And, to Edgar’s eye, beautiful.

His breath stopped as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. Suddenly nothing at all about the situation seemed tolerable. He saw with absolute clarity that he’d lulled himself into acquiescence and complicity. But now some last thing gave way inside him, something with no name. Perhaps it could be called the hope of redemption. For him. For Claude. For all of them. When it was gone, he felt that he had become someone else, that the Edgar who had split away that first morning after the rain had at last returned, and in that new state, as that new person, he believed Almondine had acted unforgivably, her pose so lovely and serene, completing that homely tableau as if Claude belonged right where he stood, when in fact he belonged anywhere else. In jail. Or worse.

He managed to keep walking. He grabbed the wheelbarrow from the far side of the barn and hurled it before him along the aisle and onto the driveway. Then Almondine trotted up beside him. He flung the handles forward and turned and raised his hand above his head to down her.

She looked at him for a moment, then dropped to the ground.

He turned and kicked the wheelbarrow ahead, runners raking clouds of dust from the driveway. Almondine broke and came forward and this time he whirled and lifted her by the ruff until her front feet came off the ground and he shook her and shook her and shook her. Then he let go and downed her again and turned away. He loaded the heavy sacks of quicklime into the wheelbarrow and piled the bags of food on top crosswise and walked around to the handles and backed the wheelbarrow away from the truck. He meant simply to walk away without another word to her but at the last minute he turned and knelt, his arms and shoulders trembling so violently he almost lost his balance.

I’m sorry, he signed. I’m sorry. But you have to stay. Stay.

He rolled the overloaded wheelbarrow up the driveway, staggering. When he tried to turn it toward the barn the thing tipped and the feed bags spilled onto the ground. One of them split and its contents poured out and he kicked it over and over until kibble was spread out in a brown swath across the ground. He reached down and threw fistfuls toward the woods until he couldn’t breathe. After a while he righted the wheelbarrow and loaded all the bags of food that had not split into the wheelbarrow’s bed and bore it heavily forward. He emerged from the barn with a rake clattering inside. He made a pile of the loose food and shoveled it into the wheelbarrow with his hands. It took a long time. Spots danced before his eyes as if he had stared into the sun.

Almondine was holding her down-stay behind the truck when he walked out of the barn. He passed her on his way to the house, stride halting and overbalanced as though his spine had fused into a column of stone, and then he threw his hands into the sign for a release.

At the porch steps, he turned back. Almondine stood in the sun panting and looking at him, tail uncurled behind her.

Go away, he signed. Release. Go away. Get away!

And before she could move, he walked up the porch steps and into the house.

The Texan

T HE INSOMNIA THAT NIGHT WAS BEYOND ANYTHING EDGAR HAD experienced, a goblin presence in his room, goading him between self-recrimination one minute and white anger the next. The sight of Almondine lying at Claude’s feet like an idiot puppy had wounded something in Edgar so close to his center, so bright, so painful, he couldn’t bear to look at it. He sat flinging out arguments, rebuttals, accusations, his heart firing like a piston in his chest, his thoughts whirling like flies around some phosphorescent blaze. He should have acted that morning, so long ago, the moment he’d understood what Claude had done. The hammer had been in his hand. Instead he’d faltered and doubted, and the flame in him had choked to embers. But one breath of pure air had drawn it up again. That had been Almondine. None of it was her fault, he knew. And yet he couldn’t forgive her.

When his mother saw how he’d been treating Almondine, late in the evening, she’d dropped any pretense of patience. He would stop immediately, and while he was at it, she said, he was going to rejoin the household and quit the nonsense about sleeping in the kennel. He’d stormed upstairs and slammed the door and stood swaying with rage and confusion. The red rays of sunrise were coating the woods before he at last fell into an exhausted slumber. But it was no rest and no balm. When the sound of his mother working a pair of dogs in the yard woke him it was almost a relief.

He sat on the bed and looked at the closed bedroom door. He couldn’t recall a morning in his life when he hadn’t opened his eyes to the sight of Almondine. When she was younger (when they were younger) she’d stood beside his bed and nosed the tender part of his foot to wake him; later, she’d slept beside him, rising while he stretched and yawned. Even if she’d gone downstairs to greet the early risers, no matter how quietly he walked to the stairwell, she was there waiting, front feet on the bottom tread, peering up at him.

He pulled on jeans and a T-shirt. He could hear the scrabble of her nails on the hallway floor. When he turned the knob and swung the door back, she pretended it was a surprise, and she bucked in place and landed with her front feet spread wide, head lowered, ears twisted back. And he meant to forgive her, but at the sight of her, playful and coy, all his arguments from the past night possessed him again: How she pandered. How she was so much like another person he could name that she ought to go find her instead. Or even him, since she didn’t care who gave her the attention she craved. She danced along behind him, catching the cuffs of his jeans. It took her a minute to follow him down the varnished stairs-the headlong plunge of her youth replaced by cautious navigation-but she darted past as he crossed the living room and whirled to face him, making a little yowl and play-bowing again.

He signed a down and stepped over her.

Two empty coffee cups sat on the kitchen table, the chairs pulled out to hold invisible occupants. He swabbed out a cup from the sink and poured himself the dregs from the coffee pot. It tasted like acid on his tongue. He swallowed once and flung the rest down the drain.

HIS MOTHER WAS WORKING the two dogs to be placed that day, Singer and Indigo. She would, he knew, be in a terrible mood. On the mornings of placements all she talked about were the qualities that made the dogs unprepared to leave. Edgar knew the litany by heart. All that time spent building their confidence. All that work teaching them a language in which questions could be asked and answered-all of it about to be abandoned and lost. His father had always been more circumspect about placement, but then he had surrendered the pups once already, to training. He was also the one who managed the carefully scheduled mail and telephone correspondence with new owners to keep track of the dogs, so in a sense he never lost them. Edgar’s mother, on the other hand, would storm around the house, indignant at the idiocy of owners, their laziness, their lack of compassion, flinging papers, slamming doors.

The irony was, a person wouldn’t have known any of that from watching her as she worked the dogs, not even on the day they were placed, because with the dogs, she became a different woman, almost a character she played-the trainer, who was interested only in what the dogs were doing in that moment. The trainer showed no anger when dogs were unruly. The trainer gave instant, forceful guidance. As their time for placement approached, the only difference the dogs might notice was that they got less attention; if they were a bit lonely, it helped them bond with their new owners.