A beer? What time was it? Clocks didn’t tell me anything anymore. Too early for a beer, though, I knew that from the sun. When had Sam started drinking during the day?

“Oh, jeez. What did you do?”

Stop! Don’t, don’t-

Too late. He didn’t even read it. He just bent over, swept up all my carefully placed crayons, along with the broken pencils and ballpoints, the torn paper and the crayon box remains. Damn it, Sam, do you know how hard I worked on that?

“Bad dog! Bad Sonoma!” He shoved the evidence under my nose. “Shame on you. Bad dog.”

Okay, okay, I get it. I lay down and put my paws over my ears. I’ve always hated criticism.

I heard the heavy, hopeless sound of Sam dropping down on the couch. A sigh. A gulp of beer. When I sneaked a glance, he was shaking his head at me. But smiling. Just a tiny bit.

I meant to be subtle, but my heart turned inside out with gladness and I pounced to him instead of slinking. I didn’t jump up next to him-I had enough self-control to stop short of that. I sat at his feet, and after a few minutes Sam put his hand on top of my head and just rested it there, heavy and trusting, and we stayed that way until it was time to go get Benny.

By week’s end, I had the run of the house. Sam decided the incident with the pencils and papers was an anomaly brought on by separation anxiety. Since then I’d behaved like Perfect Dog, and on the third night he moved my bed to the upstairs hall. No more closed kitchen doors for me. It didn’t matter, though; as soon as they were asleep, I’d sneak into Benny’s room, then Sam’s. I slept lightly, and never got caught again.

Saturday was housecleaning day. It used to be Tuesday, when the cleaning lady came, but evidently those days were over. Now it was just Sam, with Benny’s “help,” trying to bring order to a week’s worth of laissez-faire living-that’s putting it charitably. Benny’s room was beyond shoveling out; what they needed was a backhoe. How could one five-year-old boy make such a mess in only seven days?

I wasn’t completely blameless, mess creation-wise. I should have felt guilty, but it wasn’t in me anymore. And to think, I used to be such a fastidious person. “Persnickety,” Sam called me. I’d had food aversions, too; I was picky about textures, smells, certain flavors. Ha! Now I’d eat anything. Anything. If I was thirsty enough, the toilet bowl was not off-l imits. When my butt itched, I dragged it across the carpet. Dog hair everywhere? Pfft, life was too short to obsess about such trifles.

Benny and I went outside when Sam started vacuuming. What a diabolical machine; the noise alone was painful, but there was something menacing about the moves it made, that predatory back and forth. I wanted to get away from it as much as I wanted to shred it into metallic pieces.

Sam had started to build a fort for Benny last spring. When I’d seen it last, before the accident, it was a three-sided plywood lean-to abutting the oak tree at the bottom of our backyard. In the past two months, Sam had enclosed the fourth side, put in a door and a window, and painted it gray-blue with white trim. A dream playhouse and, needless to say, Benny’s favorite place. I wasn’t surprised when he headed straight for it after Sam said, “Thanks, buddy, good job,” and released him from his chores.

“Look, Sonoma. This is where I keep stuff.”

The fort was roughly a five-f oot cube, smelling of wood and earth. Benny opened a plastic chest in a corner of the cube and showed me his toys. “Brontosaurus puzzle. See, look. I can do it fast.” Indeed; he had the dinosaur assembled in about one minute. “Then it goes back in this egg, see?” He took it apart and put it away in its plastic cup. “I got a preying mantis one in my room, but it goes back in a box, not an egg. Look at this.” He showed me his plastic bulldozer and his magic deck of cards. His special marble, his lion mask.

“Okay, now,” he said in a different voice, bending into the toy box and pulling out a smaller one, metal: an old cookie tin. I went closer.

He whispered, “See this, Sonoma?” He held out an item I didn’t recognize at first. “My mom owned it. It’s a secret. I took it out of her car. It’s for coffee, you put coffee in and then you drink it when you’re driving. Going to your job in your car, and it won’t spill.” He demonstrated how to drink from my old coffee cup.

“It says the name of her job right here.” SHANAHAN & LEWIS REALTORS. “She went every day. They sell houses to people. She got rewards because she was good. She was the best.”

Well. I was, but I didn’t know Benny knew it. I felt proud, but also as if I might’ve been caught doing something slightly embarrassing. Bragging.

“This is her mouse pad.” He was whispering again. He did that adorable thing he did with his face when he was thinking hard: He scowled and pursed his mouth and wrinkled his nose. I knew exactly what he was thinking: How do I explain a mouse pad to my dog? In the end he decided not to bother. “It has a picture of us Dad took, me and Mom, then he had it put on this thing. It’s us sledding down York Lane. I was a little boy. I couldn’t go on my own yet. This is Mom and this is me.”

I loved that picture. Benny, three years old, sat in front of me on the sled, both of us red-f aced from the cold and laughing like loons. He had on his silver snowsuit, the same outfit he’d worn at Christmastime that year to sit on Santa’s lap. Outgrown long ago.

He held the mouse pad photo closer to my face. “It looks like we have the same color hair, but we don’t.” No, we did-he’d forgotten. His hair had darkened in the past two years, and mine stayed the same. He’d just forgotten.

The mouse pad went back in the box; out came something wrapped in a piece of cloth. Something special, I could tell by the way he held it.

“Look,” he said, and opened the last treasure.

Earrings. Cheap metal hearts with MOM engraved on each one-he and Sam had bought them last Mother’s Day at a kiosk in the mall. “She liked them a lot. She said they were beautiful. When she wakes up, I’m giving them to her again. As soon as she wakes up.” I leaned my weight against him; he put his arm around my neck. “I told Dad, and he said she might not remember. That I gave ’em to her before, but I think she will. Don’t you?”

He wasn’t crying, but I licked his cheek. I know she will.

I’d always liked Sam’s father, even though he was as unlike his only son as could be. Where Sam was a quiet man, unassuming and kind, often reserved around strangers, Charlie was the kind of guy the phrase “good time” was invented for. He sold insurance before he retired a few years ago, and I used to like to imagine what a nice surprise people were in for who invited him over to discuss premiums on their whole life. What I hadn’t known was how much fun he was if you happened to be a dog.

Pretend-growling was great fun, too, sort of like constant gargling. Charlie played tug-of-war with me and my toy pheasant almost as long as I wanted. Almost. We played in the kitchen until he dragged me out of the house by his half of the toy and collapsed on the front porch step. I let him pry my mouth open, hoping he would heave the bird out into the dark front yard. He did; then he did it again, and then again, but not enough. He tired out-they always do. I could’ve retrieved that pheasant all night.

Sam came out with a couple of beers, handed one to his father. “Hot,” he said. “We can sit inside if you’d rather. Cooler in the air-conditioning.”

“Not me, I like it. The dog days. Benny go to sleep?”

“Finally.”

“Seems to me like he’s doing pretty well.”

“You cheer him up, Pop. I think he’s too quiet.”

“You were like that.” Charlie took a sip of beer and then belched a few times, softly. He still had a full head of sandy hair, but he was going soft and round in all the places Sam was hard and angular. “Quiet kid, you were. Always figured that’s why you took up magic.”