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A seventeen, Jack Snyder's daughter is slender-faced and long of limb and still able to startle her father with her seeming certainty about everything she thinks. They're driving along roads he doesn't yet know, on their way to meet her first seeing-eye dog, and she is wearing polka-dotted sunglasses, a long jean skirt and a shirt with the words: If you can read this T-shirt, maybe YOU can tell ME what it says. A kid from her school ordered them, in the dozens, and Lila had bought three in different shades. "You're sure they aren't identical?" she'd questioned Jack's wife at the time. "I don't want my teachers thinking I never change my clothes."
"Believe me, Lila," Ann Snyder had said. "I don't want your teachers thinking you never change your clothes either."
As Jack scans the road for posted signs, Lila is proclaiming to him in those certain tones of hers that if it weren't for being quite so blind and having to have one, she'd definitely never get a dog. Never. Never ever. And her father is trying to follow her, trying to respond appropriately; but thoughts of Miranda Hamilton compete with the girl's words. Miranda Hamilton unbuttoning her jeans the night before, sliding them down her thighs and stepping, panty-clad, out from the denim pooled at her feet. Miranda Hamilton unbuttoning his suit pants the night before but leaving them bound around his legs until he kicked them off. Miranda's cropped, blonde hair fading into colorless down along the back of her neck. Miranda laughing as she filled her mouth with bourbon from Jack's glass and held the fluid there, smiling while it drizzled from her lips until he kissed her and swallowed it himself. Miranda whispering to Jack, her mouth still whiskey damp, just to lie back, lie still, while she moved her hips in something close to perfect circles over him. Just lie still. Just lie still. Just lie still.
"Really Dad, they're so obsequious," Lila says; and Jack has to remind himself of what they're talking about. Guide dogs. They're talking about guide dogs. "The whole alpha-male pack mentality thing. Cats don't give a shit about anyone, right?" Her father swerves around a pothole and senses her sway beside...