The puppies had been left to run about in the fenced yard off the kitchen, and in her haste to answer the telephone, which was the vet’s office changing her appointment to another day, Grace had inadvertently left the gate un-hinged, and it took only a minute for Benji to shove it open and race toward Cove Road.

Grace had dashed outside, running so fast she nearly fell on her face when she caught her shoe in a gopher hole. She grabbed both dogs before they reached the road, tucked them one under each arm, and trudged back to the house.

Now she sat with them on the front steps and fanned her face with the newspaper. She would put the dogs in the fenced yard and make sure the gate was secured. Then she would go over and visit Bob. But when she glanced toward Bob’s cottage, his car was gone, and she remembered that Bob was at the VA hospital visiting Randy. This was Bob’s fourth visit, and a friendship had sprung up between himself and Randy. Randy needed a father figure, and in Grace’s opinion, Bob needed what she considered useful involvement with people. She believed that some unspoken law of the universe required people to contribute to what she called the life stream. If you had a skill—be it a learned skill like carpentry or gardening, or an innate skill like being a good listener, or the ability to organize things or do research—it was incumbent on you to use that skill to help others, especially young people. In Grace’s mind, chasing a golf ball around a course did not count as useful.

Bob volunteered with the police department, riding with the police occasionally and checking in prisoners’ visitors at a local jail. But Grace thought that Bob should be working with young men. He had brushed off every suggestion she made until their visit with Randy at the hospital.

Visiting at the VA hospital was difficult for Grace. There were far too many men in wheelchairs or on crutches. There were too many men with vacant looks in their eyes, and it broke her heart to witness their pain, whether physical or mental. She blessed Bob for spending time with Randy, who, Bob reported, was seeing a counselor and doing much better. Grace knew from a phone call to the boy how much Bob’s visits lifted his spirits, and Bob had told her they had discussed Randy’s future, and the possibility of his continuing his education with the goal of becoming a history teacher.