After it happened, Alice’s friends stopped talking about their children. Alice knew that it was their way of being sensitive to her loss, and their way of keeping Alice’s bad fortune away from themselves. It was something beyond trying not to remind her of what happened, as if silence would prevent her from thinking about it every minute of every day. It was also their being afraid of her, of what had happened to her, afraid that it proved that their children were vulnerable. That the worst thing could happen. It hadn’t helped that Alice had withdrawn into herself, finding any conversation at all abrasive to her tender nerves. She did not care about the price of peas at Potter’s. She couldn’t raise the least bit of interest in the latest small-town scandal, when the church secretary was discovered embezzling funds to support her scratch-ticket habit. Alice found herself angry at everyone, thinking, Do they not know what has happened? How can they care about a television show or the outcome of some baseball game? For a long time, Alice resented everyone for having a life without a lost child.

“I don’t know. Is anybody doing dog training around here?” Alice switches a couple of out-of-order books. “Besides, he’s trained enough for us. What would be the reason?”

“Just to have fun. You could enter him in obedience shows. They earn letters, like college students earning a BA or a BS. Dogs get a CD—companion dog—or something. Or maybe he’d be a good therapy dog. You could take him to the nursing home.”

Alice imagines her silver-and-white dog resting his head on the knee of some wheelchair-bound elder, the expressive little black eyebrows making him look interested in whatever the oldster might say. It seems like something the dog would do well. He sits with his chin on her legs all the time, those mismatched eyes studying her face, as if he expects her to do something. Alice thinks of the feel of the dog’s soft fur under her hand, how easy it is to get lost in stroking him.

Sally reshelves a book from her rolling cart. “I’m thinking that I might get another dog. There are so many out there needing homes. What if I got another and we could go together?”

Alice pokes David McCullough into his correct space on the biographies shelf. “What would you get?”

“Probably another pit bull. Maybe a puppy rescued from that New Bedford raid.”

“So you’ve been thinking about this?”

“No. Well, maybe. Hearing about those puppies just got me thinking. And when you got Buddy, my dog-parent juices started flowing again.”