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“Like what?” Stephen asked.

“Well, she said medicate him every morning at seven. And he takes some other kind of medicine on his food, so he has to eat then, too. And we can't just feed him and not the other dogs. G.Q. and Rufus will have to eat then. Some mornings I've already left for Tufts by seven.”

“We could take turns,” Stephen suggested.

“But that's early for you. It's hard for you to get up and off to school. I'm not sure it would be fair to ask you to do that.”

“They're probably going to kill him if we don't take him.”

“True.”

“And I'll be away now and then … I have some readings next term. One's in California. What if he's having seizures?”

“I could take care of him. Mom, listen. Let's do a trial. Let's say we'll try it with this dog. Two months. Let's say a two-month trial. In that time we'll learn what to do. We'll teach each other. If it's just too hard, we'll find him another home. I'm willing to try if you are.”

“It's crazy,” I said.

“Kinda.”

“A third dog?”

“I know!”

“With epilepsy.”

“Fits!”

“Fits, as in Hey, kid, you're a step ahead of a fit!”

“Named Buster.”

“Who likes to play with balls.”

“Get the ball, Buster!”

“Get it? Get the ball-buster!”

It's a cool, drizzly fall day and the 7-Eleven is busy as a car pulls up, the driver scanning the parking lot where I wait, a brindle bulldog hanging eagerly out the window. I wave and the woman stops her car and nearly runs to the passenger side. She leads Buster on a leash toward me.

“Are you Deborah?” she asks, thrusting the leash in my hand.

“This is Buster. Say hello, Buster! Now you hold him while I get his meds.”

I kneel in front of the dog, his beautiful bulldog's face—not quite as flat as G.Q.'s—thrust into mine. He is also somewhat taller, a lighter golden brindle, more sleek, as if he might be part boxer. We smell each other. He licks my face as I hug him.

“Buster,” I say. “Hello, Buster.”

“Here.” The woman hands me a plastic bag full of meds. “The instructions are on the bottles. A Valium in the morning at seven, and one at seven in the evening. Feed him twice a day at those times and put a capful of the potassium bromide on his food.”

“Do you have his records? His shots and stuff?”

“I'll send them. Okay? I forgot them.”

The woman bends briefly to pet Buster on the head. “ ‘Bye, Buster,” she says. “She'll take good care of you.”

Some years later, the morning following his death, while I'm digging Buster's grave, digging a deep, fine hole back near the woods in which I set down pictures of us, Buster's basketball, and a couple of Valium for the afterlife, not without popping a few myself, I'll remember the day I met Buster the bulldog at a 7-Eleven in New Hampshire, and fell in love.

As I struggle against tree roots, the mossy black soil, I'm thinking how from the day I brought him home to Amherst Stephen and I came to love this dog.

We loved him ridiculously, without self-consciousness, as did the other dogs and cats of our household. Our cats came to greet Buster as they greeted us, rubbing against him and purring. They curled up next to him on my bed. After a while Rufus and G.Q. allowed such greetings and sleeping arrangements since Buster had shown them the way.

“He's our Vergil,” Stephen once said.

During his seizures we learned to hold him while he frothed at the mouth, lost control of his bladder and his bowels. And then, covered in slobber, urine, and feces, we helped him to his feet as he recovered, praising him, offering him meds in a hot dog, the water he so badly needed after an episode, washing him down with warm towels before we washed ourselves.

Often Buster would begin a cluster of seizures during the night. I'd be awakened as the bed in which both of us slept began to vibrate, Buster rigid, rising toward something, his eyes fixed on the ceiling as if someone were calling his name, or he envisioned a ball being held up just out of his grasp. Then he would fall into a seizure, flailing, arcing his back as he rolled and wheezed and panted.

Stephen, who