Right around then the snow started accumulating, banks of it, stiff like packing material that creaked when she walked on it. The gray smoke from her chimney dispersed into the gray sky and she countered by buying an elaborate set of bright markers. They stood upright in their own plastic lazy Susan, taking up half her drawing table, every possible hue of every primary color. Somebody sent her a boxed set of Beavis and Butt-Head DVDs and she watched all of them in a row on a dim Saturday, then threw up her pad thai. Another time she tried to walk her dog on the road and was accosted by the Dobermans. Sheba, despite being mostly blind, was still willing to kill them, spinning in circles and making exorcist noises. The Dobermans followed, their hackles raised, growling.

“Can you please call your fucking dogs off?” she cried to the people who were standing in their yard watching.

“Muffin,” the woman said after a moment. “Trina.”

The dogs took a few more stiff-legged steps and then turned and trotted back toward their house and up the driveway.

It was around this time that she began to think about making some friends.

Before she could formulate a plan, her father came down with a terrible flu that turned out to be cancer. For a few weeks, her sister ferried him to radiation and chemo, calling to report the details—the Sharpie diagrams drawn on his skin, the gruesome melted-chalk taste of the Ensure he drank from a bent straw, the waiting rooms with TVs blasting, Ellen dancing ghoulishly across the screen while patients shivered under afghans, receiving their poison.

Joan called him every day after his treatments, making her voice buoyant, and then again in the evening to see what he was having for dinner, even though he always said the same thing: “One of these milkshakes.” Near the end of every conversation, as before, he would ask, “How’s your little dog?” He never called her Sheba, even to her face.

The day he didn’t answer she got hold of her sister, who drove over to find him collapsed on the floor.

“It’s not going to work out,” her sister whispered into the phone that evening from the hospital corridor.

Within two hours, Joan and the dog were in the car, first creeping on snowpack through western New York and then driving fast on dry pavement all through the night. Loud music and sparkling stars until it was dawn in the Midwest, and they could slow down.

They had him sitting in a chair, but he was slumped over, eyes closed. He looked smaller, burnished, and so intensely like himself that for a moment, standing in the hall, Joan didn’t recognize him. Next to him was Connie, one of his girlfriends, wearing a sweatshirt with a big plaid heart appliquéd on the front. Connie was looking at her shoes, turning them thoughtfully this way and that. She reached down into her bag of knitting, took out a long blue needle, poked at the sole of one sneaker, dislodging something that she then picked up with a Kleenex and deposited in the wastebasket. While up, she tidied a stack of newspapers and then opened the drawer of the nightstand.