Grant came up beside him on hands and knees. “Maybe it’s her hips.” He gestured and called to the dog and she scrabbled forward a few inches on her forepaws and stopped and whimpered. Grant watched her. He surveyed the crawl space and the dirt and said with his eyes on the dog, “Think you can crawl back there?”

They got the dog out from under the house and arranged her gently in the cab of the blue Chevy, and doing so the boy remembered the girl bleeding in the truck, and in his exhaustion he thought that that must have been something he dreamed.

They climbed in on either side of the dog and Grant drove to the county road and turned west, away from town, and a mile later he parked in front of a white two-story farmhouse, pink in the dawn, and after a moment a stately white-haired woman appeared on the screened porch and called down, “Is that you, Grant Courtland?” and Grant called back, “I’m afraid so, Evelyn.”

“I see you got your truck back.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Who’s that with you?”

“He came with the truck.”

“Don’t say? How are you, Sean?”

“I’m fine, Mrs. Struthers. How are you?”

Her head tilted back and she peered down at him from the height of the porch, the height of herself. “Mrs. Struthers is what my students call me. Were you ever my student?”

“No, ma’am.”

“I thought not. In that case call me Evelyn.” She held the door wider and gestured them up. “Come on, come up out of the cold and let me get some coffee in you.”

When the old man came down, Grant said, “I’m sorry about this, Dale, I know you’re retired but I didn’t know where else to go.”

“Oh, stuff,” said Evelyn, sweeping in behind her husband and going to the coffee pot. “Neighbors are neighbors.”

Struthers regarded the back of her head, then turned to Grant and the boy and jerked his thumb at her, as if to say there was nothing more to say nor better way to say it. She turned and fitted a mug of coffee into his waiting hand and so armed he said: “All right then. Let’s see what you got.”

Grant pulled the truck around and parked before a small red outbuilding, and he and the boy carried the dog inside and settled her onto the stainless-steel table. The boy cupped his hands and blew into them and the old vet said, “I’m sorry about the cold. I don’t hardly heat anything but the house anymore, and hardly that, cost of gas.”

Cold as it was the air smelled richly of kennel and ammonia and pine.

The old man set down his coffee and reached into the pocket of his white coat and put something under the dog’s nose and in one chomping instant the offering was gone. He placed his hands on her, playing them slowly through her fur, watching her eyes, frowning, pausing, moving on again and waiting for his hands and the dog’s eyes to tell him something. He slipped one hand underneath her and she gave a yip and swung as if to bite his wrist but only licked at it furiously. He reached into his pocket again and again she took the treat and licked her chops and watched his hand.

“Way under the house, you say.”

“About as far as you could get,” Grant said. “Had to send skinny under there to pull her out.”

The three of them looked at the dog. The dog watched the vet.

He sipped from his coffee and set it down again. “She’s got at least two cracked ribs under there. One is just about broke but not quite. I’d guess a horse kick right off. But of all the horse-kicked dogs I ever saw I never saw one got itself kicked from underneath like this. I don’t know what kind of horse could pull that off, do you?”

Grant held the old man’s eyes. Then both turned again to the dog, as if she might put an end to speculation with her testimony. Grant stood in silence and the boy watched him and watching him understood that something had been discussed between the two men that though he’d been right here, was not available to him—as if he’d dozed on his feet, or blacked out.

“Can you do anything?” Grant said.

“How do you mean?”

“For the ribs.”

“There’s not a whole lot I can do for cracked ribs but wrap them up. And she’s old.”

“Right,” said Grant. “Meaning?”

“Meaning she’ll be a long time healing, if at all. And she’ll be in pain.”

Grant nodded. “Is there something for that? For the pain?”

“Sure, sure,” said the vet. “But.”

Grant and the boy and the dog waited. Struthers took his clean-shaven jaw in his hand and worked it over. “I’m not sure she ought to be going back there, Grant, is the thing,” he said.

“No,” Grant said.

“I mean it ain’t my business . . .”

“No, I think you’re right.”

“And I can’t keep her here.”

“I wouldn’t ask you to, Dale.”

“I’m just not set up for it anymore. And Evie can’t have an animal in the house for her allergies, never could, all these years. The Lord said no children and then he said no pets either, all you get woman is this old man comes in end of the day smelling of horse and dog and everything else.”

“Seems to me she’s had plenty of kids, Dale,” said Grant. “Hundreds of them.”

Struthers didn’t seem to hear this, but then he looked up from under his silver eyebrows and said, “Thirteen hundred and twelve.”

Grant watched him.

“She’s got ever last grade book going back to her very first class, year we were married. Takes them out time to time. Goes through them one by one, like picture albums.”

“NOW WHAT,” SAID THE boy.

“Now we go see a friend.”

They were in the truck again, driving back toward town. The dog in her trussings nested between them, blinking drowsily as the painkiller found its way into her blood. The sun climbing the pines, washing the snowy boughs in a restless glitter. They came around a turn and Grant brought the Chevy to a stop behind a school bus. Flushed little faces in the rear window, too listless at that hour even to stick out their tongues.

The boy got a cigarette to his lips and depressed the lighter knob.

“Give me one of those,” Grant said. “I’m out.”

The lighter popped and they took turns with it.

“Are you gonna tell me what’s going on?” said the boy.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

Grant shook his head. “Can’t tell you what I don’t know.”

“Well, what do you think then?”

“What do I think?” Grant flicked his ash. A young girl and a younger boy came out of a small clapboard house and made their way to the bus. The bus door folded open and the little boy stood stomping some last-second imperative into the snow until the girl nudged him and he hauled himself aboard and she climbed up after him. The door rattled shut and the stop sign clapped to and the bus rumbled on, towing the Chevy behind at a distance.

Grant said: “I’m wondering if Billy didn’t do that to her.”

“Billy.”

“Emmet’s son. That’s his car at the house. The El Camino.”

The boy looked at the dog. He watched the rear of the bus.

“Why would he do that?”

Grant drew on his cigarette. “I’m not saying he did.”

They were silent. The little faces at the back of the bus watched them. The boy took a last drag on his cigarette and crushed it in the tray.

“Yes you are.”

They followed the bus through town and for another mile beyond that before Grant turned into the woods down a narrow drive where the snow lay brilliant and trackless between the pines, a small one-story house at the end of the drive, cornflower blue with darker blue shutters and a bloodred door. Grant made a space for the Chevy on what might have been the lawn so as not to block either of the Subaru wagons parked before the house, and when he opened his door the dog forgot about her injury and tried to stand and he placed his hand on her skull and said, “You stay here. Both of you.”

He shut the door and the dog began to wheeze in distress for what she couldn’t see, and the boy spoke to her. “He’s walking up to the house. He’s knocking on the door. Someone’s at the window. The door opens. It’s a woman. Dark curly hair. It’s the woman from the diner, that waitress, I forget her name. She looks out and waves . . . I wave back. He steps inside and the door closes. Maria is her name. Maria Valente.”