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always have lunch with Carol?” was the answer he gave even as he saw Phoebe ask the waiter, please, could he make a doggie bag?
    Now Ned put the desserts out on separate plates. “We could do this for dinner.”
    “I don’t have anything else in mind,” Isabel said.
    So they drank red wine and shared the carrot cake—“So good,” Isabel said—and she came around the table and kneaded Ned’s shoulders.
    Her being nice made Ned feel guilty about seeing Phoebe—God knows, not Carol—but when he remembered the blind shih tzu and the fact of Isabel’s touching him after cold dinners, no dinners, silence and silence, it annoyed him.
    “Thank you for letting me foster this dog,” she said, and she kissed his cheek.
    “Do I have a choice?”
    “You sound tired.”
    “I am.”
    Her joyless “All righty.”
    “What is it now, Isabel? Huh?”
    The grunting of the disgruntled; they’re both too tired to fight.
    Later, they lay in bed listening to the dog’s wheezy breathing. “Will you help me?” she asked. “If we could just do this one thing together, I think. . . .”
    He could hear in her voice that she was as lonely as he was, but for answer he could only say her name, “Isabel”—an equivocal answer at best.
    *
    Ned saw the dead eye, a pink glistening marble, and the other an otherworldly blue, cataracted, scratched. The dog was in pain and made the most tormented cries. The head doctor whose name came first on the board though he wore blue jeans and a checked shirt and eschewed a white coat, the head vet came in to see if the younger vet attending the dog, a pale girl with a tiny face and enormous eyebrows, had applied a topical anesthetic. Ned didn’t understand her answer, but he liked the skinny boy in the green outfit, even though the green outfit suggested he was only a helper, an assistant—not a real vet. The head vet looked as if he should be fishing whereas the helper was doing the difficult work. He was holding the dog, and over its screams he was joshing, calling the dog “BK,” an upbeat endearment, a twist on Brooklyn, the name the pound had given this desolate being because the blind shih tzu had been found in Brooklyn on Neptune Avenue, a stray.
    Then the girl vet poked out pellets of impacted crap, which explained the dog’s great thirst. Unplugged, BK wagged his tail for the first time since Ned had known him.
    But a week later, the vet informed them that BK’s blood indicated the start of kidney failure. More tests were necessary. And the very next morning, Isabel carried BK back to the vet where she was given new pills for the dog on top of the other, and Puralube ointment, an ocular lubricant for the cataracted eye. In the loft BK mostly slept.
    “Peanut butter,” Ned said, and he proffered the dog a dollop of Jif stuck with pills and in this way learned how easy it was to give BK his medicine.
    “What next?” he asked.
    “I think the dog is deaf.”
    “Why?”
    “Maybe dim then.”
    “Maybe.”
    “No, deaf.” And she lifted him, a soft sack of something living—(Ned saw the dog’s face only once; full side, eye open, the opalescent, not the red.) Isabel set the dog to stand on the floor and turned him to face the wall, which he did in a sweet dumb trance that wasn’t broken by the sound of the vacuum or tin bowls banged together. BK didn’t hear; the dog didn’t turn around.
    The dog died, he crossed the Rainbow Bridge, but before that, Ned took him every day for a week to the vet’s in a precautionary manner; hopeful—well, and desirous of the veterinarians’ company, especially the boy in the green operating duds although the boy really wasn’t a boy, only his sweet exuberance marked him as a boy.
    “It looks to me as if you’d owned that dog for years,” the boy had said that first visit.
    Ned liked the boy but the vet’s office was dirty and preposterously small. The two examining rooms were the size of a closet. In one, another young assistant—in