I went to see Aaron. I hadn’t been gone that long, but I might as well have been an astronaut after a mission to the space station. Everything in the house, everything about Aaron himself, was both familiar and not so. It took me a while to get my bearings, and maybe it was the same for him, seeing me. We hugged, but hugging really wasn’t our thing, not unless it was going to lead us straight to bed. And I wasn’t going to end up there this time, even though somewhere inside me a familiar slow fuse had been lit.

It was a relief to break the hugging off when Batman came padding into the room. “Batman!” I knelt down and let him kiss my face. “Oh baby, I missed you so much.” I looked up at Aaron. “I mean, I missed you both.”

“Thanks.” He’d put his hands in his pockets and taken a step back. Body language alert.

It was always so much less complicated to love a dog, but I didn’t think I should say that. I stood up. “Could we take him for a walk?”

We followed our usual route, past the vacant lots and half-built houses, out to the roadway and the empty spaces where Batman could sniff and pee. It was the first week of September, still warm, still hazy and golden. But the light was receding, day by day. It felt like the end of something. I’d already told Aaron about Viridian’s stroke, and now he asked how she was.

“The same. She’s in a sort of coma. Or not sort of. I don’t think she’s going to come out of it.” I hadn’t said it before. Tears pricked at my eyelashes.

“I’m sorry. That just sucks.”

He took my hand then and held it. Sometimes he was the best.

“But she’s being taken care of, right?”

“Nobody knows what to do.” The doctors had been talking about how, once she had stabilized, meaning, once they could do no more for her, she could be moved to a nursing and rehab place in Marin.

“It doesn’t sound like there’s much of anything to do.”

“But it doesn’t feel right. Her life shouldn’t just come to this full, stupid stop.”

“Carla, that’s what life does.”

I didn’t have any answer to that. After a while we turned back toward home, and Aaron said, “I’m waiting for my passport. Once it comes, I’m all set.”

“Set for what?” I said, although I thought I knew.

“Vancouver. I got the job. I can start as soon as my feet hit the ground there.”