her.

“Shit,” Wilson mutters.

She turns around. Wilson’s elbows are perched on his knees. He holds a slender wire in each hand before his face, stares at one, then the other.

“Wilson,” Ruth says.

“Yuh,” he grunts.

“Are you going to have him look at Maggie?”

Wilson fastens the wire in his left hand to the back of the phonograph base. “Who?”

Ruth sighs and turns back to the window.

“Dr. Marks?” he asks.

“Yes, Wilson. The vet. Do you think we ought to let him take a look at the dog?”

“You’ve been talking to my mother,” Wilson says. She hears a click as Wilson sets another piece of the phonograph machine into place. “Dr. Bremer has seen Maggie twice now,” he says. “I think he’s probably done for her everything there is to do.”

“She doesn’t seem well.”

“She’s not well.”

“I’m just never going to forgive myself if we don’t do everything we can,” Ruth says, turning around again.

“Forgive yourself?” Wilson says. He looks up from his fiddling. “I think we’ve done everything we can and more. Believe me, if there was anything I thought Dr. Marks could do, I’d be the first to let him.”

“Well, maybe there is….”

“Ruth, the man’s been in retirement for over a decade. But if you want to, then by all means.”

Ruth follows his gaze toward Maggie. She lies curled on the rug at the foot of the bed, her eyes half closed and glassy.

“She doesn’t look well,” Ruth says.

“No.” Wilson frowns.

“I should never, never have insisted on getting her early. Shit. Shit.” She turns around again.

“Getting her early?”