Page 130 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

Then he dropped the branch and lunged at me.

Not aggressively, of course. Joyfully. A play tackle from a seventy-pound dog who had apparently decided my dignity needed to be knocked down a peg. I caught him around the shoulders as he crashed into my legs, and we both went down onto the grass.

Quinn made a sound halfway between a laugh and a gasp. “Oh my god.”

Max stood over me, panting triumphantly.

I looked up at the sky through moving leaves and found myself laughing hard.

The sound seemed to surprise Quinn as much as it surprised me. When I turned my head, she was staring at me, her face so open, the world seemed to stop around us.

Then Max licked my chin, restoring my perspective.

“Absolutely not,” I said, turning my face away.

Quinn dissolved into laughter again.

Max, having established dominance over a dragon, trotted back toward the water bowl.

I sat up, grass clinging to my sleeves. “He has poor sportsmanship.”

Quinn wiped at her eyes, still laughing. “That was affection.”

I brushed grass from my sleeve and stood, aware that my shirt had pulled loose at one side and my hair was no longer as it had been when we arrived.

Quinn glanced at me for one second too long, then turned decisively toward the basket. “Food?”

“Subtle.”

“No,” she said. “But effective.”

We ate sitting in the grass near the stone wall, Max lying in the shade between us, one paw touching Quinn’s ankle and his eyes half closed. The conversation came more easily there. Perhaps because the air was clean. Perhaps because the dog’s happiness had made a quiet treaty between us.

Quinn told me about Avery Teddington’s townhouse and the absurdity and generosity of rehabilitation dogs occupying real estate worth more than several law degrees. She spoke of her friend with affection threaded through exasperation: the buzz cut, the bluntness, the way she pretended supplies for Max were “extras” when both of them knew she ordered them deliberately.

“She sounds like a loyal friend,” I said.

“She is. Aggressively. She once threatened to fight a delivery guy because he called Max ‘old boy’ in a tone she didn’t like.”

“Did she fight him?”

“No. I distracted her with a Malinois emergency.”

“Those occur often?”

“At Avery’s? Hourly.”

I told her more about my parents than I intended. Not the worst of the Fog. Not the private griefs that belonged to my mother. But I told her about the terrace we had altered so she could walk without fear, the phonograph, the way my father moved through rooms ahead of her to remove anything that might catch her foot or unsettle her before she reached it.

Quinn listened without the anxious softness people often adopted around illness. She didn’t make sorrow the center of the conversation, though she honored it. She asked about my mother’s tea, her music, and whether she liked dogs.

“She likes dogs,” I said. “When she remembers they are dogs.”

Quinn nodded. “Max is flexible about identity.”

I smiled. “I think she would like him.”

Quinn looked down at Max, then back at the field. “I think he’d like her.”