“Good for you,” he said. He had just gotten back from his trip and he was amused by the news of the dognapping. They agreed to meet at a park toward the center of town.

Jen got there before David and unleashed the dog, watching her run in long, elegant arcs from one end of the lawn to the other, stopping sometimes to smell the ivy or paw at the dirt. She never barked and never traveled beyond Jen’s line of vision, as if she already belonged to her, and the two shared some invisible filament of understanding. When the dog sprinted, the grass and bushes blurred in the background, her body suspended in a graceful economy of motion.

David arrived on his bike and stood to admire the dog.

“Are you going to keep it?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Jen said. “Maybe. If I can.”

“Wow,” he said. The dog turned and smiled at them.

“What should we name her?” Jen asked, leaning into David’s chest.

“How about . . .” David paused and half laughed. “How about ‘Penis-balls’?”

Jen drew away. David’s joke was repellent to her. She refused to mock the beautiful dog with a name like that. “That’s awful. Something pretty.”

“Okay, how about naming it after my grandma,” David suggested. “Grandma Sadie.”

“Sadie?” Jen said. She tried out the name on the dog with some optimism. Sadie was something she could work with. Sadie was antique but gracious, perfumed and yet tough. She liked the monocled, lacy, ruffled implications of the name. She imagined a sinuous, lacquered rocking chair.

“No, not ‘Sadie,’ ” David said. “ ‘Grandma Sadie.’ Come here, Grandma Sadie! Com’ere!” David laughed as the dog halted in mid-stride and looked toward them. Jen could see, ruefully, the naming had been done.

Within minutes the dog’s name had devolved to Grandma Penis-balls, the words sliding around on some scrim between David and reality, some invisible Scrabble board in the air. Jen watched the dog’s muscles bunch and stretch as she ran in long ovals around the grass. Her dog didn’t need names anyway.

Soon enough Jen stopped listening to David and sat down on a bench. He had ruined the momentum of the day’s events with his irony. She would take the dog to the Humane Society that afternoon and let them decide what to call her.

At the end of the month a spell of turgid, chilly drizzle arrived in town and continued for weeks without pause. It was like a cold lid placed over the sky, and the damp crept into everything. Jen couldn’t keep her hands and feet warm. One day she opened the newspaper to discover that the region was entering a new, twenty-year cycle of rain.