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snort. “If a penis bangs around inside you like a clanger in a bell, I say why bother.”
    Eventually I would have to break it off with the guy because I couldn’t help grimacing whenever I looked at his hands. Needless to say, if I liked someone, I generally kept them far, far away from my sister.
    It had never mattered before. It shouldn’t have mattered then since I barely knew Sandy Portman. But already I knew I wanted more from him.
    “I accept,” I said after we finished eating.
    “Accept?”
    “Your dare.”
    His hazel eyes darkened and he reached for me. I nearly let him stay and finish what we had started on the kitchen counter. Instead, I shoved a paper bag of cinnamon rolls into his hand and pushed him out the door.
    *   *   *
    For hours after that early morning call from my parents-in-law, I existed in a state of numb disbelief.
    Sandy couldn’t be gone.
    I washed his clothes. I ironed his crisp button-down shirts that didn’t need ironing. Somehow it seemed that doing perfect housewife things would make him come home.
    At some point, less than twenty-four hours after the call, my mother-in-law arrived and informed me that the funeral was to occur the following Friday at St. Thomas Church on Fifth Avenue. I couldn’t quite absorb the insult or implications of her making the arrangements. Instead, when she told me, I had to swallow back a laugh—or was it a choke? I didn’t believe any of it. None of this could be happening. I couldn’t be a widow. Widows wore support hose and had gray hair. Or if they were lucky, they had laugh lines around their eyes from long years living with a man who made them smile. At any second I would wake up and Sandy would be at the breakfast table eating what he always ate. One soft-boiled egg. Two slices of nine-grain bread with red currant jam. Grapefruit juice and Elijah’s Blend coffee. All from the Fairway market. Why didn’t his mother know that?
    Althea Portman looked at me oddly then left.
    On the Monday before the service, three days after the accident, I made Sandy’s breakfast without thinking. The surprise of seeing the meal sitting on the kitchen table brought me up short, and I backed into the wall. Without throwing it away or cleaning anything up, I dressed and hurried to my midtown office with its fax machines and break rooms where I couldn’t fall into the trap of expecting to find Sandy.
    I threw myself into a manuscript that was a mess, losing myself to the disconnected sentences and half-formed truths, anything that would consume my mind. At the end of the day, instead of going home, I went to the animal clinic where I volunteered. I was Emily Barlow. Strong, practical. I dealt with impossible situations. I could do this, I told myself. If nothing else, I was my mother’s daughter.
    When I walked into the clinic, I sensed something before I understood what it was. I should have been surprised when I found the white wiry dog on the verge of death, covered in tubes and bandages, but I wasn’t. The staff said they had found him in the street out front, clearly a stray that had been hit by a car and left for dead. They had done what they could to revive him. Nothing had helped.
    “Einstein.”
    I named him without thinking, gently running my palm over the tufts of white wiry fur that stood up on his head and I knew that I had to save the animal, as if by doing so I could save my husband. Not that I actually put this into words, or even fully formed the concept in my head. I just knew I had to save the dog. For reasons I couldn’t explain, I couldn’t lose Einstein.
    I paid for expensive surgeries with money I couldn’t afford to spend, praying for him to come out of the coma. When the vet had done all that he could, I sat with Einstein, waiting, stroking his fur. “Hang in there,” I whispered. “I need you to not die.”
    They say that coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous. But sometimes he opens his palm and hands us a