“But Benny’s a talker.”

“That’s for sure. Nonstop. But he’ll be okay. He will be, Sam.”

“Sure, I know.”

“Hey, getting that dog was a great idea.”

“Well…”

Well, what?

“No leash-you’re not worried she’ll run off?”

“No way. She sticks to us like a shadow.”

“What about when you and Benny are gone all day? Him in school, you at work?”

I stopped sniffing around in the grass and trotted over. What work? Sam had work?

“She’s housebroken,” Sam said.

“Yeah, but cooped up in the house all day, that’s no life for a big dog.”

I thought of myself as medium.

“I’d take her for you myself, but they’ve got a weight limit on pets.” Charlie lived in a retirement community in Silver Spring. But what a sweet offer. I nuzzled his hand in gratitude.

“I’m more worried about Benny than the dog.” Sam set his beer on the step and pulled out the deck of cards he always kept in his pocket. “I hate it that I won’t be here when he gets home from school.”

“So what’ll you do?”

“There’s a neighbor who’s offered to keep him. She’s got two boys his age, so it should work out.”

Monica? “Mupf?”

“Hush, not now,” Sam said, thinking I wanted to play.

“Well, that’s good. Yeah, that sounds like it’ll work out all right. Kids adjust,” Charlie started saying. “When they’re little, they can adapt to almost anything…” So on and so on. I quit listening. Monica Carr was going to take my child after school every day? Why? Where was Sam going to be?

“Queen of spades.”

“So tell me about your new job,” Charlie said, pulling a random card from the flared deck Sam held out to him. “Queen of spades,” he confirmed without surprise, and handed it back.

“It’s not what I wanted. I was hoping for something part-time, but that was a dead end. There’s been a lot of downsizing and merging since I got out of the field. I had to take what I could get. Two of clubs.”

Charlie picked a card and nodded. “Two of clubs. But you hate this job.”

“No, Pop. Don’t say that.” He gave a weak laugh and concentrated on his overhand shuffle. “Anyway, it’s irrelevant. I have to make some money.”

“I was real sorry to hear about the cabin.”

Sam nodded, shrugged.

“I know you had high hopes,” Charlie said gently. “Spend more time with Laurie and all.”

Really? I tried to read Sam’s face in the dimness. That wasn’t why he’d wanted the cabin. Was it?

Charlie patted his knee. When I came over, he started ruffling my ears and blowing into my face. I wagged my tail, ready for a game. “Kinda ironic,” he said.

“How so?”

“Laurie always wanted you to go back to work.”

I wheeled away, out of Charlie’s reach. That’s not true. Even if it was, Charlie never knew it. Sam never knew it-because I never said it. Not out loud. I looked at Sam, waiting for him to deny it.

“Laurie…” he said and stopped.

Yes? What?

“She thought she was marrying an actuary. It’s not her fault she ended up with a part-time magician.”

“Oh, yeah?” Charlie sat up straight. “Well, the way I remember it, you didn’t think you were marrying-”

“Hey, now, Pop.”

“-a type-A workaholic go-getter who-”

“Pop.”›

“-lived for making dough and setting sales records. Okay, okay. Sorry. But if she was disappointed in you, I say that went two ways.”

Charlie! I thought you loved me!

Oh, this was so unfair. I slunk farther out into the yard, beyond the circle of the porch light. If only I could disappear. I found a patch of dusty-smelling ivy and burrowed down in it.

What was wrong with liking your job? I was not a workaholic. Charlie was right about one thing-when I met Sam he was working in one of the biggest insurance companies in the country, climbing the actuary ladder, taking the competency exams, passing with freakish ease. A math geek. As it turned out, he hated math, but I didn’t know that. But it didn’t matter! We were glad to switch gender roles, especially when my salary tripled and quadrupled during the real estate boom. When it went bust-okay, that was when I might have said something to Sam. Not nagging, though; more pointing out the obvious. Tactfully. Lovingly and supportively.

Then I got the O Street property in Georgetown and sold it to a Chinese businessman who paid the asking price in cash. Huge commission, Mega Deal Maker of the Year, promotion-Sam’s cabin on the river. In the worst housing market slump in recent history, I was invincible.

Then I drowned.

Now Sam had to go back to a job he hated. Benny had to face first grade without a mother, and after school he had to go to Monica Carr’s house. Sam had to sell his beautiful cabin to pay the insurance bills. Everything was going to hell, and it was my fault.

I might as well lie down in the street and get hit by another car.

I would have, except just then Sam said, “Delia’s coming down tomorrow and we’re all going to Hope Springs to visit Laurie. You can come along, Pop, but you don’t have to. I know it’s hard to-”

“No, I’d like to come. Thanks, Sam. For including me. I feel bad that I haven’t gone to see her more often.”

I couldn’t remember Charlie visiting me at all. But this was great! “All” must mean the whole family-Sam would take me, too. They encouraged pets at places like Hope Springs -we were therapeutic!

My God, this was it. The answer, the key. Tomorrow would change everything. I didn’t know how-I just knew it would. All I’d wanted was my family back, and in a way, a most peculiar way, I’d gotten it. It was time to get myself back.

They didn’t take me.

It took me until the last second to figure it out, when Sam stuck his foot across my chest, said, “No, Sonoma, you stay here. Stay, girl, we’ll be back. Guard the house,” and shut the front door in my face.

Unbelievable. All my hopes, dashed in an instant. The capriciousness, the absolute tyranny of humans over dogs had never hit me before. If I hadn’t known it would make everything worse, I’d have hurled my sixty-pound body over and over against that obstinate closed door until one of us broke. Now I wouldn’t even see my sister!

But worse, much worse, I wouldn’t see myself. And after conceiving the idea, I’d only grown more certain that that was the only way out. How it would work, exactly, I had no idea-how could I, when I didn’t know how this bizarre business had started in the first place?-I just knew I had to try. To reconnect. To reclaim myself.

Which meant I had to escape.

Stratford Road, our one-block-l ong street in suburban Bethesda, was such a safe, sweet neighborhood, sometimes we didn’t even lock the doors. Sam and I used to say we ought to do something about the basement windows, which were small, old-f ashioned casements set high in the walls, grimy and cobwebby, most of them rusted shut if nothing else-but we never got around to it. I knew which one was the most vulnerable: the one in the furnace room over the fuel tank. Last spring two oil company guys had come to service the furnace, and in the process they’d opened that window to pass tools back and forth.

The hardest part was getting up on top of the fuel tank, slippery, stinky, rusty, dusty metal, four feet high, but where there’s a will there’s a way. What a godsend that the window opened outward on its hinges. All I had to do was pull the lever down with my teeth and push against the glass with my head. “All,” I say; I almost broke a tooth, and the gap I finally pushed open was so narrow, I scraped my backbone scrambling through it. But I got out. I stood on the hot driveway pavement, triumphant, and shook myself. Call me MacGyver.

Hope Springs was in Olney, technically another Washington suburb but a really faraway one, twenty miles or so up Georgia Avenue from the district line. My best bet would be to take Georgetown Road to I-2 70, get off at the Beltway, follow it to Georgia, head north. In a car, that’s probably half an hour. On foot…