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until ten thirty because Elaine had forgotten to turn on the oven after putting the roast in it. She looked through the view window a few times, upset that the meat would not cook, before she noticed the oven was off. None of us in attendance—and starving—found this development surprising. Elaine can spend ten minutes looking for the car keys that she’s holding in her hand. Lest you worry that her occasional confusion indicates the onset of Alzheimer’s, people who knew her when she was a teenager tell us that even then she could spend ten minutes searching for the horses to pull the covered wagon when the poor beasts were already standing in their traces and ready to go.
    When you start drinking red wine at six o’clock, expecting dinner at seven thirty, and when dinner arrives three hours later than promised, you are in a very forgiving mood and find the chef to be as adorable as do the uncountable men whom she has discarded like old shoes. Conversation around the dinner table was lively if notraucous, and surprisingly coherent, considering. About halfway through the meal, someone asked Elaine if she had heard from Al lately, and before she could reply, from under the table came the voice of Billy Ray Cyrus singing “Achy Breaky Heart,” as if Al were under there, concealed by the tablecloth.
    Trixie, when visiting a friend, never before or thereafter appropriated the property of the host for her own use, but with her timely addition of a soundtrack, she got the biggest laugh of the night, and came out from under the table to accept applause.
    Any Spot or Fido might decide that a colorfully outfitted cowboy doll must be a dog toy. Settling with it under the dinner table would also be predictable dog conduct.
    But Trixie had stood on her hind feet to pluck the doll off a shelf that she could barely reach. Instead of munching it at once and activating the recording, she took it quietly under the table, without anyone seeing her. That she bit the song from it precisely when someone asked Elaine if she’d heard from Al lately…
    Well, I won’t go so far as to say that this uncanny canine knew Al had given the doll to Elaine, that she bided her time and waited to hear Al’s name, that she knew why this would strike all present as hilarious. For suggesting such a thing, I would no doubt attract the attention of the Bureau for the Compassionate Care of the Inadvisably Mystic-Minded or some other government agency that would want to lock me up for my own good. But aswith so many things about Trixie, this moment at a dinner party was magical and uncanny.
    Trixie was a joker, all right, and when she wasn’t lying in wait under a table for a laugh, other furniture inspired her humor. A console, a dresser, a sideboard, any item on short legs intrigued her. She would stand with head lowered, sniffing the narrow space under the piece. By her urgent attitude, she seemed to say that she had trapped a critter and that we ought to have a look at what she cornered. If we didn’t take her suggestion right away, she would lie down and paw at whatever might be in the hidden space.
    Inevitably, when we got warily on our hands and knees to peer under the furniture for the mouse, nothing was there. The way Short Stuff grinned at us, I swear this was her idea of a practical joke. We fell for it again and again, and when we refused to be conned, we saw her pull the trick on other people.
    In the Harbor Ridge house, we once had a real mouse loose on the lowest of three floors. In the kitchen, I lined up a series of mousetraps in the lid of a box that I could carry to the lower floor, and I baited them with chunks of cheese, one by one.
    Trixie stood at the counter, at my side, interested in my task but drawn also by the aroma of Velveeta. Five times, as I carefully put down a set trap, it sprang, flipping into the air with a hard snap, which caused Trixie to twitch but didn’t frighten her into flight. The sprung traps castbits of