“That’s sort of what they did. They walked a few more blocks, then found a little business district and there was an antique store. It was run by a Holocaust victim.”

“One of those people the Nazis tried to kill.”

“Yes.” Again she was surprised that he didn’t need to have the Holocaust defined. Walter had been skeptical when she told him she needed sanitary napkins, not because he didn’t know about menstruation, but because he didn’t think she was old enough. “I thought you got breasts when that happened,” he said, and even he could tell he had hurt her feelings. Later he explained that although he had a sister, she was thirteen years older and he didn’t know much about what he called girl secrets.

“The jeweler was very old, and stooped, and he wore one of those things that jewelers use to look at things closely.” She waited a beat to see if this was one of the odd things that Walter might know, but he didn’t supply the word and she didn’t have a clue what it was. “Mr. Steinbeck asked if any of his customers had recently had a necklace repaired there.”

“But the customer might have been on the way in,” Walter said. He had a real argumentative side. “And the jeweler couldn’t know that.”

“Only the necklace wasn’t broken, and it was shiny, polished up. He was pretty sure someone had dropped it on the way home. And he was right. A teenage girl had brought her mother’s necklace in to get it cleaned and repaired as a surprise to her, then it had fallen out of her purse on the walk home and she was terrified to tell her mother what had happened because it was an antique, a family heirloom.”

“How did the jeweler know all that? It happened after she left.”

“He didn’t, but he told Mr. Steinbeck how to find the girl, and he learned the rest of the story.”

“Did she offer him a reward?”

“Yes, but he said he didn’t need one, that people shouldn’t get rewards for doing the right thing.”

Almost all her stories about Mr. Steinbeck and Charley ended this way. They did a good deed, then declined any reward for it. She hoped that Walter would eventually decide that doing the right thing-letting her go, turning himself in-would be a reward in and of itself. But so far the man-and-dog duo had traveled to Boston, Atlanta, Milwaukee, Crater Lake, Yellowstone Park-thank goodness her family had taken that cross-country trip when she was eight, she had lots of material on which to draw-and now Tulsa, always doing good deeds, and it didn’t seem to make any impression at all on Walter.

THAT NIGHT, IN ONE of the motor courts that Walter preferred, places where cash and men with young girls didn’t seem to excite anyone’s curiosity, he asked if her period was finished.

“Yes,” she said, her stomach suddenly queasy, drawing her knees to her chest. So far, he had not touched her, not in that way. So far. But maybe that was because he had thought she wasn’t a woman yet, and therefore off-limits.

“So I can put these back in the truck for a while?” He held up the box of sanitary pads.

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“A month.” She paused, not wanting to admit the next part. “Sometimes more.”

A month. Would he really keep her for another month? Did she have a month’s worth of stories about Charley and Mr. Steinbeck? She hoped so.

15

I CAN READ YOU LIKE a book is not generally a generous expression. It is a criticism, an accusation of naïveté, a suggestion that someone is trying to manipulate another person, but failing. Similarly, I can see right through you has a sinister feel to it. Or, even: I’d know you anywhere.

Yet in a long and happy relationship, that kind of transparency and instant recognition has an endearing comfort. So when Peter arrived home one evening, actually in time for supper with the children, and announced he was ready for the family to get a dog, Eliza had no problem discerning his motives. Peter had always opposed having a dog for any number of reasons-dirt, hair, the possibility that Albie would prove to be allergic. But his primary objection had been that Eliza would become the dog’s caretaker, although she had insisted she wouldn’t care. Now, he announced at dinner, in front of the children, that he had changed his mind, which left Eliza feeling a little sandbagged. What if she no longer wanted a dog? If Peter could change his vote from no to yes, why wouldn’t he check first to see if she had changed hers?

“A real dog,” Peter said.

“What do you mean by ‘real’?” asked Iso, the young lawyer. She was waiting, Eliza realized, for the penny to drop, one of the few Briticisms she allowed herself. She preferred it to the idea of the other shoe dropping.

“Not one of those toy things, that you carry around in your arms. And not a terrier of any kind. They’re too high-strung. A Lab, or…a German shepherd.”

“I don’t like the idea of purebred dogs, when there are so many dogs in kennels waiting to be adopted,” Eliza said, even as Iso cried “German shepherd” and Albie countered with “Black Lab!”

“No, the shelter is fine, that’s a good idea,” Peter decreed. “Mixed breeds are healthier and smarter. Just as long as it’s a real dog. We’ll go Saturday.”

That was three days away, and intrepid Iso quickly learned that they could search the local kennel’s inventory online, which was providential, as Albie noted, “Because we can talk about the dogs without hurting their feelings.” As Peter pored over the children’s choices in the evening, eliminating some, approving others, Eliza began to realize what he meant by a real dog. Big. Peter wanted them to have a big dog. And she began to wonder: Had the lawyer, Blanding, told Peter something more about Walter or Barbara LaFortuny? Was that the penny that had yet to drop?

IN THE END, FOR ALL their careful study and rational discussion, they allowed a dog to choose them. Reba, a shaggy, sad-eyed mix of terrier and shepherd, had studied them with the resignation of a dog who never gets picked. She had been in the kennel, a no-kill one, for a record eighteen months. Peter demurred-she wasn’t small, but she wasn’t big or intimidating-and Iso was casually cruel about the dog’s lack of charisma. But Eliza and Albie became passionate, intense champions and-after a surprising amount of paperwork and references-Reba came to live with them a week later.

“Can we at least rename her?” Iso asked. “Everyone will think we named her after that actress on that silly sitcom.”

It took Eliza a second to sort out that Reba McEntire, forever in her head as a country singer, was apparently on a sitcom these days. Eliza wondered if Iso had any memory of the fact that, back when she was a baby in Texas, Eliza had developed a bizarre fondness for CMT, the station that played country music videos, and she had liked Reba quite a bit. There had been a whole series of videos that seemed to tell a little story, about a man and a woman who circled each other in some romance novel setting, possibly one of those islands off the coast of South Carolina. And she had been a doctor, or some such, who met the love of her life in Guatemala, or someplace, but they didn’t end up together, and somehow that was okay. Madonna in the 1980s, Reba in the 1990s-who was her musical role model now, as the first decade of the new century drew to an end? Eliza wasn’t sure she could even name a current pop star. Not on the basis of her work, at any rate. She knew, in spite of herself, which one had been beaten by her boyfriend, and the one who had been arrested for kleptomania, and the one who kept going to rehab. But don’t ask her what they sang.

“No,” Eliza told Iso, with a vehemence that caught them both off guard. “You don’t just go around changing people’s names.”

“I did,” Iso pointed out. “You did.”