“I want to be clear about these,” she told us. “They’ll improve her quality of life, but they will also probably shorten her life.” She paused. “Certainly shorten it. Don’t come to me when she’s dead and say I didn’t tell you that.”
“How long will they help?” I asked.
“They may not help at all. I told you, they’re experimental. I only have them because they were left over after Dr. Petrie finished a clinical trial. For which he was well paid, I might add—not that I saw any. If they do help, Radar here might get a good month. Maybe two. Probably not three. She won’t exactly feel like a puppy again, but she’ll be better. Then one day…” She shrugged, squatted, and stroked Radar’s skinny side. Rades thumped her tail. “Then one day she’ll be gone. If she’s still around at Halloween, I’d be very surprised.”
I didn’t know what to say, but Mr. Bowditch did, and Radar was his dog. “Good enough.” Then he added something I didn’t understand then but do now: “Long enough. Maybe.”
When the woman was gone （two hundred dollars to the good）， Mr. Bowditch crutched over and stroked his dog. When he looked back at me, he was wearing a small, crooked smile. “No one in authority’s going to arrest us for trafficking in illegal dog medicine, are they?”
“Doubt it,” I said. There would be a lot more trouble about the gold, if anyone found out about it. “Glad you made the call. I wouldn’t have been able to decide.”
“Hobson’s Choice.” He was still stroking Radar, long glides of his hand from nape to tail. “In the end, it seems to me that one or two good months are better than six bad ones. If it works at all, that is.”
It did work. Radar began to eat all of her chow again, and she could make it up the porch steps （sometimes with a little help from me）。 Best of all, she was good for a few games of chase-the-monkey-and-make-him-squeak at night. Still, I never expected her to outlive Mr. Bowditch, but she did.
7
Then came what the poets and musicians call a caesura. Radar continued to… well, not improve, I couldn’t call it that, but to seem more like the dog I met on the day Mr. Bowditch fell off the ladder （although in the mornings she still struggled to get up from her rug and go to her food dish）。 Mr. Bowditch did improve. He cut back on the Oxy and swapped the single armlet crutch he’d been using since August for a cane he found in a corner of the basement. Down there he was once more working on his jigsaw puzzle. I went to school, I spent time with my dad, I spent even more at 1 Sycamore Street. The Hedgehogs football team started the season 0–3, and my former teammates quit speaking to me. This was a bummer, but I had too much on my mind to let it get me down. Oh, and on several occasions—usually while Mr. Bowditch was napping on the roll-out couch, which he was still using to be close to Radar—I opened the safe and plunged my hands into that bucket of gold. Feeling the always surprising weight of it and letting the pellets run through my fingers in little streamlets. At those times I thought of Mr. Bowditch talking about the fascination of gold. I meditated on it, you could say. Melissa Wilcox now only came twice a week, and she marveled at Mr. Bowditch’s progress. She told him Dr. Patterson, the oncologist, wanted to see him and Mr. Bowditch refused, saying he felt fine. I took him at his word, not because I believed him but because I wanted to. What I know now is that it isn’t just patients who go into denial.
A quiet time. A caesura. Then everything happened almost at once, and none of it was good.
8
I had a free period before lunch and usually took it in the library, where I might do homework or read one of Mr. Bowditch’s gaudy paperbacks. On that late September day I was deep into The Name of the Game Is Death, by Dan J. Marlowe, which was splendidly bloody. At quarter to twelve I decided to save the climax for a binge-read that evening, and grabbed a newspaper at random. There are computers in the library, but all the papers are paywalled. Besides, I liked the idea of reading the news in an actual newspaper; it felt charmingly retro.
I might have picked the New York Times or the Chicago Tribune and missed the story entirely, but the paper on top of the stack was the Elgin Daily Herald and that was the one I took. The big stories on the front page were about Obama wanting to take military action in Syria and a mass shooting in D.C. that left thirteen dead. I scanned them, checked the clock—ten minutes to lunch—and riffled through the pages on my way to the comics. I never made it that far. A story on the second page of the Area News section stopped me. And I mean cold.