Summer. Sunlight so etched, winter could never have been; even night itself seemed remote, a vagary of the mind. Foster’s fingers stained purple from black raspberries. The two of them at the riverbend, on the shelf of boulderback. Jamie in black swimming trunks, the boy naked as a trout. Brown as syrup. Jewelweed hanging over the bank.

“Poppy?”

“What’s that?”

“What do you think about heaven?”

“Well. It’s a nice idea. I guess I wasn’t ever sure what to think about it.”

The boy nodded. Was quiet a moment. Then, “Me neither.”

Jamie sat with his knees up watching him. Foster looking off somewhere—the trees across the rivermeadow, the high summer clouds. Into the jewelweed. Then looked at his father. “At least there’s both of them. They’ve got each other there.”

A doctor in Whitefield called Dodge bought liquor by the case from Jamie for his own use and for those of his patients that were the better for it. He owned an English setter bitch who that spring had whelped a litter of nine puppies and Jamie bought one for Foster, feeling it a transparent and ineffectual thing to do but something tangible, some diversion, companionship at the least. Dodge wanted to make a gift of the puppy but Jamie wouldn’t have it and the older man nodded with gravity and folded the bills into his vest pocket. Inquired then mildly about Jamie himself and without pause or thought Jamie said, “The piss and vinegar’s gone right out of me. I need to be looking sharp and I just don’t care. I can’t shake it, it’ll get me hurt or killed or jailed. And seems like nothing I can do about any of it.” The doctor said nothing to this, studying Jamie. Dodge was not a young man and there was little of kindness about him but Jamie knew he was silent because there was nothing true to be said, no remedy to be offered. Then Dodge reached and touched his sleeve, a quick gesture as if lifting something away and told him for Foster to call if he had any questions about the puppy, and to bring the boy and dog by sometime and let him see them.

For that one moment when Jamie brought out from under his jacket the twelve-week-old squirming puppy an illumination appeared in his boy’s face, a brief slide from shadow as the world made new. By the time Jamie spoke the words “She’s for you,” the boy was already reaching for her with his face once more grave, very serious, as if all the implications were understood and accepted, the responsibility assumed and undertaken. The puppy laved her tongue in hard quick curls over the contours of Foster’s face and briefly his eyes closed with pleasure. Then he got both hands firmly around the puppy and held her down against his chest and looked at his father. “I’ll call her Lovey,” he said, “because I love her.”