Mrs. Orson’s answer was a gentle but mocking smile. It was a look Ruby got a lot, but it didn’t bother her as much coming from the residents. She liked to think of them as the fleet of loving grandparents she’d never had.

“It’s not right,” Ruby insisted. “He shouldn’t get away with it.”

“He doesn’t, dear.”

Harry emerged with two white pills in his hand. He rattled them around the same way a gambler would a pair of dice, and Ruby couldn’t help but imagine his pockets overflowing with baby aspirin with the A’s scraped off.

She shook her head as Mrs. Orson accepted the pills and carelessly kicked them back. Ruby could work here for the rest of her life and never run out of ways to be surprised. Every day was an education.

“Five minutes,” Harry warned as he took himself off. He pointed a finger at Ruby. “Then you need to be scrubbed in and on the clock, understood? I don’t care how many dogs are dying around here.”

Ruby was superstitious enough to reach down and pet Wheezy as soon as Harry rounded the corner. “He didn’t mean that,” she said, running her fingers through the tangled curls of his ears. The golden retriever did no more than stir, so she turned to glance up at Mrs. Orson. “And please stop threatening death every time you don’t get your way. Think of how bad you’d feel if something happened to Wheezy.”

This admonishment had about as much effect on the older woman as the revelation that Harry was stealing her medication. Mrs. Orson blinked at her for a moment before picking up her book once again.

“But you said yourself that he’s in perfect health,” she pointed out. “You had that nice man from the dog show check him out.”

“I said he gave me diet food recommendations,” Ruby corrected her. “And he wasn’t nice. He insulted poor Wheezy.”

“Did he now?”

“Several times, actually. He also tried to bar him from entering the contest just because we were a few minutes late.”

“Then it was good of him to change his mind. You must have been very convincing.”

Ruby hesitated. Convincing wouldn’t be the word she’d have chosen to describe her interaction with Spencer Wilson. She’d used logic, yes, and persuasion, and maybe even a little bit of cunning, but he clearly hadn’t been won over—not by Wheezy and definitely not by her.

Holding her place in the book with one gel-tipped fingernail, Mrs. Orson glanced up. “Ruby, honey, if doing all this extra work for Wheezy is too much, I won’t hold you to your promise—and I won’t ask Harry to take your place either, so there’s no need to look at me like I just ran over your favorite bicycle. It’s only a dog show.”