“What are you doing?” Fritzie says from the doorway.

“I’m changing the sheets.”

“No, you’re not. You’re smelling the pillow.” She comes in, followed by Bedford, and the two of them get up on the bare mattress. She starts jumping up and down, higher each time, until Bedford can’t take it anymore and gets down. Patrick can’t take it anymore either, but he knows that if he asks her to stop, it’ll end up being a whole discussion. She’ll have facts at her disposal that prove mattress-jumping is good for the environment or for health or, God knows, even for mattresses. Living with her is like living with a pint-sized, eagle-eyed, hypermanic lawyer, somebody who knows where all the loopholes are and where all the bodies are buried.

Later he talks to Philip Pierpont on the phone. The numbers were good for the weekend. Successful show. Maybe now he’ll do more work? People want to buy the sculptures.

“They’re not for sale,” says Patrick. “I want to keep them.”

Pierpont starts in with wanting to negotiate. “None of them?”

None.

“Then do more, my good man. If you don’t want to let these particular ones go, can’t you copy them and do more of the same? You’ve got real feeling in these.”

No. He can’t even listen to this kind of talk. Copy them? Like he’s some kind of hack? Doing this just for the bucks?

He takes Fritzie and Bedford to the park, and that feels almost like a hero’s journey, just getting the two of them ready and then making their way along the sidewalk. Fritzie argues about wearing a hat, and he insists, especially now that she doesn’t have any hair. He trudges along while the two of them—Bedford and Fritzie both—leap and cavort their way along in front of him. He’d never particularly thought about the word cavort, but there’s no other description for this half skipping and half jumping they do. It starts to snow while they’re at the park, the sky suddenly letting loose of all the cold it’s been holding on to, and he stands shivering while flakes fall on his head and shoulders, and he watches while Bedford and Fritzie run back and forth, chasing a tennis ball, going further and further away. He walks along the path, sees them in the field, jumping and throwing and barking and running.

How many Januarys ago was it that he’d had to rescue Bedford after he got hit by a car, and then come to this very spot in the park to find Marnie to tell her? She’d been out searching for that mutt, who for some reason only known to his insane doggy mind, had left her at the park and headed for home by himself and then had gotten hit by a car. Patrick had been on the verge of leaving Brooklyn. Everything was ending for him here. That day he was packing up the truck. And yet . . . that day had been the turning point for them, he’s heard her say when she tells their story. And it may be true. Certainly that was probably the day he figured out that he wasn’t going to be able to live without loving her—or at least admitting it to himself. No other force could have pried him loose from his plan to stay a hermit and move to Wyoming. Nothing but love would have made him go out into the street and pick up her bleeding dog and carry him to a veterinary hospital, insist on them fixing him, and then go search for her when he couldn’t reach her by cell phone.

It was love. He didn’t choose it, he hadn’t wanted to fall in love with her, but forces beyond his control seemed to set the whole love thing in motion, and he’d gone along. He had let life unthinkingly sweep him up in its moving current. Later that week, after the park incident, after he’d kissed her there in public, he’d moved upstairs to live with her, and he’d settled into the yin and yang and normality and laughter and strife and brooding and making up and kissing that comes with being part of a couple.

It turned out that love took over everything in life: who came to his house, what made him laugh, what his sleep was like. Love turned out to have power over even the sweatpants and shirts he wore, the smell of his sheets, over his opinions about cats and dogs, the pastries he baked and the music he listened to, his breathing and his heartbeats, the things he thought about in the shower . . . and the fears he kept secret because of how big they grew.

Now look at him. He’s all out of love. Who knew it was a commodity and you could use it up?

He’s cold. He stamps his feet and calls Fritzie and Bedford back. They’ve gotten yards and yards away by now out in the middle of the soccer field, and it’s snowing harder.

“Patrick! Patrick! Patrick!” Fritzie is calling and jumping up and down.

He cups his hands around his mouth. “Come back!”

“Patrick! Patrick! Patrick!” She must say it seventy billion more times. Has any human ever used his name so many times in one day? He doesn’t think so.

“Come! Back!” he hollers.

He looks for Bedford and doesn’t see him. Shit. Is that damn dog lost again? He’s going to have to go running through the field, isn’t he, and into the woods, and out to the avenue to see just where this idiot mutt might have gotten himself to. He can’t bear it. He simply cannot relive any of that.

“Patrick!” She is screaming it now, cupping her hands around her mouth.

“What?” he calls back. He starts to run toward her.

“I WANT PIZZA FOR DINNER!”

This is what she wanted to tell him? He slows down, catches his breath. He sees Bedford, galloping in that inelegant way of dogs, heading toward Fritzie with his ears flying straight out, looking like they could take him happily airborne if they had just a little more curve to them, a little bit of lift.

“PATRICK, CAN WE HAVE PIZZA FOR DINNER? CAN WE HAVE PIZZA FOR DINNER? CAN WE? CAN WE? CAN WE?”

There are going to need to be rules, he thinks. This sort of thing can’t keep happening.

They decide upon some rules while they’re eating dinner. And yes, it’s pizza—takeout pizza. Patrick insists on taking it home, above all her objections. He knows he cannot sit in the brightly lit pizza parlor, which pretty much consists of a long counter and two tables. The place is taken up with teenagers, rough-talking kids milling around in knit caps and sweatshirts, cruising for things to point out, constantly saying variations of the word yo, while they share a paper plate filled with greasy garlic knots. Patrick does not want to be the subject of teenaged attention while he eats a pizza with a pint-sized POW.

She argues and argues, but he wins.

“It’s because you’re afraid the teenagers would talk to you,” she says as they’re walking home with the cardboard box of pizza, which is leaking grease onto his gloves.

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is. You hate talking to people, and you hate it more when people talk to you.”

He makes himself stay silent. He wonders if he can make a rule that she is not to make any comments or observations about his character. She is stomping along next to him, with her jaw set in that way she has when she feels she’s been wronged.

“Okay, we’re going to have some rules,” he says, once they’re home at the kitchen table. Even though it’s six o’clock, he’s made himself a pot of coffee to try to give himself a modicum of energy to make it through the next few hours until her bedtime.

She slouches further into her chair and sticks out her tongue at him.