“If he’s so smart, why don’t you check out doing obedience with him?” Sally Perkins, Alice’s coworker at the library, pushes the cartload of books to be reshelved. It’s midafternoon, a slow time on a weekday, too early for the kids who come in to play computer games instead of doing their homework, too late for the senior citizens who come by the little bus; the nonworking mothers are about the only people drifting through the stacks, killing time before the little kids get off the bus, poking through the romance novels and the self-improvement books.

Alice has been telling Sally all about Buddy’s spontaneous trick of standing on his hind legs and spinning. She is ahead of Sally in the stacks, straightening out the disorder of improperly shelved books. How come patrons can’t put them back where they found them? The one marked 941.45 HE belongs left of 941.45 HI. Alice reverses the order of the nonfiction on the shelf. “He already knows the basics. Sit, stay, down.” Buddy even heels, although she’s never asked him to. Every time he performs a trick or obeys a command, Alice tries not to make too much of it. If he’s this clever, someone spent a lot of time with him. And that line of thinking makes her nervous. It isn’t hard to put herself in the place of whoever has lost this dog.

“Then you could go into an advanced class. It’d be fun.” Sally has been a dog person all her life. Alice is discovering that a lot of her friends like to label themselves “dog person.” Like Mary Jackson. Alice has known Mary all her life and knows that she’s never been without a dog, but it wasn’t until Alice began to talk about Buddy that Mary opened up about her beloved shih tzu, as if she was talking about her kids. Sally, too, was going on about Ralphie, her rescued pit bull. Suddenly, this common ground has added a dimension to their friendship. Or maybe filled a gap.