Foster sold three of the pups through Dodge, both available females and one of the males. It was hard to accept the money, six dollars apiece, and then the men drove out of the yard and the money was in his pocket and Glow chewing at his cuffs and he felt all right about it. The last males he sold through an advertisement in the paper. This was harder yet, the people rank strangers. Without caring what the people would think he lifted each pup and kissed its head and without words wished it well before handing it over. Then it was done. Lovey’s coat began to grow back. She returned, something forever shifted in her but the old dog back. Aloof and demanding, pressing up against him at night. Turning her head away when he’d reach to stroke her. And there was Glow. A strident urgent puppy. Sometimes, in the woods, stopping so suddenly on top of some scent that she’d topple over her own legs, her nose down in the soft dirt, her eyes already turned up to scout her next move.

The way things happen. As if a gap, a hole in the world, is only waiting to be filled up. And not passive waiting but gravitational. Just after midnight, the fourth of August, the Perseids streaking the sky, Jamie at an oval polished table in the general manager’s office of the Forest Hills, above Franconia. This room a small lap of luxury left in a diminishing industry. A private sitting room with a fine daytime view of the Notch and the mountains around it: the Old Man. The manager an old hotel man called Harold Shelton. Jamie sitting there drinking whiskey through the evening hours with Shelton, both of them passing time trading stories and laments, Shelton pausing to lift the telephone in response to the bell, settling a problem without moving. Watching him do this recalled to Jamie something familiar, where a man made order in his wake. He could look clearly at Shelton and see a man out of time, a man not only of an old order but of one passed by. Who did not know that yet. Or more likely, as Jamie sat and sipped, who knew it well and was simply riding out whatever was left to him. Shelton a lean stringy man with a trimmed ginger beard and manners matching the manicure of his fingers. His hair white-patched over his temples, the white fading back in sublime fine disintegration as if a sign painter had done the job. On the wall a round electric clock, an audible click with each minute passed. A neat stack of stationery with the hotel imprint on the top of the sheet. A fountain pen and well. And the telephone. Nothing else between them but the bottle and the glasses and a pair of cork coasters. Late, and quiet in the room. Shelton turned his glass on the coaster, watched the revolution, looked up at Jamie. Jamie touched his own glass and then looked at Shelton.