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said, pulling her foot away. He moved on to the other. His tongue, like dewy pear skin, tickled. “You crazy dog,” she said, her voiced lilted with squelched laughter. She swished her long skirt to shoo him off, but he paid her no mind, his tail wagging from beneath the floral print. “You don’t know where those feet have been, Cricket.”
    Upon hearing his name, he lay down and inclined his head up to her, one fuzzy ear dangling to the dirt. She pulled the ear up and scratched behind it.
    â€œCricket,” she whispered again, and it seemed to fit. His dark eyes searched her face. An old soul within.
    Eden had never had a pet as a child. Her mother didn’t want to clean up after one. Her father said he would love a dog but they were so frequently traveling, it wasn’t practical. “We’d have to kennel it for weeks at a time, and that’s not fair, right?” he’d argued.
    Even then, Eden recognized the irony. They didn’t blink at boarding their children at sleepaway camps for the same amount of time.
    The closest thing she’d had to a pet was the brown Tenderheart Care Bear she pretended was a dog when she was six years old. She fed him bowls of rock candy, brushed his fur with her hairbrush, let him sleep on her pillow, and took him with her everywhere her parents left her. Then one day she made the mistake of taking TCB on the Slip ’N Slide. His cotton body absorbed the water, grew fat and sodden, then rotted from the inside out. Her mother threw the doll away while Eden was at her weekly piano lesson. It was like losing the closest friend she’d ever known. Denny wouldn’t come along for another three years. She wondered if the owner of the doll’s head carried a similar memory of loss.
    â€œI promised your husband I’d feed him,” said Cleo, “but looking through your pantry, there isn’t even a macaroni.” She shot Cricket a look of dramatic pity, which put Eden on the defensive.
    What was she doing going through their kitchen? Jack had paid her to take care of the dog,
not
to nose around. She huffed, but Cleo took no notice.
    â€œWe only got cat food,” she went on, “and he doesn’t seem to take to it, so either you give me money to buy dog stuff at Milton’s Market or you need to get some.” Cleo plucked a purple clover by her ankle. The color nearly matched her eyes.
    She was a pretty kid, if sassy, thought Eden. There was a rawness about her: unspoiled produce in Mother Nature’s basket. Eden couldn’t remember how it felt to be that bud-young.
    A bee landed on the tip of a basil bloom, and Cricket sniffed it.
    â€œWatch out,” Eden said. “That’ll sting you.” The dog opened his mouth as if to taste the stem.
    In one motion, she swept the pup up. He was light as her childhood teddy bear, the bones of his rib cage thinner than her fingers beneath the fluff. He licked the salty night sweat on her wrists and let his body go limp in her arms.
    â€œSo what’s it going to be?” Cleo twirled the clover blossom between her thumb and forefinger. “I have to go to the bank on Main at lunchtime. Milton’s is there. I can stop.”
    It wasn’t a bad idea. Even if Cricket wasn’t staying, Eden couldn’t starve the poor animal, and she couldn’t blame him for rejecting that god-awful cat food.
    â€œOkay,” she said and carried the pup back into the house with Cleo at her heels.
    She wasn’t sure where her purse was but remembered a crumpled twenty-dollar bill she’d found in Jack’s trouser pocket the last time she’d bothered to do the wash. She went to the catchall basket in the laundry room just off the kitchen, fishing one-handed through the loose change, sticks of metallic-wrapped gum bent to odd shapes, crumpled takeout recipes, and a half-eaten Tums peppermint roll until she found the money.
    â€œHere you go,” she