I'm in the Palatial Tampa Theater with my husband, eating fistfuls of hot popcorn and watching Oscar-nominated animated film shorts. This is just one of the activities he has planned for us while we’re in Florida, in what will be a series of valiant efforts to get my mind off my grief.

The last entry, Mr. Hublot, is an 11-minute film about a charming little robot man who lives alone in a house full of clocks and mechanical plants. Every day, Hublot rises at the same time and goes about his chores in the same order—winding the clocks, watering the plants—before jetting off to work. One morning, mid-routine, Hublot catches sight of a robot puppy as it darts into a discarded box on the street. Then he sees the city garbage truck lumbering toward it.

Hublot saves the puppy, and his daily routine expands. Each morning, after winding clocks and watering plants, he feeds the robot pup breakfast. It’s a rich diet of nuts and bolts, motor oil, and chains, and soon the pup grows so comically large that Hublot must widen his thresholds and hallways. When the dog grows too tall for the room, Hublot must make a decision: get rid of it or find a bigger home for both of them. In the movie’s final frame, the two sit happily side by side in an enormous empty warehouse.

The lights come up, but I don’t move. My husband and I sit quietly, shoulders touching, until the crowd shuffles out and the echo of voices fades. Then he pats my thigh.

“C’mon,” he says gently. “We have to go.”

We’re in Florida for a few days because my husband has work here. He is an artist who travels around selling high-end work to wealthy patrons. I’m a writer who works mainly from home in a tiny upstairs office with three dogs I call my employees. Until recently, that is.

“Let’s go to work!” I’d say every morning, and they would scamper upstairs and take their places on the rug and under the desk and in the chair beneath the window. When they were older and could no longer manage the stairs, I carried them up one by one—a human ferry, depositing them on the landing and instructing them to wait until I got the next one, and then the next one. At lunchtime, we’d reverse the process, and after lunch, we’d start all over again.

But a year ago, I put the 12-year-old to sleep (her heart was failing), followed by the 16-year-old a month ago (his liver was failing), followed by the 14-year-old a week ago (everything was failing, and she was a wreck without the other two). For the first time in 36 years, I am dogless. Cocker Spaniel-less, to be exact. Not that the breed matters, except that Cockers happen to be especially cheerful dogs, loyal to a fault and worshipful of their owners. Having three was like being the benevolent dictator of an extremely happy country.

“You should come on this trip,” my husband suggested, a few days after we put the last dog down. “It would be a good distraction.”

We’d go to the movies and explore downtown St. Pete and the Dali Museum. While he was at meetings, I could write. None of this excited me. But when I weighed the option of staying behind in a house newly emptied of dogs against taking a trip I didn’t want to take, I decided the former was worse.

So I packed. Out of habit, I moved stealthily from suitcase to closet, sliding my feet as if on snowshoes though there were no dogs in my path to trip over, and none tailgating. I once read that writer David Foster Wallace liked to get into a cab and ask to be taken to some ridiculously un-urgent destination, such as the library, then adding, just for fun, “… and step on it!” It made me think about my dogs, always skittering behind me, their precisely aimed noses pushing urgently into the backs of my knees, as if to say, To the kitchen, and step on it! To the sofa, and step on it!

My husband and I file out of the Tampa Theater and walk through the darkened streets to the car. It has rained, and the air is cool. The smell of garlic drifts from a nearby restaurant.

“I’m starved,” he says.

“That was sad,” I say.

He reminds me that everything ended well for Hublot and his dog. Then he puts his arm around me and pulls me in close. He knows what I mean. Even a happy story is a sad story for a sad person.

But it’s not just that Hublot’s sweet tale of rescue and devotion feeds my grief. It’s that the larger story —the endless accommodations Hublot made for the dog and the all-consuming dedication that ultimately came to define him—is my story as well.

I almost never travel with my husband. Partly this is because I’m the kind of person who clings to home, who likes to cook and putter and take walks around my own neighborhood more than I like to explore new places. But mostly I didn’t travel with him because I hated to leave the dogs for more than a night, even though I had a sitter who loved them almost as much as I did. Despite the fact that she’d worked for us for 20 uneventful years, I worried that in my absence my dogs were lonely and bored and in near-constant danger. It was a worry that ruined everything from overseas trips to overnight jaunts.

Two years ago, my husband convinced me to go on a week-long excursion to France. He would do everything— research tickets, make our accommodations, plan our days—if I’d just learn to operate the Blackberry we’d use while overseas. I agreed. Upon our arrival in Paris, I was immediately distraught because I could not remember if I had engaged the dog sitter (I had, of course), and I could not call her.

This was because I’d discovered that learning to use the Blackberry caused me to think about being away from the dogs, so I didn’t do it. I spent our entire first day stumbling down the Champs-Élysées and in and out of pastry shops and the Louvre staring down at the tiny, mysterious phone, punching random buttons, willing it to call home. When at last by some miracle it did, it was three in the morning back in the U.S., and the dog sitter was groggy and alarmed.

“Are you okay?” she croaked into the phone, her voice gravelly with sleep. “Yes!” I shouted. “Are you at my house?” “Of course,” she said, sounding bewildered. I apologized profusely for waking her. Then I apologized profusely to my husband for the distraction. Within an hour, I was worried again, afraid the dogs were sad without me and that the sitter would forget to padlock the gate when she went out. But that was then and this is now. There are no dogs pining for me at home or on the edge of danger. The worst that could happen has happened.

My husband’s art rep owns the 23rd floor penthouse condo in St. Petersburg where we are staying. Like the theater, it’s palatial. Floor-to-ceiling windows line the living room, offering a dizzying view of the bay, a busy small aircraft landing strip and the Dali museum. We waste no time selecting one of the four enormous bedrooms to drop our bags and learning to operate the espresso machine in the kitchen. We kick off our shoes and take our coffee onto the balcony. Below us on the street, people and cars and horse-drawn carriages mill about, all of it so far down that the symphony of voices and engines and clopping hooves barely reaches us. It is as if we exist in a world apart.

My husband loved the dogs every bit as much as I did. He loved to snuggle with them and take walks, and he, like me, marveled endlessly at their quirks (look how she folds her paws under, like a lamb; look how he buries his head behind the pillows, like an ostrich!). Whenever we went out, he turned on the golf channel.

“They love golf,” he’d say, grinning at them lined up on the sofa.

But I was the one who’d pulled them off the streets. I was the one who fed and bathed and took them to the vet and managed their pills and their diet and their days. And not just the three Spaniels, but the four dogs before them as well. There were mornings, washing my hair and brushing my teeth, that I wanted to scream from the boredom of it, the repetition (hair again?! teeth again?!), and yet never did I weary of asking my dogs whether they were, at suppertime, ready to eat; or at potty time, to potty; or at walk time, to walk, even though I knew the answers to these questions were yes, yes, always and forever yes.

Like Hublot under the spell of his growing pup, my meticulous tending to the ever-expanding needs of my dogs became the point of my life. It was what defined me. It was not what defined my husband. I know for a fact that he never once thought his life would be pointless without dogs.

Our second day in St. Pete, we do everything else on my husband’s list of distractions: Dali Museum, antiquing, lunching downtown. At 2 pm, he catches a cab to a meeting and I walk back to the penthouse. I stand in the silence of the living room, then make coffee and take my laptop out on the balcony. Thirty minutes later, having done nothing but watch prop planes glide in and out of the airport, I go back inside and lie down facing the back of the sofa. Two hours, later my phone rings, jolting me out of the blackness of sleep. “The meetings went great!” shouts my husband. I’m to meet him downstairs in an hour. I put down the phone and walk over to the window. Below, the street still swarms with traffic and crowds and horse carriages. It looks frantic to me, like throngs of people desperately seeking diversion from boredom or sorrow or regret. To pleasure, and step on it!

I often wonder how it’s possible to know the end is coming for your dogs, and to still be shocked when they die. How, when they could no longer breathe or eat or shit—the advance guards of imminent death—and you made the decision to euthanize, you could somehow feel you’d been heartless. As if, had you truly loved them, you’d have engineered something beyond biological possibility. You’d have made them immortal, like Hublot’s mechanical dog.

Suddenly I am visited by a crushing homesickness. I’ve fled back to home from wherever I was for so long, I still feel urgently that I must go there, regardless of what does or doesn’t await me. Even without dogs there is alive in me the same panicked, compulsive tending—once to their presence, now to their absence. I think of devoted Hublot, in a final sacrifice to the ever-expanding needs of his dog, moving to an empty warehouse, marking a renunciation of life as he knew it. As if to say, There is now only this. Only us. What began as expansion—saving a pup—becoming, in the end, a contraction. A narrowing. A sealing off of the exits.

This was not what I intended. This is why, when our last dog died, my husband asked for a year before getting another. And this is why I agreed.

I leave the condo and walk down to the harbor. The sun is hot on my neck, the water calm except for tiny swells that form around the boats, are swallowed up, form, and are swallowed up again in a rhythm that is hypnotic to watch. When at last I look up, my husband is standing over me, his tall, lanky form backlit by the sun. He sits down, puts his arm around me and kisses me. His shirt and lips are still cool from the chilled indoor air of his meetings. For now, there is only this. Only us.

For a good part of my life—16 years —I had a dog named Lala. During our time together, she was stolen from me three times. Now, Lala was not any kind of pedigreed canine, but rather, a small mixed-breed, part Chihuahua, part Dachshund and part something else, possibly German Shepherd. She looked like a miniature German Shepherd—blonde with black tips—and weighed around 11 pounds. She was undeniably appealing—dark, expressive eyes and chronic joyousness—but she was not the kind of dog you could fence for money.

With people, Lala was the friendliest, most loving dog imaginable; I’ve never met another dog with so purely affectionate a nature. She, in turn, inspired affection and even goodness in the most unlikely and even unlikable human beings. Although when it came to other dogs, Lala was fearless and ferocious.

I used to say that her motto was two-fold: come from love and kill big dogs. If she’d had a different kind of owner (if, indeed, she’d stayed with her second captors) she might have become a bear dog, a fyce (as Faulkner calls them), one of those little yappy things who runs right up to bears, barking and nipping, but is too small and too close to the ground for the bear to reach underneath and eviscerate with a claw swipe. As it was, I once had to pry an Airedale’s teeth off her throat. Lala antagonized other dogs, especially those larger than herself.

Ah, but humans, Lala adored and trusted indiscriminately. Once, in a supermarket parking lot, she shot out of my car and ran across two aisles to greet a family of strangers as though they were her own long lost kin. She made human friends wherever we went.

I found her at a small sawmill in the Southern Sierra foothills where I routinely stopped to fill my trunk with scraps for my wood-burning stove. One day, a small puppy with an infected eye came up and licked my ankle. “Whose dog is this?” I asked the owner.

“Yours,” he said. Then added, “Somebody left three puppies in the ditch. Please take her, or my wife will.”

I took her. And drove directly to the vet, who pulled a foxtail out of her eye, gave her puppy shots and said that she was around four months old. Maybe two weeks later, she was stolen from me for the first time.

I was living in the country, amoung the oak- and grass-covered foothills outside a small town I’ll call Mayville on the banks of the Chula River. (I’ve changed names to protect the guilty—and to protect myself from the guilty.) On Memorial Day, I drove into Mayville to see my friend Fanny. Her back yard was on the river. We spent the hot afternoon walking several hundred yards up the bank, then floating downstream in inner tubes. Fanny’s two dogs and Lala ran up and down along the bank with us. People were in their yards, barbecuing, and cooling off in the river. Lala made friends left and right, with families and retirees and an old hermit, and was an instant hit with a small pack of eight- to 10-year-old boys. The dogs were always there to greet us as we pulled ourselves out of the water. Then, at one point, Lala wasn’t with them.

Fanny and I spent the rest of the afternoon scouring Mayville, calling and whistling, to no avail. I came across the pack of boys who’d befriended Lala. They’d seen her, but couldn’t say exactly where, or when, or agree which way she’d gone. I gave up searching after dark, and had a very bad night.

The next morning, Fanny called from work; she was a teacher’s aide at the local school. One of the little boys, she said, had had an attack of conscience. He’d admitted that he and his friends had stolen Lala and put her in an outbuilding behind his house in Mayville. Fanny gave me the address, directions and the eight-year-old’s description of the place. I drove into town.

I found the address easily—a house on an acre of shady land with at least five outbuildings on the property. Nobody answered the door of the main house, so I walked around to the back. Three sheds were locked, and another was an old outhouse filled with gardening tools. The last building was a small substandard dwelling —Mayville was filled with uninsulated shacks and shanties that people once vacationed in—and I was heading toward it when a woman came out of the main house. She was slim and good-looking, with black hair in the big, sprayed style of a cocktail waitress. “What are you doing?” she said. Not friendly.

“I’m looking for my little blonde dog,” I said. “Your son said she’s here, in one of the back buildings.”

“No,” said the woman. “I told him to take the dog back to you yesterday, and he did. There’s no dog here.”

“I’d just like to look in there,” I said, pointing to the one unsearched building.

“I can’t let you in there,” said the woman. “It’s not mine. And there’s nothing in there, anyway. It’s empty. You won’t find anything.”

I wavered. It felt rude to insist. The woman seemed so certain, and so hard. She was not someone to mess with.

Then I heard something. Or thought I did. A yip. Or a hunch of a yip.

“Still,” I said, walking past the woman. “I’m going to look.”

I reached the door and turned the knob. The door opened. I did not see an empty house. Rather, I took one step inside a room crammed with electronic equipment—televisions, stereos, soundboards, stacks and stacks of them. There was only a narrow aisle through all the stuff. And suddenly, swerving around a pillar of speakers and running full tilt, there was Lala.

The boys, when tired of her, had simply put her in with all the other stolen goods.

Lala, wriggling with pleasure, let me kiss and pet her briefly, then ran outside, and took a good long pee on the lawn. (Now, that’s a good dog!)

“You have to go now,” said the woman.

I ignored her and, turning on a faucet, gave Lala water out of my hands (she was very thirsty). We left only after Lala drank her fill.

Mayville, as is obvious, was a quirky little town; there were near-luxury homes and small ranchos in the nearby hills. Modest, well-tended riverfront properties alternated with falling-down, paint-thirsty, more rustic constructions. The town itself was a few blocks long with few merchants and no prospects—no economic base, no industry. Locals logged, or commuted 12 miles to the next larger town to work. There were a couple of bars, some small grocery stores, a gas station, a post office, a struggling café, two struggling dinner houses, a decent hardware store.

Juvenile dognappers and stolen-goods-keepers were not, unfortunately, the town’s only or worst criminal element. Mayville had its own homegrown sociopath, who was in jail when I first moved there, but I heard all about him.

Wren Hickles was known for stealing; wrecking other people’s property; running cars off the road; and sudden, unprovoked, violent assaults. He was prodigious in his antics and there was hardly a family in Mayville who had not suffered at his hands. For a long time, nobody would press charges against him because they were too afraid of him. Finally, a man whom Wren had beaten savagely for no reason in broad daylight on Main Street had him arrested and convinced several reluctant witnesses to testify. Wren Hickles was sent to Soledad State Prison for three years.

As those years were coming to a close, a murmur rose in the town. His name came up more and more. The old stories took on new life. This wedding party ruined by drunken rampaging. That truck full of firewood forced off the mountain road. This house broken into, trashed. That bloody fistfight.

And then Wren Hickles was back. The news rippled through the small community. He applied for a job in the hardware store; the owner, a friend of mine, said Wren seemed friendlier and smarter than before, and also funny. “One thing, though,” said the owner. “He was leaning against that glass display of pocket knives while he was talking to me, and when he left, half the knives were gone as well.” My boyfriend at the time was a local. It was his brother who had succeeded in having Wren Hickles sent to jail. “If you see him,” my boyfriend said, “Don’t do anything to attract his notice.”

Not long after his return, I saw Wren Hickles for the first time. I’d stopped at the convenience store to pump gas and there was a lean snaggle-toothed guy, shirtless, his back tattooed with a clumsy lightning bolt and the word Mayville. A prison tattoo. He was smoking pot with another guy right by the pumps while, a few feet away, a woman wept in a car. A bad scene. I decided to get gas elsewhere.

I told my boyfriend that I’d finally laid eyes on the notorious parolee. “Stay below his radar,” my boyfriend said. “Or, believe me, you’ll regret it.”

Lala disappeared on a weekday. I was driving in to work, and I was a little late, and she chased me farther than usual, past the gate to my property and partway down the side road to the highway. I stopped the car and yelled at her and ordered her home. I wasn’t worried she’d get lost. We often walked this far together, and every morning, she and my Lab, Olive, went for long exploratory runs in the barely populated hills. But when I came home nine hours later, Olive was there and Lala was not. I drove around the neighborhood calling her, and the next morning, I contacted all the neighbors. Nobody had seen her.

I made handbills and hung them up on telephone posts and fence posts, in the Mayville post office, on the supermarket bulletin board. Days passed. A week. Nobody phoned. Then, one day, I came home late at night to a message on my answering machine. “I know where yer dog’s at,” said a man in a thick backwoods drawl. “An’ this is Lawrence …” No further message. No call-back number. Just a click.

Lawrence. I didn’t know any Lawrence. I asked around. There was a retired dentist named Lawrence “This didn’t sound like a dentist,” I said. I played the message for my boyfriend and watched his face darken. “I’ll handle it,” he said.

I begged him not to. I promised to talk to the deputy sheriff the next morning. I promised I wouldn’t approach Wren Hickles myself.

And promptly broke that promise. The next morning, I went into town to pick up my mail. I’d heard by then that Wren Hickles had a job at the Mobil station, so I drove on over. He was washing the office window. “Hi,” I said. “Are you Lawrence?”

“Yes ma’am,” he said, turning. He put the squeegee in his bucket and offered me his hand.

We shook. “I’m Michelle,” I said. “I think you called me about my dog who’s lost.”

“I seen your sign in the post office,” he said. “The Greens got her—you know the Greens?”

Of course I did. The Greens were a big notorious mountain family, all men, except for the mother whose name was—I kid you not—Ophelia. The father, Robert, was a hunting guide; one son was a logger, another was a tree surgeon. The third was the runt of the family who was actually called Pipsqueak —he was trustworthy and a hard worker, the one people hired for chores around the house and yard. The youngest son was a beautiful hunk who soon moved south to star in pornographic movies.

“I was gonna call you again,” said Wren Hickles. “Nice little dog. You better get her quick, ’fore they get any more attached to her.”

I drove straight up the mountain road to the Greens’ house. I parked behind a row of pickups and flatbeds. As I got out of the car, the first living thing I saw was Lala.

She took one look at me and tucked her tail between her legs, as if she’d done something very wrong.

“Oh, Lala,” I said. “You’re okay, I’m not mad.” And shortly, she was there, licking my face.

With Lala in my arms, I knocked on the door. Only Ophelia was home. Her husband, Robert, she said, had found “Sunny” on the street where I lived. “She would’ve come home,” I said.

“I thought she was someone’s pet,” Ophelia said, vaguely. “We were going to put an ad in the paper.”

When?, I wondered.

Ophelia reached out and stroked Lala’s head. “She’s the first dog Robert’s let in the house in years.”

I took Lala home and she didn’t get stolen again for another 13 years. But I did have one more exchange with Wren Hickles. He pulled up next to me in his car at a highway stop and asked if I got my dog back. Not long afterward, less than a year after he’d been paroled, he fled the state. He’d carjacked a vehicle, locked its owner in the trunk and sent it off the side of a mountain; while the owner survived, Wren’s parole was definitely in violated. The last thing I heard, he was being extradited from Missouri.

Lala and I moved back to the city— first to Pasadena, where we lived for six years in a courtyard of Craftsmen cottages. We didn’t have a yard, so I walked Lala several times a day, and in sunny, mild weather, tied her to a faucet out front so she could lie in the sun and greet her many friends going up and down the courtyard walkway. If I didn’t put her out for a few days, it was not unusual for strangers to knock on the door and ask after her. Oh, Lala and her legion of friends.

From Pasadena, we moved to Atwater, an odd little suburb of Los Angeles near Griffith Park. We had a huge fenced-in yard, and Lala took her responsibility —guarding the property—seriously, at least when it came to other dogs. Every perambulating canine was announced, and many barked back. Except for this constant ferocity, Lala befriended the entire neighborhood— which is more than I can say for myself.

We were happy in Atwater except for one thing. One major thing. We had a crazy next-door neighbor, a woman who had repeatedly been charged with being a “neighborhood nuisance.” Therese was in her late 70s and surely mentally ill; she was filled with hatreds, resentments and frustrations—and that’s putting her pathology nicely. All of my neighbors warned me about her. She called the authorities about everything, real and imagined, any infringement, no matter how small. When people, forgetting something, pulled back in their driveways and ran into their house, she called parking enforcement if they blocked the sidewalk. If a car was parked in one spot over the 72-hour limit, or with a bumper in the red zone, or more than 18 inches from the curb, she called to have them ticketed.

She must have had a list of every petty authority and enforcer in Los Angeles County. She called the county agriculture inspector many times about my garden: when I mulched my roses with straw (she believed mice live in straw and therefore, the day I mulched, called and told the inspector I had an infestation of vermin). She called him when I made a compost heap (she thought it was garbage) and when I fertilized with steer manure (she said I’d strewn excrement on the premises). When I first moved in, she phoned my landlord every time I had a house guest or a visiting dog and told him I had a new roommate and/or a new pet. He didn’t care, and began hanging up on her. Everyone in the neighborhood avoided and ignored her as much as possible.

Except Lala. Lala was as happy to see old Therese as she was to see almost anybody. Also, despite my endless requests to the contrary, Therese constantly fed Lala table scraps. Lala was perhaps the only living creature who ever exhibited even the slightest pleasure at the sight of this bitter, vindictive old woman. (Therese’s own husband, a timid man, would sometimes raise his voice in unmistakable agony, “Therese, you are an evil, evil person,” an assessment with which we neighbors, wincing in sympathy, unanimously agreed.) Lala had more compassion and humanity—and a greater love of table scraps—than all of us combined.

One chilly Sunday afternoon, I was watching videos in bed with my boyfriend. We were watching the Prime Suspect miniseries, one episode after another. The only problem was, the phone kept ringing. And it was nobody good, nobody whom I wanted to talk to more than I wanted to watch Helen Mirren solve crimes. Finally, after someone called to ask how to make pot roast, my boyfriend said, “Don’t answer it anymore, okay?”

Lala was in and out of the house at her whim, sometimes joining us on the bed, sometimes patrolling the yard. The phone rang several times over a period of an hour. “God, you get a lot of calls on a Sunday,” said my boyfriend.

Then, someone was pounding on the door.

I jumped up, pulled on a robe and answered the door. It was Therese, with her weary, sagging face and hideously swollen legs. She was 80 by then and nearer the end of her life than we even hoped. My house sat deep in the lot; it must have been an enormous effort for her to walk all the way down my driveway. She’d been banging the door with her aluminum canes.

“A man stole Lala,” she said. “I’ve been trying to call you. He just opened the gate and stepped in and picked her up. He had white hair and a white moustache and a whole bouquet of white flowers. He probably stole those too,” she said.

My boyfriend and I went into action. Dressed. Grabbed cell phones. We were so steeped in Prime Suspect, it seemed as though we were setting off into our own crime drama episode.

In my truck, we drove up and down the streets, stopping and interrogating every person we encountered: “Have you seen a small blonde dog with a white-haired man?” We had asked maybe 10 people before we got the answer we wanted.

“I saw them,” said the man. “I asked him, ‘Where’d you get that dog?’ and he said he’d found her in the street.”

The man, he went on to say, hung out at the liquor store over on Fletcher, by the Foster’s Freeze. We drove off in hot pursuit.

We found our prime suspect sitting on a cinderblock wall at Foster’s. “Where’s my dog?” I asked him.

“Your dog? I haven’t seen your dog,” he said.

And then, in the long grass behind him, I saw a familiar black-tipped tail. When he saw me see her, he said, “I tried to call you and tell you I found her lost in the street.”

I was running across the parking lot, yelling Lala’s name. Lala jumped off the wall and into my arms. I was shaking with fear and loss and relief.

The dognapper asked my boyfriend for a reward.

My boyfriend said something suitably macho and dramatic—“If I ever catch you anywhere near our house, or that dog again, you’ll be sorry you ever saw that dog …”

And thus was Lala restored to me, again through the agency of a public enemy. We laughed about it— the high drama, the solving of a crime—but I was also keenly aware that it could have turned out very badly indeed.

I had almost 16 happy years with Lala. As with many dogs, she was a study in unconditional love, but in her case, it was unconditional love of the most extroverted and expressive variety. She could beguile and charm even the worst of human beings, and somehow make them behave admirably on her behalf. She forced me to see the faintest spark of goodness in people. She made it impossible to thoroughly despise some of the most feared and disliked citizens in my community, for she brought out the best in them, brought out whatever trace of affection and responsibility slumbered within them. An entire town feared and despised Wren Hickles, and for excellent reasons, but my interaction with him was only positive: he did me a great favor. And while I suffered living next door to horrible old Therese and was frankly relieved when she died, I cannot hate her unconditionally, for she did, when quite ill, make her long, slow way to my house to tell me Lala had been taken.

Ah, Lala. You were a better human than I—except when it came to other dogs.

During the mid-1970s, I directed one part of a multi-agency study of the responses of elk to logging in the northern Rockies. My study involved an area in western Montana on which we mapped site-specific annual levels of elk use by counting pellet groups on contour transects. I was always accompanied—and often surprised—by my Norwegian Elkhound, Tigre, who was inclined to herd anything on four legs.

His technique with elk would always start with a sniffing exhibition. He would rise up on his hind legs to get his nose well above the surrounding undergrowth and walk along that way for 10 to 15 feet. Once he was sure of his quarry, he would take off running, but very quietly. At that point, I had no more than five minutes to find a big tree to stand behind. I needed the big tree because the consistency of Tigre’s work was simply outstanding. At the end of his silent run, he would suddenly explode into an army of barking dogs, and shortly thereafter, a herd of elk would come stampeding toward me.

This was not a random occurrence; it happened at least once every year that we did the pellet counts. I cannot imagine how you would ever train a dog to do this. It has to be natural and instinctive, and even that explanation seems a little farfetched unless you’ve seen it happen.

The talent, however, was not confined to elk. One morning, a colleague, Freddy Hartkorn, and I were walking through a field in Lupine Creek to the start points of a couple of transects. Tigre started barking, and I knew right away what it was (you could tell by the tone of the bark what he was herding). I told Freddy, “That’s a bear bark.” We had just come even with a large maple shrub when a big black bear bustled down the hill and turned left.

Imagine the scene, arranged within three corners of an equilateral triangle. The maple is in the middle, Tigre is at the apex, and the two basal angles are occupied on one end by Freddy and me, on the other by a very perplexed bear. After skidding to a halt, he just sat there and looked at us. The expression on his face was absolutely priceless. Tigre was also sitting quietly, although you could almost hear him thinking, There he is, boss. All yours.

The third corner was the one that reacted, or at least Freddy did. He started yelling and waving his arms and carrying on something fierce. Dumb me, I didn’t join in; I was too busy looking at that poor bear’s face and trying to keep from laughing. (It was one of those “you had to be there” moments.) When he finally figured it out, the bear turned around and ran off. Forever after, Freddy was willing to tell anybody who would listen, “That damn dog of Jack’s is really dangerous. He’s going to get somebody killed.”

As it happens, Freddy’s prediction didn’t come true, and Tigre and I had other adventures that also turned out well.

One morning on a pellet route in Burdette Creek, we saw bears on the other side of the drainage, too far away for Tigre to notice. So, later that day, when I was sitting down writing notes and heard an animal stirring around downhill from us, I figured it was another bear. Unusually, Tigre seemed more interested in sitting right next to me rather than chasing it. This behavior aroused my curiosity, so I stood up to have a look. Lucky I did, too. The mountain lion was almost as surprised as I was—I’m sure he thought Tigre’s bobbing white tail belonged to a great big bunny.

I am not responsible for much. I do not have children who have to get to school on time and wear matching shoes and be taught the difference between right and wrong. I do not have a job in which the well being of a company or the safety of the nation or the health of anyone at all is resting on my shoulders. I have a couple of plants I must remember to water. I make a point of paying my taxes on time. I take care of myself, but that’s not worth mentioning. I pitch in and help all sorts of people when I can, but they are people who could find the same help elsewhere if I went on vacation. When I think of who I am responsible for, truly responsible for, the list whittles down to my dog and my grandmother, and it just so happens that last week they were both sick.

Rose is white with ginger ears and an extremely alert tail. She weighs 17 pounds even though she should probably weigh 16. She had some angry-looking lesions on her pink belly that made me take her to the vet two months ago. I gave her the assigned antibiotics wrapped in cream cheese or peanut butter, depending on what was around. But the inflammation lingered and then flared, exacerbated by Rose’s very focused licking, and I decided we should go back and try again. I had heard there was a dog dermatologist in town with a three-month waiting list, but decided to give my regular vet another try. I’m quite certain I wouldn’t go to the dermatologist if I had pimples on my stomach and so I don’t see why I should make my dog go either.

My grandmother is 94, a mere 13 in dog years. She lives in an assisted-living facility three miles from my house and four blocks from my vet. Sometimes I take her with us to the vet, even though it is a lot to navigate a scared dog and a mostly blind, very confused grandmother into the waiting room. Still, she likes the excitement of barking, the snuffling dogs, the chance to comfort Rose, who is inevitably trembling with her head pressed beneath my grandmother’s arm. Rose doesn’t like the vet, which would be a point too obvious to include were it not for the fact that my mother’s cat worships his trips to doctor. They are his 15 minutes of fame. He purrs for hours after coming home at the mere thought of having received so much attention.

“It’s okay,” my grandmother tells Rose and rubs her ears. “Nobody’s going to eat you.”

But Rose, for all her incalculable wisdom, is still a dog and we cannot reassure her that something really hideous isn’t about to happen. Maybe she does think that an enormous and drooling animal is waiting to chew her up behind the door of examining room number three. She vibrates in her fear, tucking her head down and her hindquarters in until she is the size of a grapefruit. How can I explain that this was all for the good, that I would never leave her here, that I would protect her with the same passion with which she protects me from the UPS and FedEx trucks? We have such a language between us, Rose and I, but in this case it fails us and all I can do is pet and pet.

My grandmother has said her leg was sore all week. There was a bruise behind her knee, a funny place for a bump, and so my mother and I kept an eye on it. As soon as my mother flew off for her vacation, I received a phone call from the assisted-living nurse. My grandmother needed to go to the doctor, immediately.

“Are we going to your house?” my grandmother said, once I had wrestled her and her suddenly useless, painful leg into my car.

“We’re going to the hospital,” I told her. “The doctor needs to see your leg.”

“My leg is fine,” she said.

“It’s fine because you’re sitting down. Do you remember it hurting before?”

“My leg doesn’t hurt,” she said.

Her leg is blowing up like a summer storm, dark as an eggplant now across the back and getting green in the front. Her skin feels tight and hot. How did it get so bad so fast? The doctor said her blood was too thin. She’s had a bleed into her leg, which is better than a clot, and was admitted to the hospital.

If twenty minutes in the vet’s office can turn my bounding, snarling, terrier mutt into a cowering grapefruit, three days in the hospital would cast my sweetly confused grandmother down into the bottom circles of dementia.

“Where are we?’ she asked.

“In the hospital.”

“Are you sick?”

“No,” I said, leaning over to lightly tap her leg. “You have a sore leg.”

“I’ve been here before.”

“A long time ago.”

“There weren’t all these pots and pans then,” she said. “Not so many red squirrels.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“Where are we now?”

“Still in the hospital.”

“Do you feel sick?”

And so we went on in our circle, hour after hour. We had stepped outside of the routine we knew and found ourselves in a place where language was utterly useless. Still, we could not stop talking, the same way I talked to Rose while we waited for the vet. “It’s okay. I’m right here. You’re a beautiful dog. There was never such a good and beautiful dog as you.” I whisper to her over and over again while I pet.

I could not call Rose and tell her I was at the hospital, and I could not leave. IVs can get pulled out much quicker than they can be put back in; I had already found this out. Every five minutes my grandmother swung her feet to the floor. “Let’s go now.”

I picked them up and put them back in her bed. “You aren’t supposed to walk.”

“Where are we?” she asked.

Is it wrong to tell a story about your grandmother and your dog in which their characters become interchangeable? My sense of protectiveness for the two of them is fierce. They love me, and because their love is all they have to give, it seems especially pure. I love them too, but my love manifests itself in food, medical care, rides in the car, grooming. On Saturdays, I bring my grandmother home and give her lunch, and she always claims to be too full to finish her sandwich so that she can give half of it to Rose, who does not get sandwiches at other times, especially not straight from the table. I look the other way when my grandmother whispers to my dog, “Don’t worry. She doesn’t see us.”

My grandmother longs to have the ability to spoil someone again. My dog is the one mammal left who is unconditionally thrilled by her company. I wash my grandmother’s hair in the kitchen sink after the dishes are done and Rose sits in her lap while I blow it dry and pin it up in a twist. Sometimes, when I’ve finished with my grandmother’s hair, I’ll wash Rose in the sink and use the same damp towel to rub her dry. Then they lie down on the couch together and fall asleep, exhausted by so much cleanliness.

Back in the hospital, I cover my grandmother up with a white blanket.

“Your little dog sure did give me the cold shoulder,” she said, her voice full of hurt.

“What?”

“She didn’t even come over and say hello.”

“Rose isn’t here,” I told her. “We’re in the hospital.”

My grandmother’s eyes move slowly from the window to the door, then back again. “Oh,” she said, glad to know she was wrong. She takes the white blanket up in her hands.

Three days later, my grandmother went home, her leg still sore but stable. I have told her she was in the hospital, but she doesn’t believe me.

Rose, on the other hand, remembers her antibiotic. After dinner she sits in front of the counter where the bottle is kept, wagging her tail. She thinks only of the cream cheese, not the medicine, because she knows that part of it is my responsibility.