E is about to lay her eyes on S: a first that might be a last, or that might be one of a series of firsts. She has no way to prepare, so she makes a stove-top espresso and listens—knock, strike, rinse, fill, hum, clatter—for the sentence that will tell her what she doesn’t know she knows.

&

No sentence came, nor was there time for one to form; before she brought the coffee mug to her lips, a shadow fell on the kitchen floor, interrupting the stream of morning sun, and a knock turned her around to face the slatted-glass door as she heard the sounds of a car reversing out of her gravel drive.

The sun was streaming directly through the glass so she couldn’t see the face of the standing figure; the next thing she knew the door was pushed in, and an enormous wirehaired dog barreled into E’s thighs, whinnying.

It was easier not to look up at S. It was easier to face the dog: a bucktoothed, wild-eyed, brindle mix of who knows what breeds. An unimaginable dog, just as S had been—and remained, for seconds longer, or as long as E could delay—unimaginable.

“That’s Splice,” a voice said, and E gave in to the polite obligation to look up.

As she did, the mass of coarse brindle hair launched toward her face, preceded by a giant pinkish tongue.

“Splice, so happy to meet you,” E laughed, subconsciously assessing the dog’s potential for craziness before performing the bonding gesture she had made, since she was a child, with every dog whose craziness potential was low: she boxed Splice’s ears with her hands and brought its forehead to meet hers, then, through a series of deliberate inhalations and exhalations, synchronized their breathing. This, of course, though it was a genuine and longstanding habit, at the moment served mostly to put off facing S for as long as the situation would allow.

&

E’s house, the house she rented from the last surviving offspring of a family that had been in the area for many generations, twin sisters who had both moved to a retirement home in Orlando and relied on the modest rent from E to supplement their social security payments and other fixed income (in one case an inheritance from a dead husband, and in the other a school librarian’s pension—E had gleaned all of this from the one conversation the three women had when the lease was signed), was once a trailer.