Spencerville

when he’ll be home, he always shows up a few hours earlier, like he expects to find me in bed with the milkman or something.”
    “How about a farmer? Let’s go to your house and give him something to get annoyed about.”
    Again she suppressed a smile, then said, “I just stopped by to see you before you left, and I wanted you to meet Denise.”
    “Who?”
    She called out to the dog, who came running, licked Annie’s hand, then sniffed at Keith and put her paws on his knee. Keith knelt down and played with the dog, who was friendly and who looked like a wire-haired terrier.
    Annie watched a moment, then asked, “Do you remember?”
    He looked at her, obviously not remembering.
    She said, “This is actually Denise number four.”
    Then it came back to him—he had given her a mongrel puppy in the summer of ’63, and they’d named her Denise after the Randy and the Rainbow’s hit song of that summer. He stood and looked at Annie. “This is…?”
    “This is Denise’s great-granddaughter. Denise died about 1973, but I’d kept one of her pups and named her Denise Two, then
she
had a litter, and so on… I… it was just sort of a connection, I guess… really sentimental and silly… you know how us country girls are…” She looked at the dog, who was pulling on Keith’s shoelaces, then at Keith, and she said, “A dog’s life is short, but… they don’t make problems for themselves.”
    Keith contemplated the dog awhile, realizing that this dog represented an incredible display of love and loyalty, faith and remembrance over the years. “I can’t believe you did that.”
    “I didn’t have much else…” She tried to smile and said, “If only Cliff knew… he has dogs of his own, but this one is mine, and this one
hates
him. In fact, they all hated him. Old Denise bit him once.” She laughed.
    “The dogs all had good judgment.”
    She smiled again. “He asked me once where I’d gotten Denise, and I told him my guardian angel gave her to me.”
    Keith nodded but didn’t reply. The dog bolted off in chase of something she smelled or heard near the barn, and as Keith watched, a flood of memories came back to him, and he couldn’t trust himself to speak.
    He recalled the day when he’d first noticed Annie Prentis in school, then remembered the summer they’d begun courting, the long walks, sitting with her family on their porch, ice cream sodas in town, holding hands in the movies, the feel of her skin and hair, the smell of her, the first kiss. The sexual tension had almost driven him out of his mind, and in those days the chances of actually doing it were somewhere between nil and zero. Yet, one night, when her family was out of the house and he’d come over, they sat on the porch together, and she said almost nothing for about half an hour. At first he was annoyed at her distraction, then somehow, in some manner that to this day he didn’t quite understand, without a word or a touch or an obvious look, she let him know she wanted to have sex. He recalled being so frightened by the thought that he almost went home. But he didn’t, and he’d said to her, “Let’s go to your room.” His world and his life were never the same after that night.
    He recalled, too, his decision to take a puppy from a friend’s litter and give it to her a few days afterward. He didn’t know about flowers after sex then, and since then his gifts to women had been more substantial, as had his gifts from women. But the puppy was the first thing he’d ever given to a girl, and more important, what she’d given to him—herself—was as good a gift as he’d ever gotten.
    He said, “You never wrote to me about Denise.”
    “I was… I couldn’t think of a way to mention Denise without sounding like I was being soppy and lovesick.” She took a breath and looked at him in the fading light. “So… these dogs were a daily reminder of you.” She smiled. “Are you insulted?”
    “No, I’m speechless.”
    “I’m too sentimental for my own good… I’ll tell you another secret—at my sister’s house I have a trunk full of Keith Landry… love letters, prom photos, our high school and college yearbooks… valentines, birthday cards, a teddy bear… I had some other things, too, and I was stupid enough to keep them with me when I got married. He found the box of things—no letters or photos or anything like that, but little gifts and souvenirs that you’d bought me, and I guess he figured they