He was there when Royce stopped breathing. He knew before I did. He lifted his head and made a sound I had never heard from him before or since, low and long, not a howl exactly. Then he put his head down on the mattress and kept it there until the funeral home came.
So when I tell you he's just a dog, understand that I'm lying.
I sold the old house the following year. It had stairs, and Rook's hips were getting worse, and every room had Royce in it in a way I found I could not live with. I bought a ranch on a slab in Heron Bend, a subdivision of three hundred and twelve homes on the far edge of Tamsen County, built in the early 2000s on what used to be soybean fields. Wide sidewalks, a retention pond the developer had named Heron Lake with a straight face, a clubhouse with a pool, and a homeowners association with a forty-page set of covenants that I read cover to cover, because, as I said, rule follower.
Rook has rules too. He relieves himself in exactly one place in the world: the back left corner of our fenced yard, on command. The command is "Busy." Royce trained it into him because a police dog cannot stop to squat on the shoulder of I-70 during a vehicle search. In the seven years Rook worked and the four since, I am not aware of him ever once going anywhere else. On walks he sniffs, he reads the neighborhood news, he marks a mailbox post with the solemnity of a notary, but that's all. He does his business at home, privately, like a gentleman.
I met Candace Vreeland my second week in Heron Bend. She came to my door with a welcome basket: a potted mum, a box of lemon shortbread, and a three-ring binder containing the covenants, the bylaws, the architectural guidelines, the pool rules, and a laminated map of the neighborhood with the common areas shaded green. She was perhaps fifty-five, slim, very put together, with a blond bob that didn't move in the wind and the kind of white sneakers that have never been near grass. She'd been board president for six years, she told me. She'd been on the board for nine.
Rook came to the door behind me, the way he does, to see who it was.
She took a full step back. Not a polite step. A step that put her heel off the edge of the porch, so that she had to catch herself on the railing. The shortbread box tipped and I caught it.
"Oh," she said. "Oh, he's big."
"He's retired," I said. "He's very well mannered. Rook, down." He lay down on the hall rug and put his chin on his paws and looked at her with his ears back in his most harmless arrangement.
"I'm sure he is," said Candace Vreeland. Her voice had gone a half step higher. Her right hand had moved, I noticed, to cover her left forearm, where there was a pale, shiny, crescent-shaped scar about three inches long, the kind of scar I had stitched more times than I could count. "We have a lot of children in the neighborhood. You'll want to review Section 7. Pet regulations."
"I have," I said. "Twice."