Chapter 14: Dress Rehearsal

On Wednesday evening I graded Gerald with a pencil, on a clipboard, in my own backyard.

The Animal Services officer had emailed me the real checklist, five tests on one page, with a box beside each.

I had printed it twice. Silvan had read his copy so hard that he had folded it into a fan.

"Test one," I said. "A stranger approaches the dog and pets him."

Dina stood by my back fence in a floppy straw hat and sunglasses.

She had turned up an hour early and asked to be the stranger, and she had not mentioned Camille's office once.

"I'm a stranger," Dina said, deepening her voice. "Nobody knows me."

"Everybody knows you," I said. "You're in the hat."

"I'm a stranger in a hat."

She walked toward Gerald with her hand out, stiffly.

Gerald saw her, understood that she was a person, and leaned his whole eighty-eight pounds into her legs.

Dina sat down in the flowerbed with a small cry and a Doberman across her lap.

He licked her sunglasses off and wagged.

"Jumped on a stranger," I read off the clipboard. "Automatic fail."

"He didn't jump," Silvan said. "He leaned."

"The form has no box for leaning."

"Then the form is wrong."

Dina's phone had slid out of her pocket into the dirt. She snatched it up and put it away without filming a thing, and I watched her do it.

Dina had filmed my sourdough starter's birthday, a fire drill and a raccoon in my hedge.

I put that on the shelf with the rest.

"Test two," I said. "Food. I take the dinner bowl away while he's eating."

Silvan set down a bowl of steak cubes. Gerald dropped into a sit, vibrating, and waited to be told.

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