“You get upset by the little things. I don’t think that’s normal.”

“I like that table.”

“As I see it,” Mimi told me, “you have two choices.”

Most things in life, according to Mimi, involve at least two choices. I know better than to ask what they are. I know she’ll tell me.

“You can get therapy.”

“What’s the second choice?”

“You can get a dog.”

At one point in our communal lives, we had had cats. Wesa and Mr. Bean. Two Burmese. They were lovely animals. But having pets was difficult, and when the cats died of old age, even though we were sad and knew we would miss them, there was the sense of relief that a burden had been lifted.

“A dog?”

“I think you have a hole in your heart,” Mimi told me. “I think a dog might fill it.”

I didn’t have a hole in my heart, and I didn’t want a dog.

“Why don’t we go to the humane society,” said Mimi. “Just for a look.”

“No.”

“Then it’s therapy.”

So we went to the humane society. The woman at the front desk told us that at the moment, their supply of unwanted dogs was low.

“Let’s look anyway,” said Mimi. “What can it hurt?”

There were four dogs. In cages. As soon as we stepped into the room, they all started barking. The noise was startling, but it was the smell that stopped me in my tracks. Even Mimi was momentarily immobilized.

“Our dog would be happy,” she said. “These dogs are frightened. That’s what you smell.”

The first cage we came to contained a thirteen-year-old dog named Muffy. She was a Lab-pointer mix. Her owners had brought her to the shelter because they couldn’t afford to get Muffy’s teeth fixed.

The minute Muffy heard us, she got off her mat, limped over to the front of the cage, and gave us a sniff.

“She’s mostly blind,” the volunteer told us, “and deaf.”

When Muffy was done sniffing, when she realized that we were not her family come to take her home, she limped back to her mat.

Mimi had been wrong. I had been merely disheartened before. Now I was depressed.

SO WE’RE IN PRAGUE, on the Charles Bridge, watching the movie crew rearrange the lighting for a reverse shot, when I look back and see that the front door to our hotel is now open.

I point this out to Mimi.

“You do like to catastrophize,” she says. “I thought we had agreed to leave Eugene and the Other Demons at home.”

There’s a woman at the front desk. She speaks fluent Czech, and I speak fluent English, and we rock the languages back and forth until the question is settled.