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insufficiently satisfying for her to have reduced Zajac’s time with their son to a mere two days and three nights every month. And so, thinking she’d found a way to further poison their time together, she final y got Rudy a dog.

    “You’l have to keep it at your father’s, though,” she told the six-year-old. “It can’t stay here.”
    The mutt, which came from some humane-society sort of place, was generously referred to as “part Lab.” Would that be the black part? Zajac wondered. The dog was a spayed female, about two years old, with an anxious, craven face and a squatter, bulkier body than that of a Labrador retriever. There was something houndlike about the way her upper lips were floppy and overhung her lower jaw; her forehead, which was more brown than black, was wrinkled by a constant frown. The dog walked with her nose to the ground, often stepping on her ears, and with her stout tail twitching like a pointer’s. (Hildred had got her in the hope that the abandoned mutt was a bird dog.)
    “Medea wil be put to death if we don’t keep her, Dad,”
    Rudy solemnly told his father.
    “Medea,” Zajac repeated.
    In veterinary terms, Medea suffered from “dietary indiscretion”; she ate sticks, shoes, rocks, paper, metal, plastic, tennis bal s, children’s toys, and her own feces. (Her so-cal ed dietary indiscretion was definitely part Lab.) Her zeal for eating dogshit, not only her own, was what had prompted her former family to abandon her.
    Hildred had outdone herself in finding a dog on death row with habits that seemed certain to make her ex-husband insane, or more insane. That Medea was named for a classical sorceress who kil ed her own children was too perfect. Had the voracious part-Lab had puppies, she would have eaten them. What a horror it was for Hildred to discover that Dr. Zajac loved the dog. Medea searched for dogshit as assiduously as he did—they were kindred souls
    —and now Rudy had a dog to play with, which made him happier to see his father. Dr. Nicholas M. Zajac may have been a hand surgeon to the stars, but he was first and foremost a divorced dad. It would be initial y her tragedy and then her triumph that Irma was moved by Dr. Zajac’s love for his son. Her own father had left her mother before she was born, and he’d not troubled himself to have any relationship with Irma or her sisters.
    One Monday morning after Rudy had gone back to his mother, Irma began her workday by attempting to clean the boy’s room. For the three weeks that he was gone, the six-year-old’s room was kept as tidy as a shrine; in practice, it was a shrine, and Zajac could often be found sitting worshipful y there. The morose dog was also drawn to Rudy’s room. Medea appeared to miss Rudy as much as Zajac did.
    This morning, however, Irma was surprised to find Dr. Zajac asleep, naked, in his departed son’s bed. The doctor’s legs overhung the foot of the bed, and he had flung the bedcovers off; no doubt the heat of the sixty-pound dog was sufficient. Medea lay chest-to-chest with the hand surgeon, her muzzle at his throat, a paw caressing the sleeping doctor’s bare shoulder.
    Irma stared. She’d never before had such an uninterrupted look at a naked man. The former midfielder was more puzzled than insulted that women were not drawn to his superb fitness, but while he was by no means an unattractive man, his utter craziness was as visible as his skeleton. (This was less apparent when Zajac was asleep.) The transplant-driven surgeon was both mocked and envied by his col eagues. He ran obsessively, he ate almost nothing, he was a bird nut newly enamored of the dietary indiscretion of an exceedingly neurotic dog. He was also driven by the unchecked agony he felt for a son he hardly ever saw. Yet what Irma now perceived in Dr. Zajac overrode al this. She suddenly recognized the heroic love he bore for the child, a love shared by both man and dog.
    (In her newfound weakness, Irma was also moved by