think the old coot would spend a few bucks and buy cans with lids that fit. The ones he hangs onto are a lunch invitation to coons and every other passing animal.'

    'Grail ate the trash already. Now he's run off to the woods.' The unspoken question dangled - should Lynn abandon the mutt and drive to the hospital, or embark on a cross-country bushwhack?

    'You'd better find him, I suppose.' In the background, over the faintly heard tones of a nurse and a doctor conversing, Ann said, 'Just a minute.' A muffled roar as her hand smothered the receiver. She came back, tiredly resigned. 'There's little enough to do here, anyway.'

    'Hang on,' said Lynn. 'I'11 join you soon as I can.' She dropped the receiver in its cradle, swearing like a sailor, because at that moment she hated life. She ached from sad certainty that Ann wanted her off to find the dog because even now she held out for a miracle. Outraged motherhood would not accept that Sandy's final hour must happen soon. He would not wake up, recover, and come home; but as long as life still lingered, it was unthinkable to Ann not to have a dog waiting, to bark and lick Sandy's hands in greeting.

    'Damn, damn, damn,' said Lynn, her eyes now dry to her fury, and her insides clenched in misery. 'There ought to be a law against mothers outliving their children.'

    But there was no law, beyond the one outside the window, in cycles eternally unaffected. Nature wove all of spring's fabric of rebirth, in the flight of nesting barn swallows, and in the sunlight falling immutably gold over maples crowned with unfolded leaves.

    Lynn shoved up from the desk, returned to the kitchen, and dug through the clutter of children's drawings and coupons for the spare ring of keys. She locked up a house made cozy for living, but that echoed empty as a tomb. She slammed the door, set the dead bolt, and crossed the back yard to the woods in a blaze of targetless anger.

For Ann, and for Sandy's memory, she'd find the blasted dog. Grail was the sort who tore up great grouts of earth with his hind feet just after he defecated. Assuredly no tracker, Lynn nonetheless could not miss the divots chopped out of the grass and raked in showers across the patio as evidence of Grail's blithe passage. A smeared print or two remained in the mud by the swing-set; these pointed unerringly into the shade, and should have been

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