It was like putting your hand on a spinning top, but as soon as I let go, she began turning again. We used to call her Top Dog because she liked to sleep stretched out on our old black Lab, her head settled on his head, both of their eyes closed. Once, many years ago, the Lab had gotten carefully to his feet, made his way to the kitchen where my husband was cooking, and accepted a treat, all without disturbing the sleeping puppy draped over his neck. The Lab lived to be fifteen too. The marriage, fourteen.

I took my hands away to button my jacket, and she turned blindly for a moment on the gleaming linoleum, then bumped into the single leg of the examining table.

“It might be time,” the vet said, putting his foot out to stop her. Except for those neon running shoes, he was completely nondescript, like an actor you aren’t sure why is in the movie until the very end, when he turns out to be the killer.

At home, it didn’t get any better or any worse, Sheba following herself, nose to tail, around and around in a circle while I tried to keep her steady. My neighbor came over for a few minutes and watched, her eyes round and nervous. “This doesn’t look hopeful,” the neighbor finally said.

It was dark by then, and I was kneeling on my living-room floor in the lamplight, holding her and then letting her turn, holding her and then letting her turn. It was winter, but the neighbor was wearing flip-flops.

“Aren’t your feet cold?” I asked her.

“Yes,” she said, and went home.

We were used to being alone. Our house was small and dark, set into a hillside, but we had a stone fireplace and built-in bookshelves and a screened porch overlooking a blue lake, our own dock, and certain seabirds that didn’t seem like they belonged there, so we chased them away each morning, or, rather, one of us did while the other stood on a giant ornate piece of driftwood and drank coffee in her sunglasses, even though nobody needed sunglasses in Ithaca.

We had brought more or less nothing from our previous life—a few pictures, some ceramic bowls, a Turkish rug that we hardly noticed in our old, big Iowa house but that became, in the new house, a focal point, the last remnant of what used to be. Sheba began urinating on it sometime around midnight, a series of dark rings overlapping and intersecting one another. By one o’clock it was my turn to pee, and I ran to the bathroom and came back to find her spun into a corner and stuck there, bumping against the baseboard.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre.

“Sheba,” I said.

The falcon cannot hear the falconer.