His father had been planning a litter for a sweet-natured black and chestnut mother named Olive. He’d spoken of finding a perfect cross, but Claude had searched fruitlessly in Edgar’s father’s notebook. As Edgar well knew, that notebook was a mess of illegible notes, lists, reminders, and diagrams. The same man who filled out log records with the precision of a penmanship teacher wrote his notes in a madman’s scribble. But Olive was coming into heat soon, and Claude sat at the table after dinner behind an avalanche of manila folders. Late one evening, he walked into the living room.

“I have Gar’s cross for Olive,” he said.

Edgar’s mother looked up from the magazine she’d been reading. “Who?”

“Drift,” he said. “He’s sired three good litters. Healthy as a horse. He’s down in Park City.”

Edgar’s mother nodded. She had intuition on crosses, based on her memory of how past litters behaved, but she had always been indifferent to the detailed research, leaving that to Edgar’s father. The pups were what excited her, all their talents as yet unrevealed. But Edgar saw the problem at once, and he was signing a response before he had time for second thoughts.

That’s a line cross. A bad one.

Trudy looked back at Claude and interpreted. “A line cross?”

“Let’s see,” Claude said. “Olive was sired by…” He retreated into the kitchen and rummaged through papers. “I’ll be damned,” they heard him say. “Olive and Drift are both from the same sire, one generation apart. Half Nelson. Sired by Nelson, who was out of Bridger and Azimuth.”

“What’s the problem with that?” his mother asked.

Remember Half Nelson and Osmo? Edgar signed.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Not good.”

Claude had returned, but he couldn’t read Edgar’s sign.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that a couple of years ago, Half Nelson sired a litter out of Osmo, with three pups stillborn and the rest with straight fronts. Gar decided it was a bad cross.”

He had decided more than that, Edgar thought. His father had considered that litter a disaster. He’d paid scant attention to superficial traits like coat color, but bones mattered, and straight fronts, which meant bad angulation in the dog’s forelegs, were hard to eliminate from a line. And yet Osmo had borne good litters from other sires. Edgar’s father had spent most of a day pulling folders and making notes until he’d tapped his pencil twice and announced he’d found what he was looking for, line crosses with a common ancestor in Nelson. Edgar sat with him while he talked it through, and he could still see the diagrams they’d drawn.

“Would have been nice to know that a couple of days ago,” Claude said.

“Edgar didn’t know you were considering Drift until just now,” his mother said, before Edgar could respond. She turned to him. “Who would be good, then? Do you have an opinion?”

Edgar wanted to leave Claude hanging, make him work it out for himself so he would look foolish and slow. Any help he gave Claude would only advance his brainless theory of osmosis, but Edgar wasn’t sure Claude wouldn’t take a wild guess, and he couldn’t stand the idea of the dogs being used clumsily.

Gleam, he signed. Or one of his sibs.

After Trudy translated, Claude pursed his lips and returned to the kitchen while Edgar grinned. His mother gave him a don’t-push-it-buster squint and turned back to her magazine. He knew what Claude would find: Gleam was a four-year-old brindle, placed with a farm family east of town. The little boy who lived there sometimes sought out Edgar at school to tell him about the dog. He also knew Claude wouldn’t find any problem with the cross; he’d have to go back seven generations before he found any common ancestry, if he bothered to look that far.

When Edgar came downstairs the next morning Claude was sitting at the table, manila folders stacked before him. “We’re going with Gleam,” he said. He waved a coffee cup over the records. “Did you want to check me on this? I’m going to call the owner this afternoon and arrange it.”

Edgar tried to think of a response but his mind seized up. He shrugged and walked to the doorway.

“Look,” Claude said. “Is there something in particular you want to say? It’s just me and you here. Whatever’s on your mind will stay between us.”

Edgar stopped.

I bet it will, he signed. He thought how he’d capitulated the night before, how he’d helped Claude though it was the last thing in the world he’d wanted to do. Slowly, and with great precision, so that the gesture was unmistakable, Edgar angled his left hand in front of him and shot his right beneath it, index finger as straight as the knife it was meant to evoke.

Murder. That’s what’s on my mind.

Claude’s eyes tracked Edgar’s hands. He looked as if he were searching his memory, nodding all the while noncommittally.

Edgar turned and walked onto the porch.

“I just want you to know,” Claude called from the kitchen. “Picking Gleam like that. I was impressed.”

Edgar pushed through the screen door and let it slam, blood rising in his cheeks. He’d mustered the resolve to accuse Claude to his face, yet somehow Claude had twisted the moment into a chance to look magnanimous. And to whom? No one had been there to see it. Worst of all, Claude’s compliment had elicited in him a flush of pride that made him instantly loathe himself.

The problem-the very troubling problem-was that, when he wanted to, Claude could sound so much like Edgar’s father.

NIGHT. HE STOOD IN THE bathroom and crossed his arms at his waist and peeled his shirt over his head and looked in the mirror. Where a story had once been written in mottled blue and green, now only pale and ordinary flesh.

Memory of his father’s hands sinking into that spot. How, with the slightest pressure, his heart might have stopped. The stream of memory passing through him like rain, now as faint and undetailed as dreams called back from sleep. He pressed a thumb to his sternum. A familiar ache lit his ribs.

He swung his arm wide, hand curled into a fist.

The sensation, when he brought it to his chest, exquisite.

WARM AFTERNOONS, HE WALKED with Almondine into the woods, where they slept under the dying oak. Sometimes he took Essay or Tinder along to make it look like training. Whenever his mother insisted he spend the night in the house, he waited until she and Claude were asleep, then led Almondine downstairs, bearing all his weight onto the creaking treads. From the bedroom doorway his mother watched him rummage through the refrigerator.

“What are you doing?”

Going to the barn.

“It’s eleven o’clock at night!”

So?

“Oh, for God’s sake. If you can’t sleep, read something.”

He slammed the back door and stalked across the yard.

Yet he couldn’t oppose them in everything. One problem that irked him especially was naming the newest litter, something he’d delayed for three weeks. But now the pups’ eyes were open and their milk teeth were beginning to come through and they had begun exploring. The earliest puppy training would start soon-the playing of unusual sounds, the setting up of miniature stairs and hoops and all those puzzles for infants-and when that began they had to have names. He carried the dark blue New Webster Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language into the whelping pen and sank cross-legged into the straw. Four pups bumbled to the edge of the whelping box and looked at him.

The spine of the dictionary cracked dryly when he laid it open. He sprayed the pages through his fingers. Annotations flickered past, the oldest in his father’s handwriting, but most in his own squarish lettering. Good names had once lived between the dictionary’s covers: Butter. Surrey. Pan. Cable. Argo. Sometimes he could even remember the exact place he’d been sitting when the word had risen from the page and declared itself to be a name. At the back of the dictionary was an essay by Alexander McQueen, the editor, entitled, “2,000 Names and Their Meanings: A Practical Guide for Parents and All Others Interested in Better Naming.” Edgar knew it by heart. “The naming of an infant is of more than passing importance,” McQueen had written. He’d listed seven rules for choosing names, such as “The name should be worthy,” “It should be easy to pronounce,” and “It should be original.” Now, the more Edgar thought about those rules, the more the unclaimed words turned to nonsense: Spire. Encore. Pretend. Herb. The mother dog lifted her nose to scent the dry pages, then sighed to acknowledge his difficulties, and he closed the dictionary.