Our pessimism proved unfounded. I wasn't totally without experience with dogs. I just didn't have any experience with a dog that could pull me off my feet without half trying. However, one area in which I was not and never had been "ordinary" was in my level of sheer cussed stubbornness. Just ask anyone who knows me, especially my mother.

Enrolled in a basic obedience course, the freshly neutered Butch terrorized all the other students and their handlers for only about the first five minutes of the first class before we were expelled. After several months of weekly private instruction, we were allowed to rejoin a class and proudly graduated with half a dozen others at the end of the eight-week course.

Butch was one of the two good things that came out of my marriage. The house that I refinanced to get the money necessary to fence every one of the five acres around it was the other. Once the property was fenced, Butch was never tied anywhere again for the rest of his life, and as soon as he was housebroken, he slept every night on John's side of the double bed, providing considerably more comfort than John ever had and snoring less.

Five years later, when Butch was diagnosed with the cancer that took a year to kill him, I talked to Susan a second time. She remembered me, and finding out what had happened to that unruly four-year-old yard dog pleased her enormously, which was why she adopted my current Rottweiler, Sophie, to me.

Sophie was released to rescue at four months old by owners who claimed they hadn't realized puppies chew. Healthy puppies with little baggage from neglect and mistreatment don't come to rescue often, and I took my puppy home feeling particularly fortunate. I paid the adoption fee and didn't wake up to the fact Susan planned to extract another kind of payment until months later.

Susan kept in touch the way she keeps in touch with all her adopters. She also set her careful rescue trap. First she made just the occasional phone call, could I keep one nice dog for a day or two? Could I do a short transport run?

I can't claim that when I finally tumbled to what Susan was up to, I couldn't have refused to go along with her plan. I let her knit me into her rescue net willingly enough, and now here we were the morning after Jack's murder, sitting in the same kitchen where John and I used to argue over Butch, arguing over Robot with equal intensity.