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human-animal bond is so important in this stressful world.”
    After that, Arthur approached Mrs. Theodorus and said, “I might be interested in a puppy. Since Claire passed on—”
    â€œI know, I know,” she said. “Come tomorrow, in the afternoon.”
    He drove through a rainstorm. Mrs. Theodorus lived in a small, sleek, cobalt-blue house in a neighborhood where the streets flounced into cul-de-sacs and children played capture the flag with unusual viciousness. The puppies stared up at him from theirkitchen enclosure, mewing and rubbing against one another, vying for his attention. “This little girl is the one for you,” Mrs. Theodorus said, and he was amazed that she could tell them apart. “Look at this.” She pried the puppy’s mouth open, revealing young fangs.
    â€œLooks okay,” Arthur said.
    â€œCan’t you tell?” said Mrs. Theodorus. “Her bite’s off. She’ll never show. A pity, because her coat’s really good, almost as good as Alicia’s was, and she’s got the best bone structure of any of them.”
    â€œWe had a dog once, a Yorkie,” Arthur said. “She died when my oldest daughter was twelve. Just went to sleep and never woke up.”
    â€œOh, I can’t talk about the death of dogs right now,” Mrs. Theodorus said.
    He took the puppy home with him that day. Claire had been gone a week, and still he was finding things he could not bear—today it was a half-finished
New York Times
acrostic puzzle. It was three weeks old. Already her handwriting was shaky. Did she have any idea then, he wondered, that the rash creeping over her skin, that unbearable itchy rash, was going to kill her? He certainly didn’t. You don’t die from a rash. A rash would have been embarrassing to bring up in group, where hematomas and bone loss were the norm. Claire’s bane, her great guilt, in the group was that she was one of the healthier ones, but she hoped that meant she could help. “What the group does—what we mostly do—is figure out how to help each other,” Arthur remembered Claire saying, as the two of them sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. She had just come back from her second night at group. The third night she didn’t come back until four in the morning, and he went half mad with panic. “We went to the Greek Tycoon’s,” she explained blithely. “Mr. Theodorus bought us all drinks.”
    The fourth night was spouse night, and he went.
    He sat down at the kitchen table with the acrostic and tried to finish it; one of the clues Claire hadn’t been able to get was a river that ran through the Dolomites, and he became obsessed with figuring it out, but as soon as he saw how thick and strong his own handwriting looked in comparison with the jagged, frail letters of Claire’s decline, he laid his head down on the newsprint and wept. The puppy watched him from the corner. When he got up, he used Claire’s last puzzle to line her pen.
    Just before spouse night ends, Kitty Mitsui announces that she and Mike Watkins and Ronni Holtzman will be going to Poncho’s for margaritas and nachos. “It’ll be a good time,” she says halfheartedly. But everyone knows she is fighting a losing battle. Since Mr. Theodorus died the after-group outings have lost their momentum.
    Then, in the group’s golden age, its giddy second childhood, in the reign of Mr. Theodorus, there was wild revelry, screaming laughter in the hospital parking lot, until finally Mrs. Leon, a Mormon, brought up her moral objections at group.
    The next week Mr. Theodorus arrived with a rubber dog’s snout tied over his nose. That was the end of Mrs. Leon, Claire reported afterwards to Arthur, her eyes gleaming. He smiled. It seemed that Claire’s greatest ambition was to be fully accepted into that subgroup of the group which played charades until four in the morning,