“Benny!” I said. “Bruf!”

“Let’s eat,” he said, and we ran down to dinner.

“How about Gumball?”

“Gumball!” Hysterical laughter.

“Or… Falafel?”

Benny blew milk out of his nose.

“Easy,” Sam said, chuckling, handing him his napkin. “Hey, I know. She sticks to you-we could call her Velcro.”

Another laugh attack. “Or Glue!” Benny drummed his feet against his chair.

Under the table, I was having mixed feelings. On one hand, it was nice to be the center of attention, plus every now and then Benny dropped a piece of French bread on the floor; much better than Purina Dog Chow. But on the other hand, these name suggestions were ridiculous. Benny’s were worse than Sam’s-Jezebel, Caramba, Muffin, Baloney. Be serious! I wanted to tell them. I don’t want to go through life called Hairy-et.

Benny got sidetracked and started telling Sam about school supplies he needed for the first day of first grade, which crayons, what kind of colored pencils. I’d been looking forward to that shopping trip since spring. Now I wouldn’t even get to take him to school. Soon, though, the conversation swerved back to what to name the dog.

“Blunderbuss,” Benny snorted, swaying in his seat, overcome with his cleverness. “Blinderbluss. Bladdabladda. Bliddablidda. Bliddabladdabliddabl-”

“Hey, I have an idea,” Sam said seriously. About time he settled Benny down. If he got revved up this close to bedtime, he couldn’t fall asleep for hours. “How about if we call her Sonoma?”

Sonoma. I crawled out from under the table. That’s not bad.

“ Sonoma?” Benny said. “Why?”

“Because that’s where we were when we hit her. Georgetown and Sonoma Road.”

They looked at me. I looked at them. “ Sonoma,” they said together. “Do you like it?” Sam asked.

“Yes,” said Benny.

Me, too.

Good thing they didn’t hit me on Roosevelt.

“One more, Daddy, please? Just one more, I promise.”

That’s what he said after the last story. This was new behavior; Benny was a pretty good sleeper, rarely had histrionics at bedtime, would often drift off in the middle of the first chapter. From my spot at the bottom of the bed, I could see he was exhausted, hear it in his croaky voice.

Sam sighed. “Hey, buddy,” he said gently, closing the book. “We talked about this before, remember? What we said?”

“Yeah.”

“What did we say?”

“I can go to sleep.”

“You can go to sleep… and what?”

“Wake up.”

“That’s right.”

“Not like Mom.”

Oh, no.

“Right. You can let yourself fall asleep, and in the morning you’ll wake up-what?”

“Bigger, better, and stronger.”

“That’s right. Brand-new day.” He gave Benny a soft kiss on the forehead. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Okay. You sleep tight, Benster. Love you.”

“Love you. Can Sonoma stay with me?”

“Nope.” Sam stood up and slapped his thigh-my cue to leave. I considered my options. Jumped off the bed.

“Leave the light on, okay? And the door open!”

“Don’t I always?”

That ritual was familiar to me: hall light on, bedroom door ajar; Benny was afraid of the dark. Afraid of falling asleep because he might not wake up? That killed me. I wanted to cry, but all that came out was a high, whining sound in the back of my throat as I followed Sam down the steps. He thought it meant I had to go to the bathroom, and took me outside.

The red nylon leash not only annoyed me-where did he think I was going to go?-it also made it harder to do my business in private. Silly, maybe, but I was not going to squat in front of my husband. I managed by sidling around a gap in the Hortons’ privet hedge next door, out of view. A particularly good spot because it was between two streetlights and therefore dark, or as dark as our suburban Bethesda neighborhood ever got.

How wonderful to be back, even under these, the most peculiar circumstances imaginable. I was feeling a kind of excitement that went beyond the fact that I was home again. The smells! I could even see better than usual, which was odd, considering that in daylight I saw slightly less well. Maybe it was because I had such big pupils. Whatever-everything was incredibly sharp and interesting and I could not get enough of the smells. Feral, musky, smoky, dusty-my vocabulary would run out before I could name them all. Anyway, it didn’t matter if I was sniffing a “squirrel”; I could only concentrate on that spicy-dirty smell, the essence of “squirrel.” I could flare my nostrils, inhale, and taste it on the roof of my mouth, the back of my tongue, all the way down my throat and into my vitals. And it was fascinating.

The phone was ringing when we got home.

“Hi, Delia,” Sam said, and I skidded to a stop on my way to the kitchen for a drink of water. My sister! “We went this afternoon, yeah. Well… not much change, I guess. No. Although sometimes I swear she can hear me.”

Sam carried the phone to the living room sofa and sat down. “Right. I know… Right.”

These long pauses while Delia talked were driving me crazy. What’s she saying? I jumped up next to Sam-who reacted as if I’d thrown up on him, leaping to his feet, sweeping me to the floor one-handed. Sheesh.

“Well, we just keep hoping. No change on the scale, the nurse said today. They call it the Glasgow Coma Scale. It evaluates… Right. So nothing new there, apparently, which you can look at… Right, exactly.”

More silence on Sam’s end. Frustration! I put my hands-I mean my front paws-on the arm of the sofa and slowly, slowly raised myself. He had the phone to his other ear, though; I could hear Delia’s voice but not her words.

“I played it for her today. Well…” He laughed. “Not, uh, not to the naked eye. I’m sure, though, deep inside she was boogying.”

Delia’s mix tape. I remembered now; I’d heard snatches of it, but thought I was dreaming. Our favorites from high school-“Love Shack,” “Vogue,” “Losing My Religion.” Sweet Delia.

She lives in Philadelphia with her growing family. She must’ve visited me in the hospital and rehab, and yet I couldn’t quite remember it. So much of that time passed in a dream state, some gray twilight zone between being and not being. I saw myself as if from a great height, and the connection between the two me’s would be strong one moment, tenuous as a paper-clip chain the next.

“Hey, that would be great. Sure, either weekend is fine. Whichever’s better for you guys. You can always stay here, you know. Plenty of room; it’s just… the two of us. Well, whatever’s easier. That’s fine.”

More talk on her end. When was she coming?

“I’m okay. You know. Yeah. Well, that, too. I’ve put the cabin on the market.”

What? Oh, no.

“Yeah, it’s a terrible time, but I couldn’t see a choice. The bills… you can’t believe. Insurance, sure, but not enough. Nowhere near. Thanks. Thanks, but we’re okay.”

Oh, Sam. Not the cabin. And not now, right after we bought it. You’ll lose all the closing costs, the mortgage fee-thank goodness there was no prepayment penalty-and you’ll have to pay them again, the buyer’s and the seller’s closing costs. Oh, this was terrible.

“I’m looking now. I’ve already started,” Sam was saying. Looking for what? “Tomorrow, in fact, I’ve got a… Yeah. Oh, something will turn up. Um, he’s all right, basically. No, I don’t tell him that. No, I keep it… Right, very hopeful. But the longer this goes on, the less chance…” Sam rubbed his eyes with his free hand. “He starts school in three weeks, so that’s… Yeah. A good distraction. Oh, he’d love that, thanks, Delia. And how are you? And Jerry and the kids…?”

More frustrating pauses. I padded around the room, unable to settle, until Sam hung up. Then I sat at his feet, the perfect dog. Minutes passed before he even saw me. “I forgot to tell her about you.”

I noticed.