If someone came in here and gave you positive proof, would you do anything different?

She shook her head. “I think it’s just as likely that someone could say that this place, right here, is heaven, hell, and earth all at the same time. And we still wouldn’t know what to do differently. Everyone just muddles through, trying not to make too many mistakes.”

I like that. This is heaven and hell and earth.

After they cleared the table and washed dishes, they walked to the barn and checked the night rotation schedule and pulled two yearlings to bring up to the house. The dogs roughhoused the length of the barn. When they came up to Almondine they stopped abruptly and presented themselves.

“You know, you need to get that litter named,” his mother said. “It’s been two weeks.”

Her tone was mild, but all of a sudden his head was throbbing and he felt dizzy with some mixture of anger and embarrassment and uncertainty-above all, with the overwhelming effort required to pretend that nothing had changed.

What’s the difference? Name them anything you want. Don’t name them at all.

She looked at him. “You’ve been dragging all day. Are you sick?”

Maybe I am, he signed. Maybe I’m getting tired of the smell of perfume.

“Don’t take an attitude,” she said. Her face flushed. “What’s bothering you?”

We train and train and then one day we just hand them over to strangers and it starts all over again. There’s never any end to it. There’s never any point. We don’t have any more choice in it than they do.

“Oh, I see. And did you have an alternative in mind?”

I don’t know. Something that doesn’t involve shoveling out dog pens every morning. Something that doesn’t mean we have to spend all day in a barn. Something just the two of us could do.

This last he hadn’t known he was going to say and he felt himself blushing.

She searched his face for a long time and ran her hands through her hair, letting it spill over her fingers like strands of dark glass. “This is going to be hard to understand, Edgar. I’ve put off talking about it with you and now I think that was a mistake. I’m sorry.”

You’re sorry. For what, exactly?

Then it was her turn to blush. She sat up straight and a kind of leonine recurve came into her posture.

“I know you saw your father and Claude fighting, but what you didn’t see is that those were old fights. Fights that had been going on all their lives. I don’t understand it, probably no one does, not Claude, not even your father if he were here. But I know this: it’s possible for two good people to be all wrong when they’re around each other. Give Claude a chance. I have, and I’ve discovered a different person than I expected.”

He closed his eyes.

A different person.

“Yes.”

After four months.

“Edgar, do you actually think that how long a person grieves is a measure of how much they loved someone? There’s no rule book that says how to do this.” She laughed, bitterly. “Wouldn’t that be great? No decisions to make. Everything laid right out for us. But there’s no such thing. You want facts, don’t you? Rules. Proof. You’re like your father that way. Just because a thing can’t be logged, charted, and summarized doesn’t mean it isn’t real. Half the time we walk around in love with the idea of a thing instead of the reality of it. But sometimes things don’t turn out that way. You have to pay attention to what’s real, what’s in the world. Not some imaginary alternative, as if it’s a choice we could make.”

But he’s not gone.

His heart pounding as he signed it.

“I know. And all the same, you and I buried him. But he’s here, too, isn’t he? In this kennel, in the house, everywhere. But unless we walk away from this place and never come back we’re going to live with that every day. Do you understand?”

No, he signed. Then: Yes.

“And is that the same as saying he’s alive? Do we treat that feeling as if he were really here?”

He found he couldn’t answer her. What if he did think that the length of a person’s grief was a measure of their love? He was as troubled by the simple fact of her asking that question as by his own inability to answer. And something else bothered him, something that had happened during the morning training sessions. One of the pups had been in that contrary mood that came over them sometimes, when they cared more about drama than praise. The pup had been provoking his mother, taunting, goading any way it could, purposefully misunderstanding what she’d asked of it, tackling its littermates-anything to make her angry. But it hadn’t worked. The carefully modulated tone of her voice and her equally modulated posture had conveyed only nonchalant indifference. It wasn’t until Edgar kenneled the pup that she said, “Next time he pulls that nonsense, I’m going to wring his neck,” and he’d realized that in fact she had been angry. Furious, in fact. That was part of her skill, wasn’t it, not to show any feelings that worked against the training? But if she could fool him about a pup, what might she be concealing when they talked about Claude?

Then his mother said Claude would be coming back in a day or two, and he would be bringing some things to stay. Edgar asked did she love him, and she said, not the way she’d loved his father. He asked if they were going to be married. She said, honey I’m still married, as far as I’m concerned. She said she didn’t expect it to make sense to anyone, maybe especially not to him, and that she could see how the two things might not add up and she didn’t know how else to explain it except just to say that it did, for her. He knew she was a direct person, with little patience for explanations. Claude was coming back for a while, and though she didn’t say it, the implication was it could turn into a long while. Maybe forever.

Perhaps his shrug surprised her. He saw he had no vote in the matter, and didn’t bother to ask for one. When his mother chose to be imperial, arguing with her was hopeless. You could disagree with her words all you wanted, but her bearing was irrefutable. He said he’d stay out in the kennel a while, and she led the two dogs away. At the doorway she looked back at him as though she were about to add one last thing, then she seemed to think better of it and turned and walked to the house.

AFTER SHE WAS GONE HE hooked the top of the kennel doors back and let the night breeze blow in and opened the pens for his litter to run the aisle. Edgar knelt beside Almondine and set a hand in her ruff and for the first time that day he felt some measure of calm.

I wish you had been out here with me last night. Then at least I could be sure it really happened.

His recollection was vivid enough to make his insides tremble, but there were gaps, too. He’d woken up in the barn, in the pen with Essay and Tinder. He didn’t remember going inside or anything that happened after standing in the rain. And in the morning the syringe lay broken in the grass, as if he’d stepped on it, but he didn’t remember that happening, either.

He tried to sort out his feelings. There was the desire to run; there was the desire to stay and put himself in front of Claude the moment he returned; there was the desire to take his mother’s explanations at face value; above all, there was the desire to forget everything that had happened, an aching desire for everything normal and familiar, for the routine of the kennel and reading at night and making dinners, just the two of them, when he could almost believe that his father had stepped out momentarily to check a new litter and would be right back.

He half expected to be spooked in the barn, but he wasn’t, maybe because the night sky was clear. If rain had been falling he wouldn’t have had the courage to stay out. He watched Essay put her feet on the front doors and try to peer over the ledge into the yard. When she tired of that she began parading in front of the dogs, whipping a piece of twine back and forth in her mouth and mock-pouncing.