I wanted to hear all about the visit to Hope Springs. How was I? What was my prognosis this week? Did Benny cry? Was he sad? But for once my son was in a quiet mood. We sat in the backseat of the car with the door open for a breeze. Hot as it was, Benny didn’t mind when I sidled close and rested my cheek on his chest. Blub-blub went his heart, the best sound. Love filled me up. How wonderful to be back with my family again.

But what was taking Sam and Monica so long? I didn’t like the look of them, standing too close in the doorway, talking in earnest voices too low to hear. Although at one point Monica clapped her hands at some comment of Sam’s and said distinctly, “Oh, that would be great.” What would? Having me put to sleep?

At last Sam turned and started toward the car. Well, this was it. The moment of truth. I searched his face for anger, indignation, but he was smiling, no doubt savoring some bon mot of Monica’s. Who, just then, thought of something else she must say to him and jogged out to the car, too.

“Oh, Sam, don’t forget the, um…” Suddenly she was tongue-tied. Sam finished buckling Benny’s seat belt, backed out, and closed the door. “The, um, you know.” She made a gesture with her hands, but Sam moved and his body blocked her. I couldn’t decipher it.

“I won’t,” he said.

“Don’t forget what?” alert Benny asked through the open window.

“Don’t forget… to tell me how Sonoma got out,” Monica said, clearly improvising. She reached in to ruffle Benny’s hair. “Pretty smart dog you got there.”

“She is really, really smart,” he agreed.

Monica looked at me and lifted one eyebrow. She wasn’t trying to communicate-sending ironic signals to a dog was the last thing on her mind. But to me, that private, raised brow was as good as a wink.

She hadn’t ratted on me.

Well, great. Just great. What was I supposed to do, thank her? And for a second, actual gratitude welled up in my retriever heart. I yawned at her. I grinned. I licked my lips.

Then I got a grip on myself. What naïveté. How could I fall for such a slick trick? I wasn’t one of those dogs you could smack around and then give a bone to and everything was hunky-dory. Forgive and forget-that’s what dogs do, but I was still Laurie. If I wanted to keep my family, I had to hang on to what I knew: Monica Carr was not my friend.

“I wonder why she came over to your house,” Sam said, settling in behind the wheel. “Although I’m glad she did-she could’ve gotten run over on Wilson Lane.”

“Maybe she’s in heat,” Monica suggested. “You should think about having her spayed.”

“I’m going to. I’ve just been too busy. I’ll call and make an appointment tomorrow.”

“Ah-r oooooo!” Oh, noooooo!

Monica thought that was a riot. “Ha ha ha! It’s like she heard you!”

At home, somebody had stuffed a large white envelope through the mail slot in the door. I got a whiff of a familiar smell, and just before Sam snatched it up, I recognized the preprinted logo in the return address: S &L. Of course-the familiar smell was Ron, my boss at Shanahan & Lewis. Funny, until now I hadn’t even known Ron had a smell.

Normally I’d have gone with Benny when he ran upstairs to his room, but something about Sam, a new dejection I could sense even though he didn’t say a word, didn’t even sigh, made me want to stay with him. When he went into the den, I followed.

He was pulling paper-clipped pages out of the envelope when his eye caught the blink of the answering machine light. He tossed the papers on the couch and punched the button.

Ron’s voice. “Hey, Sam, it’s Ronnie. Sorry I missed you this afternoon. I should’ve called first, but you were right on my way home, so I took a chance and stopped by. Anyway, good news-we got a bid on the cabin. As you can see from the offer there, it’s not the asking price, but it’s close. It’s no insult. So you think about it and let me know. We can go up ten or fifteen percent with our counter, I’m thinking. This guy’s a lobbyist. He lives in D.C., wants the cabin for hunting on weekends with clients. He says he’d hire someone for the rehab, wouldn’t do it himself-not the way you would have, and that’s a shame, but… Anyway, he seems like a pretty sure thing, no, uh, financial liabilities or anything like that, obviously. So, you’ve got the bid and the deposit check there, so now you think about it and just let me know. Hope you’re keeping well, you and Benny. We’re thinking about you. Everybody in the office-well, we just miss her like hell. Okay, talk to you soon.”

What a mensch. At the end, Ronnie’s voice wavered a tiny bit, and that put a lump in my throat, too. Sam dropped down in the desk chair and put his head in his hand. I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t need to. Whatever had happened today at Hope Springs, which couldn’t have been good, this just made it worse. Sam’s beautiful cabin, going to some rich guy who wanted to use it as a base for shooting our deer, our birds.

I put my head on his knee. Sam. I nudged his elbow so he had to uncover his face and look at me. Oh, Sam, I’m so sorry. He gave me a twisted smile of affection, absent-minded at first but gradually focusing. “You,” he said-and my heart stopped. Did he see me? Did he know me? Sam. He leaned closer, stared harder. “How the hell did you get out?”

They say you don’t know what you have until you lose it. I found out in that moment that that includes the ability to cry.

Sam gave my head a pat and stood up slowly, his shoulders slumped. “Hungry?” he said, and headed for the kitchen to start dinner.

I followed a few minutes later. Not quite as hungry as I had been.

“Daddy, what does ‘spayed’ mean?”

We were in my favorite place, at my favorite time of day: on the couch after dinner, when Sam read the paper and Benny got to watch TV for half an hour if anything suitable was on. Tonight was Sunday, so it was The Simpsons. Which may or may not have been suitable, but since I didn’t have a vote anymore, I tried not to make judgments. I just enjoyed.

Funny, when I was myself, I usually grabbed this interval between dinner and Benny’s bedtime to get some work done, phone clients, schedule appointments, do a little paperwork. I’d thought of it as Sam’s time with Benny. Which didn’t make much sense, I saw now, since Sam had Benny all day while I went to work.

I wasn’t technically allowed on the couch, but I had perfected the art of the stealthy creep, the discreet, painfully slow advance whose key element is patience. It almost always worked, and sometimes, when he noticed it in progress, it even made Sam laugh. Tonight I’d been especially successful by ending up between him and Benny, not curled in the smallest ball I could make on Benny’s far side, for invisibility. Ahh. This was the life. Everybody touching. Fidgety Benny on one side, warm, steady Sam on the other.

Sam let a lot of time go by without answering Benny’s question. Something in the newspaper seemed to have him enthralled. Did he think Benny would forget? What a dreamer.

“Daddy, what does ‘spayed’ mean?”

Sam put the paper down. “Spay. It’s an operation they perform on a girl dog so she can’t have any babies. Any puppies.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why can’t she have any puppies?”

“Because they fix her so she can’t. They tie things up in her stomach. No puppies can come out. Say, how many more days till your birthday?”

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“But Sonoma would make good puppies. She’d make great puppies. How did she get out?” Benny veered, dropping the puppy question. “How’d she get out of the house?”

“I guess she got out while we were leaving this morning. That’s all I can figure-she slipped out the door and we didn’t notice. We’ll have to be more careful from now on.”

Sam had checked every window and door in the house-I went with him. He found the open casement window over the oil tank and closed it, but not once did it cross his mind that it might’ve been my escape route. No dog could be that clever or that dexterous, he was thinking. I felt so proud.