chair across the room. It crashed into a floor lamp, which fell over, taking a small glass coffee table with it. Max had to physically restrain his brother before he did some damage.
Jamie finally agreed to let the concierge hold their bags, and they made their way to the dog show, but Jamie never fully settled. And it seemed to Max as if there were twice as many dogs on Sunday. The arena was filled with confusing smells and crowds, and Jamie had rocked in his seat, chewing the cuticle on his thumb, and moaning that he wanted to go home. It wasn’t until the herding group entered the ring that Jamie’s attention snapped to the dogs. “Beauceron,” he said.
Max didn’t understand him.
“Beauceron,” Jamie said hotly.
“Do you need a bathroom?” Max asked dumbly.
Jamie opened up his program and jabbed his finger several times on a page. Max looked down. Beauceron, as it turned out, was a type of dog.
“Never heard of it,” Max snapped back.
By the time best in show rolled around, Jamie was better. He wanted the whippet to win and kept whispering whippet under his breath. The French bulldog took the grand prize, and Max steeled himself for another outburst, but Jamie surprised him. He surged to his feet, clapping louder than anyone.
They stopped by a booth on the way out of the arena and Max ordered digital disks of previous National Dog Show broadcasts. They went back to the hotel, and Max collected their bags from the concierge, had to physically push Jamie into a cab, and they headed to the airport.
They arrived in Austin at 9:45. Max spent much of the flight exhausted by the weekend and his arrogance. His guilt weighed heavily on him—he kept thinking how many times he’d assured his dad that everything would be okay. Of the many times he’d left his dad’s house secure in his belief that his father and brother were fine, just fine, without him there. He’d been acting the part of an egotistic professor and thought he knew more than his father who lived with and cared for Jamie every day. Max was ashamed of himself.
But one thing was becoming clear to Max. Jamie really needed to be in a supervised group home, living with other adults. He needed to be with peers, to learn how to navigate life better than he was learning at home. His routine was isolating him from real-world experiences. His dad needed his own life, too. Max was convinced that if Jamie had a comfort dog, and experiences outside his routine, he would learn how to cope better than he’d coped in Chicago.
He wearily drove his brother home, then texted Carly. Too late to pick up the beast?
She responded simply, No. That was followed by a picture of something orange. He had to zoom in to see it. It looked like it might have been a pillow. He didn’t know what had happened to the stuffing but could probably assume it was either inside a dog or a trash can.
Your dog’s handiwork, she texted.
Max frowned. Had Hazel’s separation anxiety kicked in? Was Carly really so certain the culprit was Hazel? She seemed to think Baxter could do no wrong. Max hadn’t seen Baxter do anything wrong, but, come on. He texted back, asking for her address.
Ten minutes later, he pulled through the gate at Carly’s house—at first mistaking the modern mansion as hers, then seeing the wooden sign that pointed to her address near the back of the property. He parked his car in the drive of a cute little cottage that reminded him of his childhood, when bungalows were what covered the central part of Austin. The little house was set among some towering pecan trees. It was white with green shutters. There was a semicircle of brick steps that led up to a small covered porch.
Max walked up to the black door with the three transom windows and looked around for a doorbell. When he didn’t find one, he knocked. Somewhere deep in the house, one of the dogs bayed.
A moment later, the door swung open.
Carly looked harried. Her hair was tied up at her nape, but a few tendrils wafted around her face. There was a slash of something like dirt on her cheek. She was wearing a hoodie and no shoes, and stood with one hand on her hip and the other on the door. But it was her hip that caught his attention—or rather, the skirt. It