“Don’t spay her,” I said. In case I wasn’t home by Tuesday.

They both looked at me strangely.

“I mean, if you were going to, you know. Just hold off till we talk about it, is all. ’Kay?”

“Sure,” said Sam. He looked bewildered. “No problem.”

“So we can keep her?” Benny asked in a very soft voice, also garbled because of the two fingers he had in his mouth. As if he didn’t really want me to hear. As if no answer would equal permission.

The fact that he was worried at all just killed me. “Hey, are you kidding? Of course we can keep her. She’s our dog.”

At least.

I couldn’t wait to meet her.

“Crap!” Sam makes a graceful grab for his jack of spades, but the river is too swift. The card floats away before he can catch it.

“I was wondering when that would happen,” I rouse myself to say. He’s been doing flawless fancy shuffling for five minutes straight. Something had to give.

“You said crap.”

“I was provoked.”

“Crap, crap, crap, crap-”

“Benny. Stifle.”

My son cackles and goes back to pitching a rubber ball to Sonoma in the shallows. Underhand lobs, up high and right into her mouth. Being in the river was supposed to add a new layer of difficulty, but they perfected this game a long time ago.

So here we are, back where we started. Looking at us, if you didn’t know, you’d think we were the same Summer family as before, just a year older and with a dog. You’d be right, except for all the ways in which you’d be wrong.

“What time are they coming tomorrow?” Sam asks, stashing his deck of cards in his pocket.

“Two-i sh. Which means two on the dot,” I say in the middle of a wide-m outhed yawn. Time for my nap. I love naps.

That’s a difference-old Laurie would’ve suspected some horrible health crisis if she’d ever wanted anything so pointless and wasteful as a nap.

Another difference is my friendship with Miss Punctuality: Monica Carr. She and the twins are coming down to the cabin for the afternoon tomorrow. Sam will take the boys fishing or hiking while Monica and I sit in chairs in the river-like now-and talk and talk, and then we’ll all go in and eat whatever delicious but healthful meal she’s prepared ahead and brought down with her. I won’t feel an ounce of resentment. I’ll notice all the ways in which she’s a better mother, friend, and general human being than I am, but instead of feeling cynical or superior, I’ll just be grateful. That she likes me as much as I like her.

She’ll probably bring her new camera and take lots of pictures. She never told old Laurie her secret ambition was to be a nature photographer-Why would she? I wouldn’t have been interested anyway-but she was afraid to try. What if she wasn’t any good? she worried. What if it took too much time away from Justin and Ethan? What if it was impractical or, horrors, selfish?

I like to think I helped set her straight there. If you can find a way to make a living doing what you love, welcome to the elite group of the most blessed people in the world. I’m in that group-I started back at Shannon & Lewis full-time in January. Sam’s in that group-he quit the hated actuary job in February, and now he’s doing magic gigs almost every weekend. Why shouldn’t Monica be in that group? I’m glad she took my advice and enrolled in photography courses at the Maryland Institute at night. We keep the twins.

I think of that spiderweb picture she took on the log. Bet it was great. Too bad it’s lying at the bottom of the Patuxent.

The Shenandoah is bright blue today, reflecting the June sky. “Say, pard,” Sam calls over to Benny, “wanna head up to the bunkhouse and rustle some grub for the old lady?”

Who could resist such an invitation. “What’ll we make?” Benny asks, splashing over to our chairs. He’s grown an inch since school ended, I swear. In two months he’ll be seven. I want to slow time down, make this summer last forever. Benny at six is too precious to lose, so I hold on tight.

“How ’bout a side o’ beef, a mess o’ beans, and a hank o’ jerky?” I say. Benny’s in his cowboy phase; it’s between spaceman and what I predict will be all soccer all the time.

He puts his arms around me, getting my shirt soaked. This is a good hug, though, spontaneous and fun. For a while last year, Benny’s hugs were needy and clingy and he was my too-constant companion. I’d wake at night with a feeling of being watched, open my eyes, and see Benny’s, two inches away. “Hi,” he’d say, stare until I said “Hi” back, and go back to bed.

We let it go, didn’t take him to a psychiatrist or anything. I let him have all of his mother that he wanted, every last second I could spare, all my attention and all my love-sometimes I thought I’d go nuts-and after a while he quit shadowing me. Of course, now I miss him.

“Or we could just heat up a boot.” Sam bends down to kiss me. “Got any ol’ boots, pard?”

“Just you, Hopalong.”

“Sure you don’t want to come on up to the ranch and help out? Me and Ben, we got a hankerin’ fer yer grits.”

“Why does that sound-”

“Can we just make some sandwiches?” Benny says with adult impatience. Sam and I look at each other and sigh. We feel bad. Nothing shoots Benny out of a phase faster than our embrace of it.

“So you’re okay?” Sam asks, sliding his fingers through my hair. Thank goodness the question is only rhetorical, but it took many weekends to get to this point-leaving Mom by herself in the river. After I woke up I went through a long period of dizziness, completely gone now, and a shorter period of “confusion.” I’d say something strange, something only Sonoma could know, for example, then get in trouble backtracking.

Like the night I told Benny, “Don’t feed her that; she can’t handle rich food,” as he was about to smuggle the rest of his dessert to Sonoma under the table.

“Yes, she can.”

“No, she can’t. Remember that time she threw up all over the dining room after…” Oops. “No, wait, that was some other dog.”

“What dog?” Sam asked, interested. “Because Sonoma did that-”

“No, no, some other dog. Hettie’s dog, she told me about her once. She has a big-”

“Nuh-uh, Hettie has cats.”

“Not Hettie. Did I say Hettie? Carla, the other one, she’s got some big dog who threw up in the-”

“When did she tell you this?”

“Well, not when I was asleep, obviously, ha-ha!”

“So-”

“Afterward, I guess, I mean, when else? Unless it wasn’t Carla-wait, no, it was Mrs. Speakman, the lady across from Monica. She’s got a German shepherd, Trudi, she threw up in the dining room. After she ate a-pie. She ate a pie off the-kitchen window, like in a story, and-Who wants coffee? Sam? I mean, Sam, do you want coffee?”

I wanted to tell them the truth. A dozen times I started to tell them, or at least Sam, but I’d listen to the sentence about to come out of my mouth and have second thoughts. “You’ll never guess where I really was all that time you thought I was in a coma.” Or “I know you guys think you hit Sonoma that day on Georgetown Road, but guess what, you really hit me!”

Let’s face it, even Benny wouldn’t believe me. Even if I told Sam everything that happened, things only he and the dog could possibly know, he’d find a way to rationalize it. So would I-who wouldn’t? “Oh, you’re just remembering something I told you while you were sleeping,” he’d say. He’d find an excuse, the way we do with people who’ve seen ghosts or UFOs or religious miracles. Whatever they say, somehow we always find a way to explain it.

Besides, sometimes I think it couldn’t have happened; it must’ve been a dream. People do not come back as dogs. I can’t even prove it anymore, because Benny gave me back the hoarded treasures that were going to be my ace in the hole, the secret I couldn’t have known because no one knew it except him and Sonoma. But I wasn’t fast enough. The day I came home from Hope Springs, Benny piled my coffee mug, mouse pad, and earrings on the bed. “Look, Mommy. I was saving them for you.” After I had a good cry, we had a long snuggle.