— No, — Eleanor said, taking her change.
June watched her leave. Eleanor did not turn around.
On the bus ride back she held the bag on her lap and counted telephone poles out the window. Then she stopped counting and thought about Daniel. The last time he had called was in January. She remembered because there had been a snowstorm, and she hadn’t found the phone right away under a stack of books. Now it was May. Four months. Eleanor shifted the bag to her other knee.
She had left the door unlocked—that came back to her only once she was already on the bus, and she decided it wasn’t the end of the world. So she wasn’t surprised when she walked into the kitchen and found Frank sitting in her chair by the box. The second pup was in his lap, looking off to the side with the expression of a creature that needed nothing from anyone but didn’t object to being comfortable. Eleanor stopped in the doorway.
— Still kicking, — Frank said without looking up. — Hollered the whole time. Then settled down.
Eleanor took off her coat, hung it on the hook, walked over, and lifted the pup from Frank’s lap. He immediately pushed his nose into her palm.
— Thanks, — she said shortly.
Frank got to his feet with a grunt and stood there a moment by the table. At the door he turned back.
— You ought to call them something, — he said. — “First one” and “second one” sounds like a spreadsheet.
Eleanor said nothing. Frank left. The door shut behind him, and his steps scraped across the yard. Eleanor stood by the box looking at both of them. The first was already squirming, making his demands known. The second sat in her hands and squinted. She looked at them for a long time. Then she opened the notebook to a fresh page and picked up her pen.
The notebook was lying on the edge of the table, and in the morning Eleanor opened it simply to enter the night feedings—and saw it. On the top line of the new page, between the evening entry and the morning one, were two words: “Gray” and “Quiet.” Written in her hand, with her pen, in the same neat script she had used for thirty years keeping books at the local firm.
When she had written them, she didn’t remember. Probably at four in the morning, while holding the syringe and not thinking clearly. Eleanor looked at the two words. Then she picked up the pen and entered the time of the night feeding in the proper column. She did not cross the names out.
Gray, at that very moment, was climbing up the sweater toward the edge of the box with stubborn little snorts, hooking his tiny claws into the knit. Eleanor watched from the corner of her eye. He reached the edge, tipped over it, nearly slid, managed to hold on.
The wooden tool crate was deeper than the cardboard box. She had brought it in from the shed two days earlier and lined it with an old quilted work jacket. She moved both pups into it. Gray immediately started climbing the new side with the same methodical determination. Stubborn, Eleanor thought. It did not sound like a complaint in her head.
On the ninth day, at seven in the morning, Eleanor raised the dropper to Quiet’s mouth, and he didn’t reach for it right away the way he usually did. He just looked. His eyes had opened: cloudy, bluish, a little unfocused, the way all wolf pups’ eyes are at first. He looked straight at her, and Eleanor froze with the dropper halfway there.
They looked at each other for three or four seconds. Then Gray shoved his muzzle between them and bumped Quiet in the side, businesslike, not mean, just making it clear that the dropper concerned him too. Quiet turned away.
Eleanor finished feeding them both, washed the dropper, opened the notebook. Wrote: “Quiet opened eyes. Gray—tomorrow or day after.” Then the pen hovered over the line. Eleanor set it down without writing anything more. But the period at the end came out darker than usual, as if she had pressed harder than she meant to.
Frank came on his own, without warning, knocking at the door around ten-thirty. In his hands he held a small bowl covered with a saucer.
— Cottage cheese, — he announced, holding it out. — From Nora’s goat over on the far ridge. Arranged it yesterday.
Eleanor took the bowl. Looked at it.
— Why?
