“It is when it’s for a welcome dinner,” she said. “Do you feel properly welcomed?”

The bright warmth swelled tentatively in my chest again.

—

That night, showered and in my pajamas, I sat at the kitchen table and called Joellen on Francine’s rotary dial landline. Which, if you haven’t tried one, is kind of fun.

“Francine?” Joellen’s voice was anxious. “Everything okay?”

“It’s me.”

“Muir! You okay?”

“Hi,” I said. She was quiet. I liked the faraway buzz in the receiver. It felt like talking in an old movie, underwater and through a tunnel.

“Muir.”

“I’m here.”

She sighed. “You want me to come get you?”

The dishwasher, full of our high tea plates, shifted its cycle. Francine was in the living room watching TV with Terry Johnson cinnamon-rolled up in her lap.

“Ohhhh,” Francine said to him in what I was learning was her special Terry Johnson voice, “you hate the new Bachelor, too, don’t you?” Terry turned his belly up to be scratched. “Yes, you do, that’s because he’s a mansplaining dummy. Every one of those cute dental hygienists and marketing majors is too good for him, but it’s all fake anyhow, so who cares? We do. That’s right, yes, we do! Brittney better get a rose or else!” And she smothered his face in kisses.

“No,” I said to Joellen, working the knotted chain I’d taken from the pillowcase, more because I was feeling lucky than to soothe my nerves, which were oddly still. I watched Terry push his nose up against Francine’s face. “Don’t come get me. Not yet.”

Upstairs, alone in the empty room in the huge non-bunk bed, I lay awake past midnight watching the bats dive and swoop around the moonlit window until I gave up and took a blanket from the bed, crept down the stairs to the living room, and lay down on the narrow sofa. Better. Two distinct sets of breathing echoed in the dark from Francine’s room. I closed my eyes and was nearly lulled to sleep until I was startled by trotting clicks on the floor. Terry Johnson jumped lightly up onto the sofa, wormed his way into the crook of my knees, turned around a bunch of times, curled up like the pastry he was, and fell asleep.

Every orphan needs a dog to rehydrate our dead, frozen hearts, symbolize the unconditional love we’ve been denied, and make us realize that there really is beauty in the world, after all. Ask anyone. Ask Annie. Ask Sandy.

Terry Johnson smelled gross and snored like a drunk guy.

But I was asleep in about a minute, awake at dawn and back upstairs in the big bed before Francine was the wiser.