was licking it and Grizzly snapped at him. Now, when the dog lifted his head from the bowl, Edward Everett picked it up, set it onto the counter and opened the cupboard, looking for the bag of dog food. He located it, squashed under two cans of chili without beans. There was less than a quarter of a cup left, much of it only powder. He poured it into the bowl and set it back on the floor before filling the water dish.
Edward Everett had bought the dog for Renee when they’d been married for four months, just before his first road trip after their wedding. In the days before he was supposed to leave, she became increasingly quiet and he knew it was because she dreaded his being gone, didn’t want to come home to an empty house after working at the bank all day. “Your folks are next door,” he said.
“Oh, so I should be the little girl running home to Mommy and Daddy because I get lonely?” she snapped.
On the morning he was supposed to leave, he woke her early although she didn’t need to get up for work for another two and a half hours. “I thought you could make me some coffee,” he said, nudging her shoulder with his empty thermos.
“You want me to get out of bed at”—she squinted at the clock on her bedside table—“three fifty-eight? To make you coffee?”
“Is that unreasonable?” he’d asked.
She’d sat up, pushed the blankets to the foot of the bed, plucked her glasses off the bedside table and gone out to the kitchen. When he heard her banging cupboard doors, he’d gone to the garage to get the puppy he’d bought the night before and left there, a quaking ball of fur no bigger than his fist, bedded down on two towels he’d laid in a cardboard box. He hadn’t counted on the towels being soaked with urine, three tiny turds the size of little smokie sausages scattered in the box, or that there’d be feces stuck to the dog’s fur. By the time he got the dog cleaned up and wrapped in yet another towel, Renee was already back in bed, the coffeemaker hissing. He’d taken the dog and sat on the side of the bed but she lay there with her back to him, clearly fuming.
“Renee,” he said.
“Maybe by the time you get back, I’ll be speaking to you again.”
He laid the dog against her neck, where it tried to nestle against her for the body heat. Renee swatted at it.
“No. Just go.”
The dog whimpered and Renee turned over. Edward Everett snatched it away so she wouldn’t roll over onto it.
“Don’t kill it,” he said. “It’s not the dog’s fault that your husband is a jerk who asks you to make coffee at three fifty-eight.”
“What dog?” she said, sitting up. He held it out to her. “You bought me a dog?” she said, taking it and pressing her nose against the dog’s.
For some reason, however, the dog didn’t understand that he was Renee’s, or that Edward Everett, in fact, didn’t like dogs. When Edward Everett was home, Grizzly followed him from room to room. When he sat at the kitchen table, writing up the reports he sent to the big club, the dog lay at his feet. At night, he wanted to sleep at the foot of the bed on Edward Everett’s side. When he and Renee made love, they had to close the dog in the kitchen with a baby gate because, in the same room with them, he pawed furiously at the box spring. In the kitchen, he would whine and bark the entire time. “I swear he’s your father’s agent,” Edward Everett once said when they sat in the kitchen, having eggs at midnight. “It’s not enough that your father is next door, thinking, ‘What’s he doing to my little girl?’ He has to have the dog spy on me, too.”
Cracking an egg into a bowl, she’d laughed. “Daddy’s girl is past forty, been married once before and lived in sin twice. He doesn’t give us a thought.”
Now the dog finished his meager dinner quickly and began pushing the dish across the floor, lapping at it furiously, obviously still hungry. “Sorry,” Edward Everett said. “I guess I’m a lousy husband and a lousy dog owner.” Grizzly looked up at him, his face seeming to express a canine disappointment that mirrored, in a way, Renee’s, cocking his head to one side and blinking at