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stared at him vacantly, that was a cue to play fetch, not to comfort me. Solo had bonded even
more with David while I flew from coast to coast. While Solo's so-called obedience training
might have suffered slightly in my absence, he and Megan were now compatriots. They spent
their time on a Kabuki-theater version of dog play: all performance, dance, and tease. Megan
didn't believe in contact sports. In my absence, she had trained Solo to interact in a way I
couldn't have imagined him capable of with another dog: playful, subtle, light on his feet.
He still swaggered, but he had developed a sense of humor with her. He needed more time
outside, where he could run and sniff and not be in my face. With me, he thought contact
sport was required.
I thought about the options. I could continue to mope. Or I could call Nancy Hook. I
called Nancy. Parents' deaths create a void, she said. No matter what you thought of them.
And you really liked your father. Come on out and bring Solo to train. So I did.
I had missed an entire season at Nancy's farm in Zebulon. I left while it wore the tans
and grays and browns of early winter, though undershoots of brightness lurk year-round
in North Carolina. Nancy had exchanged her winter Carhartts for lighter camouflage-green
pants stuffed into tall rubber boots. Her blond-red hair was stuffed under a baseball cap
instead of a wool knit cap. She had become one of my measuring tools of normalcy—her
laughter, her ease in the world, her ability to be simultaneously direct and comforting. Her
ability to slap me upside the head without it hurting too much. She was sane, and her sanity
infected me.
A well-meaning friend asked me, “Are you grieving properly?” Probably not. It was hard to
grieve in the middle of a soft Carolina April, walking through muddy chartreuse fields filled
with mist and cow pies. And cows. It was hard to grieve when I had to watch my feet and
control Solo, keeping him away from Whiskey's fence, from the chickens doing their herky-
jerk insect dance in the yard, from Rocky, Nancy's Morgan horse who didn't suffer dog fools
gladly, from the Herefords looking doleful, then dour.
“Get that high, panicky tone out of your voice,” Nancy told me as Solo started lowering
his body toward the ground and giving the eye, preparing to stalk the mama cows with their
new calves. I dialed it down a notch and used my low big-girl voice. It worked. Solo reluct-
antly swung back toward me, and I hitched him up until we got farther from the cows, and
I could free him. He wanted to make clear that he was the winner of the dog-cow debate,
so he sauntered over to lift his leg on an electric fence before he started his search. We could
hear the
bzzt
of electricity from twenty yards away. He didn't flinch. That, Nancy told me, is
exactly what you want in a cadaver dog. If he could ignore that jolt, in that part of his ana-
tomy, nothing would shut him down.
I didn't shut down, either. I trained Solo several times a week. I found new places to train.
At our local feed-and-seed warehouse, where pigeon poop and running mice distracted Solo
