I raise an eyebrow to Phoebe. “I guess Gary is going to show Nick his etchings.”

Behind her I suddenly see the side of a giant box of Frosted Flakes, Gary and Teddy’s favorite, sticking out from behind a small prop-box of the ancient grain farro, its florid electric-blue packaging screaming ignorance and a complete and willful disregard for health and nutrition, and making me wonder yet again what kind of parent I am. I want to reach behind her head and cover it with the nearby box of polenta and two cans of pinto beans, which are probably expired, but there isn’t time, and if she caught me it would only make things worse. How would I possibly explain that I was pretending to swat at a nonexistent fly or clear away a nonexistent spiderweb because I was trying to hide some stupid highly processed food?

“Nick’s not gay, if that’s what you’re thinking,” she says, sweetly, without a trace of annoyance or rage, the two main emotion-molecules that make up most of everything I feel when I’m around people. “Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

I wave my hand a few times too many, trying way too hard to backtrack. “Of course not!”

“Just because he’s a People Puppet—someone who likes to walk around in a big costume—doesn’t mean he’s hiding under there. In fact, the costume allows him to be more himself.”

I nod vigorously even though I’m not entirely sure what she’s talking about and how that’s possible—how wearing something that separates you from the world could possibly be considered anything other than insulation or protection or a way to hide—I should know!—and because I’ve just spied a package of Paul Newman sandwich cookies that I stupidly hid in an abundance of caution when I didn’t even have to and that could have made us actually look good, since all proceeds from his products go to charity.

“Sometimes what starts out as protective gear turns out to set us free,” Phoebe adds, looking down at my stomach area. I follow her gaze and absently realize, yet again, that I’m wearing the dog—which is almost always a complete shock, so much a part of me, like an extra limb, or a pregnancy belly, the dog has become.

“Therapy dogs are so cool.”

I laugh out loud—the demented caw of the delusional, of the perpetually misunderstood—still reeling from Grace’s awful parting words to me yesterday and the haunting threat of her possibly suspecting that Teddy could be the Secret Pooper. “She’s not a therapy dog! She’s just a dog! That I wear! Because she’s really anxious! All the time!” I lean up against the canned goods section of our fraudulent health closet and something sharp sticks into my back, but I ignore it. The nerve of someone I’m trying to help with free housing—someone barely out of college in a zebra costume and papier-mâché hooves—accusing me of having a therapy dog. It feels like an assault. I’m tempted to change my mind and clear the bad puppet-energy out of the house.