“Wow. That’s a little scary.”

Alice nods. “He really is smart.”

“A real one of a kind, I’d say.” Ed snaps the leash on the dog’s new collar. “Someone must really miss him.”

“I know.”

“We have to advertise him.”

“I’ve put the ad in the Press.” Alice has missed this week’s deadline, so the ad won’t appear until next Thursday’s edition of the weekly town newspaper. Found, small collielike dog. Gray and white, one blue eye, one brown. Near Old Path Road. Call … Alice wishes she hadn’t been so specific.

Ed retrieves his hat from one of the pegs. “Maybe no one will see it.”

Alice covers her mouth with one hand. She knows, and Edward knows, that doing the right thing might mean a loss; but not to do the right thing—in this case, to properly advertise the dog—isn’t an option. It’s not how either of them was raised. Ed was a Boy Scout. She was a Girl Scout.

* * *

Alice Rae Thompson saw Ed Parmalee for the first time when he was standing in line at the Dairy Queen.

* * *

She’s behind the counter, serving up soft-serve ice-cream cones, vanilla and chocolate laden with jimmies or a dip that hardens into a chocolate shell. This is her summer job; once she’s back in class at the local community college, she’ll quit. She notices that he’s clean-cut among the young folks hanging around, his hair only a little long against his collar, not sporting the shoulder-length hair of his companions, and for a moment she wonders if he’s a veteran, someone who’s been to Vietnam. Before he even reaches her window, Alice decides that, no, he can’t be in the service, or recently out. His face is open and cheerful, not like the faces of those older brothers of her friends who have chosen the service instead of college, or had it chosen for them. They’ve come back, most of them, looking thirty, not twenty. Not smiling.

Edward Parmalee, dark-haired and blue-eyed, topping six three, slender as the basketball player he was in high school, looks at Alice Thompson framed in the Dairy Queen window and smiles at her. For the first time she can ever remember, Alice full out blushes, the warmth in her cheeks migrating straight to the roots of her hair. She can even feel the heat prickle along the center part that separates her hair into two long sheets of honey blond.

Ed’s smile opens a seam in her soul, a place that has been untouched, unmined. She can barely stammer out the right words to take his order.

“Chocolate, rainbow sprinkles, and your telephone number.” Ed has the good grace to blush himself, and she knows that he’s never done that before, that this is a new boldness.

When he calls later that evening, they laugh, realizing that neither one has asked the other’s name. “Is this you?”

“Yes. I’m Alice.”

“I’m Ed Parmalee. I work at the plant.”