Daisy makes a few minute adjustments of the blankets and pillows, then puts Lucy down on the bed. We both watch as the dog, slowly, gently, finds a spot somewhere off Glenn’s left knee—close but not touching it—as if knowing that the time for physical contact is past—that she is already beyond the tactile sense of the living and into another dimension, the mysterious and unknown one where transitioning, from life to death, takes place. Daisy takes my hand and leads me away from the bed and slowly to the bedroom door. If she didn’t, I don’t think I would ever leave.

“A hospice nurse is coming tonight,” she whispers. “She’s on her way.”

I nod with relief. “You’ll call me?” I beg, hugging Charlotte in the sling, slipping my arms inside of it to get a fuller embrace and thereby undoing all the work I just did with the lint brush. I know I should be trying to comfort Daisy, who looks calm but must be terrified, her long blond hair up in a neat ponytail and her impossibly young face pale without makeup, but all I can do is reassure her that I’ll be back soon, the second the show is over, which I hope is soon enough.

* * *

By the time we get to the school—the front of which is festooned with hand-painted banners promoting the night’s big event—we are almost, but not quite, late. Gary searches the parking lot, swearing under his breath, every time what looks like it could be a space is taken up by a tiny hybrid or a group of bicycles. Normally he would say “What is this, Amsterdam?” but tonight he just parks half the car up on a curb, the hood pushed under a bank of shrubs, and calls it a day. “Let’s go,” he says. And we do.

He runs, and I follow with the dog, fast-walking into the building. He glances back at me once, negotiating the girth of the sling, and I know he’s thinking he wishes just once we could go somewhere, just the two of us, without my impediment. I’m sure he’s also thinking: I wish she weren’t so weird. It’s one thing when I navigate the world on my own, making my own messes, as I did at the reservoir, and then being forced to clean them up, but when we’re together, he has to confront, yet again, the embarrassing fact that he has a wife who wears a dog in public. If we weren’t so late to the performance, I’d worry that the huge distance Gary is trying to create between us is to make it look like we’re not together—which we kind of aren’t, of course—and while most people at the school know us and know Teddy—this is our fifth year—there are enough outsiders attending that maybe he thinks he’ll be spared at least a few judgmental glances.

Finally he stops and waits for me. “Maybe you should get a therapy dog vest already and use a leash,” he says in a loud whisper, and I know now that he is embarrassed by me. “Is it too much to ask that you get rid of that thing?” He points to the sling.