When I brought her back to the shelter, I went to see her puppies in a private room. They were no more than eight inches long. I sat on the floor and they moved as a single mass onto me. They were crying and mewing like kittens. They licked and bit and tried to suck as they moved up my arms and chest, clinging to my neck and reaching up to bat at my face and nose, around my ears.

Once I walked Shauna in a nearby park where a group of people holding leads stood huddled in conversation while their dogs, off-leash, played close by. Shauna and I stood at the edge of both groups, and I heard a woman brag, “Barney makes on command.” Another woman observed her dog as it was mounted by two others in succession; she said that her dog’s social life was better than her own.

I was watching TV in Little Egypt with Chatty when a dog food commercial came on. A litter of tumbling pups crossed the screen, and Chatty said to me, “I guess you’re happy.”

I’ve never heard it said of you that you had dogs as pets. Though surely when you were a boy, a boy on a working farm, there must have been a dog that you befriended?

Do you find consolation in a person? In a woman? I found it once with a man, but I lost my combs. This was the last time I saw him. In the cab going home is when I saw the combs, one on top of the other on the table beside his couch. It would have been better if he had been the one to remove them, but when they interfered with the travel of his hands, I was the one who reached up and slipped the combs out. They are just cheap plastic, their job not to ornament but to secure and vanish in hair. It is not like leaving behind an earring, something that needs to be joined with a mate. The combs cost nothing, so he did not think to return them. But they’re the only ones that work in my kind of hair, and you can’t often find the ones that blend in with your hair. They tend to be packaged in assortments of a dozen, in garish bright primary colors. Before I left that night, I used his hairbrush when we finished. I left long hairs caught in the bristles, making of his hairbrush a kind of reliquary.

Where is the consolation in this? It is in humiliation, which brings the softness of heart that allows you to listen to God.

“You a student over at the college?” The cabdriver, gunning for a tip.

I still want those combs back. I need all the things I left behind back. Better to find consolation in a place. At the beach. A day at the beach when everything rhymes: crabs picked clean, one thong—green, flies blown in on a warm land breeze, parking lot rainbow in a pool of gasoline; diving seagulls, blasted boat hulls, sea-scarred plastic, rusted bedstead, rotting refuse, fish now dead.