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border collie-German shepherd mix, my dog terrorizes most people, but when Karl’s white pickup pulls into my driveway, Bobby’s tail wags hard, his tongue lolls, his lips curl into a goofy smile. Just this morning, Bobby strained at his leash, attempting to get to the passenger’s seat of Karl’s truck. Bobby wanted to lick Karl’s face, his hand, his boots.
    But when Karl flicked a cigarette lighter at him and told him to go lay down, Bobby, in a fit of obedience quite unlike him, obeyed. Bobby’s enthusiasm for this man irritates me. Because Karl Bennett is my ex-husband, my dog’s attitude seems disloyal.

     
     
     
     
    K arl Bennett isn’t tall. He stands about five-feet-seven; his chest is broad; his hair, once dark, is now a wispy gray. He’s a sweet-looking guy, handsome, with green eyes and bushy eyebrows and a neatly trimmed moustache. During hunting season, he grows a beard.
    Karl Bennett doesn’t like to see people cooing at their dogs or murmuring sweet nothings into their floppy ears. When he pets my dog, Karl extends one finger and touches, just barely, along the top of Bobby’s head. Karl doesn’t like for people to sleep with their dogs. He doesn’t like knowing we put our cereal bowls or dinner plates on the floor so our dogs can lap up the remaining milk or tongue off the bit of mashed potatoes and gravy we saved just for them. Karl Bennett doesn’t like dogs in the house, period.
    When I want to annoy him, I tell Karl that I fried up four eggs for breakfast: two for me, two for Bobby. When I want to disgust him, I tell him how I believe Bobby’s emotional problems stem from his being taken from his mama at too young an age. “Bobby suffers from separation anxiety,” I say.
    When I’m really looking to get on Karl’s nerves, I coo at my dog, asking him does he love his uncle Karl. “You’re simple,” Karl says. “You’re simple in the head.”
    There are other things Karl doesn’t like. Angela Lansbury is one. For reasons he cannot explain, Karl intensely dislikes Angela Lansbury. If he hears her voice or even a voice that sounds like hers on television, he changes the channel. Karl doesn’t much care for Hillary Clinton, either, but he believes the reasons for this should be obvious, and thus require no explanation.
    More than once, Karl Bennett has informed me that he doesn’t hate women. He may believe that women can be spiteful, yes, and they can also be sneaky and shrill. According to Karl Bennett, women are frequently impulsive, manipulative, underhanded, untrustworthy, fickle, impossible to please, confusing on purpose, and full of contradictions, but he doesn’t hate women.
    “Quit asking me if I hate women,” he says.
    When he was seventeen years old, Karl Bennett lost his virginity to a gorilla girl. It happened the summer he spent working the saltwater-taffy booth with the traveling carnival, and since then women have played an important role in his life. Karl Bennett has found jobs and quit jobs because of a woman, he’s built houses and bought houses and sold houses because of a woman. He’s started his life over from scratch, and he’s made and kept promises, and more than once, because of a woman, Karl Bennett has been disappointed, despairing, heartsick.
    He’s been married three times to three different women, and he has three children, a daughter and two sons, nineteen years separating the oldest from the youngest.
    Though his freezer is full of elk and mule deer, Karl does, on occasion, have salted peanuts for supper. Sometimes, he’ll pull open a tin of sardines. Sometimes, you can talk him into turning down the television and playing a hand of rummy. Karl has just turned fifty-three, and the last few years have been the longest stretch he’s ever lived alone. He says he’s come to prefer it.
    Karl Bennett can’t hold his liquor. Scotch makes him mean. He faints at the sight of his own blood. He’s never surfed the Internet and he doesn’t own a