Which led to a discussion about responsibility. It was like with the dogs, Trudy had told him. If you asked them to do something, you were responsible for what happened next, even if that wasn’t what you intended. You were especially responsible to the dogs, she said, because they respected you enough to do what you’d asked, even if it seemed like nonsense to them. If you wanted them to trust you, you had better take responsibility, every single time.

And then she’d let him try to hypnotize her, but she didn’t get sleepy, sleepy. He’d been disappointed, but she wouldn’t lie to him about it. Nor would Gar. Nor would Almondine, nor any of the puppies (who wanted to swat the watch out of his hands and chew it to bits). Then Edgar gave up on the whole idea, though he didn’t stop carrying the watch around. Once in a while he opened the cover and checked it against the kitchen clock and wound it, but Trudy suspected he did this only when he was around them. By the time the snow had melted that spring, she found the watch lying buried among his touchingly small, white Fruit of the Loom underwear in his bottom dresser drawer.

IF EDGAR HAD BEEN INWARD and opaque to her at five, now he was a total mystery. Since Gar’s death, he’d been sleepwalking though his days, looking angry one minute, then tragic, then thoughtful and happy a moment later. Only working his litter seemed to capture his attention. She told herself she shouldn’t worry. After all, he could have been shooting drugs (if a person could even find drugs in Mellen, which she doubted). If he really wanted to spend day and night in the kennel, let him.

Truthfully, this latest obsession hadn’t started until long after Gar died, really, the last couple of weeks of school, when he’d taken to running off from his classes. She’d talked with the principal. She wasn’t going to have them cracking down on Edgar and ruining his attitude toward school for good when he was muddling through what, she was sure, would turn out to have been the worst period of his life. He was delicate right now-deal with this rebellion wrong, and it would set. She didn’t think that the lessons from dog training always transferred to people, but it was just the nature of things that if you punished anyone, dog or boy, when they got close to a thing, they’d get it in their head the thing was bad. She’d seen people ruin dogs too many times by forcing them to repeat a trial that scared the dog or even hurt it. Not finding a variation on the same task, not coming at things from a different angle, not making the dog relish whatever it was that had to be done, was a failure of the imagination.

And in this case, the analogy applied. She’d told the principal she didn’t give a damn whether Edgar showed up even one more day that semester after what he’d been through, and if they pushed him any harder, she would withdraw him herself. They knew as well as Trudy that the teachers were coasting the last couple of weeks. Who cared if he sat in class and stared out the window or if he just wasn’t there? How many farm kids, she asked, went truant when it was time to show livestock at the county fair? She could use the help around the kennel anyway.

Then there was Claude, whom Edgar objected to. In his position, who wouldn’t? After Gar’s death, she and Edgar had grown so close it was almost as if they had been a couple themselves, making dinner, curling up together on the couch to watch television, arms wrapped around each other. She’d fallen asleep that way more than once. And on other nights, when he’d been the one to sleep, she’d stroked his brow like he was a baby. After that, of course he would be jealous. Maybe she should have held back from him a little, let him handle his grief his own way, but when you’re hurting, and your son is hurting, you do what you need to do.

Besides, Claude wasn’t something she’d planned-about the last thing she’d had in mind, particularly after the nasty falling-out between him and Gar. (Not that she understood that-a brother thing, buried under too many layers of family history for her to unearth.) Things with Claude had just, well, happened one morning-a breakdown on her part, a strange, momentary kindness on his. It hadn’t felt wrong; afterward she’d even felt as though some great burden had been lifted-as though she’d been given permission to carry on with a different life. What Edgar didn’t understand was that it was all going to be a compromise from then on out. That wasn’t something she could say, not to Edgar, not to anyone, but she knew it was true. They’d had the real thing, the golden world, the paradise, the kingdom on earth, and you didn’t get that twice. When a second chance came, you took it for what it was worth. Yes, Claude had proposed; that was silly, foolishness, not worth discussing. Not then, anyway, not when there was so much work to be done.

She and Gar had had the predictable discussion about what they’d want the other to do if one of them died. She’d been direct and forthright about his responsibilities: “I want you to spend the rest of your life in abject mourning,” she’d said. “Cry in public twice a week. A shrine in the orchard would be nice, but I realize you’re going to be busy handling the kennel and giving lectures on my divinity, so I won’t insist on that.”

Gar had been more modest. He’d wanted her to remarry the moment she met someone who made her happy, no sooner and no later. That was Gar in a nutshell, of course-when you asked him a serious question, you got a serious answer, every single time. She’d loved him for that, among many other things. He was passionate in a way that Claude would never be-passionate about principles and passionate about order, which he’d seen as a primary good. Like those file cabinets, filled with records. The kennel had been important when he talked about what should happen if he were to die; he hadn’t said it straight out, but he’d clearly expected Trudy would find a way to carry on the work with the dogs.

So Trudy thought Gar wouldn’t necessarily object to how things were working out. It looked like the kennel would be back in order by the end of the summer. And what they had both cared most about was that the other person find a way to be happy. Gar might not have liked some of the changes Claude was suggesting, but Gar had envisioned remaining a one-kennel, boutique breeder forever. Claude was less concerned with bloodlines, which freed him up to think more broadly about other things.

In the meantime, it was a matter of seeing into Edgar more clearly, making sure he got through this bad patch. And that’s all it was-a bad patch. There wasn’t anything seriously wrong.

She’d have known at once if there were.

Popcorn Corners

T HE NEXT DAY EDGAR SET OUT AGAIN FOR POPCORN CORNERS-this time alone, by bicycle. Anything to get away from the house while Claude was there, and he was there all the time now. Edgar slipped the picture of Claude and Forte into his back pocket and pedaled away to the north, retracing the route he and Claude had traveled along that thin gravel line cut through the Chequamegon Forest. A county gravel truck roared past, drawing a tawny billow in its wake. The air was still thick with dust when he came to the blacktop and turned onto a small forest road. He passed marshes boiling with frogs and snakes, and later, a turtle, plodding between the ditches like a living hubcap, its beaked mouth open and panting.

A stop sign appeared in the distance. When he reached it, he surveyed the entirety of Popcorn Corners: a tavern, a grocery, three equally decrepit houses, a band of feral chickens that lived in the culverts. He coasted past the tavern, which sported a Hamm’s Beer sign, lit to show the beer bear fishing in a shimmering Land of Sky Blue Waters, and halted in front of the grocery, covered with white clapboards that hung slightly off parallel, as if covering some profound skew of the building’s timbers. A pair of colossal ash trees cast their shadows across the storefront and a single antiquated gas pump tilted among the weeds off to the side.