Then Glenn and her bald head appear like a flash, and I stare down at the sling, put my arms underneath it, and hug the dog toward me. I feel the urge to tell Phoebe everything—about the farce of my marriage, about having a teenager who doesn’t seem to need or like me anymore, about having a friend who’s dying, but all I say is: “Not that there’s anything wrong with therapy dogs.”

Phoebe searches my face, sees the tears forming, shakes her head. “I didn’t mean to offend you. I don’t even know you and I shouldn’t have assumed anything about you.”

I wipe my eyes and wave her away. “I assume things all the time, and even though I’m almost always wrong, it’s my guilty pleasure. I can’t help myself. Like, for instance, I assumed you didn’t get my ‘etchings’ reference because you’re so young.”

“But I watch old movies. And one of my moms’ favorite New Yorker cartoons is the one that says, ‘You wait here and I’ll bring the etchings down.’”

We both laugh until I get quiet. “You have two moms,” I say, more a statement than a question. “That’s cool.”

“You think?”

I shrug. “I don’t have a mom anymore. Or a dad. And my best friend who kind of felt like a mom is sick now. Which is probably why I wear my dog.” I stick both hands deep inside the sling, into all that warm fur, until the tears stop.

Phoebe’s face falls, and she reaches to squeeze my arm. “I’m sorry.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m just a big old Debbie Downer sometimes.”

“No you’re not. Sometimes life is just really, really sad. Like, I have a friend who’s dealing with a really heavy thing right now in his family. It’s hard to imagine what’s going to happen, but I guess he’ll just get through it, right? I mean, that’s all you can do. Do your best to survive the bad times.”

There is something so comforting in her words that I’m thrown back to the days right before my father died when I knew the end was coming. I couldn’t bear to go through the final decline—first slow, then swift and shocking—again, so soon after going through it with my mother, so for one week I just stopped visiting him in his assisted living apartment. It was the holidays, cold and dark and icy, with colored lights twinkling everywhere. I had barely seen Teddy, there had been a ton of snow, and Gary told me I needed a break before I burned myself out completely and that the private nurses we’d hired would take care of things for a few days. But I’ll never forgive myself for shutting down when his illness suddenly escalated. When I saw him next, he could no longer stand without help, and he barely recognized me. After all I had done right, I couldn’t get past what felt like selfishness for taking that short break, for not being present during that part of his descent. It nearly ruined me. A few months after he’d died, on a cold March morning when I was walking around the reservoir with Glenn and the dogs, I was still consumed with guilt.