Thank God for Dave, I thought . . . and, last, I would thank God for what was, blasphemous as it sounded, the best development of my new, sober life, a small black-and-white dog named Bingo.

We’d gotten her in September, my first month back from rehab. Ellie and I had driven from Philadelphia down to Baltimore through a gorgeous fall afternoon, the sky a brilliant blue, smelling of leaves and wood smoke and, faintly, of the coming cold. Our first stop had been Target, where we’d bought everything we would need—a leash and harness made of pink nylon, a compromise between the faux-leather and rhinestone rig Ellie had fallen in love with and the plain red I preferred. We had plastic food and water dishes, a carrying crate, a ten-pound sack of dog food, a fluffy round brown-and-pink polka-dotted dog bed, a chewy toy, a squeaky toy, and the Cesar Millan video that Janet, who’d adopted three different rescue dogs, had recommended.

“Can the puppy sleep in my room?” asked Ellie.

“Fine with me,” I said. Ellie had been asking for a dog ever since she’d read Fancy Nancy and the Posh Puppy. Of course, she’d lobbied for a teacup poodle, but had been surprisingly amenable when I’d explained that there were many dogs who needed homes, and it would be better to adopt one of them. Together, we’d spent a half hour each night online, reading about breeds, watching videos of pups, getting a season pass on TiVo for Too Cute. Ellie had been keeping the tantrums to a minimum, and doing her chores—making her bed and clearing her dishes and helping me make her lunches and load the dishwasher—without complaint.

“One eleven, one thirteen . . . here we go!” The house was a yellow cape, with a front yard dotted with little piles of dog poop. As we pulled into the driveway, the front door opened, and a teenage girl came out with a small white dog with black spots on a leash. The dog had a finely molded face, a whiskered snout, and a long tail that curled at its tip. One of her ears stood up straight; the other one flopped like a book page you’d turned down to mark your place.

“BINGO!” yelled Ellie, and she was out of the car almost before it had stopped rolling. She raced across the lawn, fell to her knees a few feet away from the dog, then, as instructed, held out her hand for it to sniff. The dog, who’d seemed alarmed by Ellie’s charge, sniffed her hand, then wagged its tail, sat calmly, and allowed Ellie to pet it.

“She is so CUTE!” Ellie said to the girl, who looked amused at Ellie’s antics. I walked over, shook her hand, and signed the papers while Ellie crooned at the puppy. She was a young adult dog, her Internet profile had said, somewhere between three and five years old. She had shown up pregnant at a shelter. They’d found her a foster family, where she’d given birth, and all five of the puppies were quickly adopted. “Now we just need to find a place for Mom,” said the website, and that, of course, had made me want to drive straight to Baltimore and bring the sad-eyed little dog home. She was, according to the website, some kind of terrier mix, a solid fifteen pounds, spayed, friendly, good with kids, and with all of her shots.

“I wish we could tell you more about her,” said the teenager, who had a brown ponytail and a metallic smile. “She was a good mom when the pups were here.”

“I’m sure we’ll figure it out,” I’d said. On the application, which had struck me as astonishingly detailed, there’d been a question about whether I had ever been arrested or in jail. Nothing about rehab or addiction, but still, I wondered if I would have answered those questions honestly . . . and, if I had, whether they would have turned me down. It was crazy: Who needed a pet more than a sick person trying to get better? Who would take better care of a dog than someone trying to demonstrate to the world that she was, indeed, worthy of its trust again?

Ellie and I walked Bingo around the block, Bingo trotting briskly, Ellie clutching the leash with two hands. “Say goodbye,” Ellie instructed the dog. Bingo was docile as I scooped her up and placed her in her crate, even as Ellie begged me to let the dog ride in her lap. She didn’t make a sound the entire ride home. Once we were back in Philadelphia, we walked her around the neighborhood, letting her sniff the trees and hydrants. She ignored other dogs, hiding, trembling, behind my legs when they got close enough to try to sniff her. “She is SHY,” said Ellie, who didn’t seem to mind, as long as Bingo let her put the little tinsel collar she’d crafted around her neck, and hold the leash while they walked.

“Do you think we should try to find a better name for her?” I asked.

Ellie considered as we approached our front door. Finally, she shook her head. “I think she is a Bingo,” she decided, and I told Ellie that I thought she was right.

At home, Bingo sniffed her dish full of kibble, had a few laps of water, then wormed underneath my bed, in spite of Ellie’s importuning and threats to drag her out into the open. “Let’s just leave her be.” Ellie had gotten into her pajamas, and we read Squids Will Be Squids and A Big Guy Took My Ball before I kissed her good night and tucked her into her bed. As tempting as it was to let Ellie sleep with me every night, I’d heard enough lectures about boundaries to know that I needed to put them in place (plus, she hadn’t had an accident in months, but I didn’t want to take chances with my new mattress). She was my daughter, not my friend, or my comfort, or my confidante . . . and so, as much as I would have liked the feeling of another warm body in my bed, or the sweet smile she wore when she woke up (in the handful of seconds before remembering that the world and most of the people in it displeased her), I made sure she at least began each night in her own room.

So it was just me in the bedroom when Bingo inched her way out from underneath the bed and peered up at me. Her tail drooped. Her expression seemed despondent. I wondered if she missed her pups, or if she even remembered she’d had them—I knew so little about dogs!

“What is it?” I asked, putting down A Woman’s Guide to the Twelve Steps.

Silence.

“Do you want to go out?” I guessed.

Nothing. I took her downstairs, clipped her to her leash, walked her down the steps, and stood at the edge of the sidewalk while she did her business. Upstairs, instead of going back underneath the bed, she stood at the edge and looked at me.

“Oh, okay,” I said, and patted the mattress. Before the second word was out of my mouth, Bingo had hopped nimbly onto the bed and was settling down against me, folding herself into the space behind my bent knees as I lay curled up on my side.

“You’re going to sleep there?” No answer. I pulled the comforter up over both of us and closed my eyes. Thank you, God, for Bingo. Thank you for Ellie. Thank you for such beautiful weather. Thank you for helping me not take pills today. It wasn’t much of a prayer, but it was the best I could do.

• • •

Each year since we’d moved to Haverford, I’d hosted a Chanukah Happening (on the invitations, I’d spell it Chappening). Dozens of kids, parents, colleagues, and relatives and friends would fill our house, some bearing gifts for Ellie, or boxes of chocolates, or, more likely, bottles of wine. I would serve roast chickens, a giant green salad, and a table full of desserts the guests had brought. In the living room, kids would spin dreidels, and guests would be participating in the latke cook-off in the kitchen. We’d have straight potato pancakes, sweet-potato latkes, latkes with zucchini and shreds of carrots, latkes made with flour or potato starch or, once, tapioca. Barry would contribute sufganiyot, the sweet filled doughnuts that were also traditional Chanukah fare, and, for weeks, the kitchen would smell like a deep fryer and my hair and skin would feel lightly coated with grease.

There would be beer and wine at those parties . . . and, as the crowd got bigger and the preparations more elaborate, I’d taken more and more pills to get myself through it, to deal with the tension of whether Dave was helping me or even talking to me, pills to cope with my mom, who would show up with an eight-pound brisket and demand the use of an oven.

This year, my Chanukah Happening was limited to four people: me and Ellie, Dave and my mom. And Bingo, of course, who sat on the floor, eyes bright, tail wagging, watching the proceedings avidly, hoping that someone would drop something. Dave, I noticed, would discreetly slip her scraps, which meant that Bingo followed him around like a balloon that had been tethered to his ankle.

“Good girl,” he’d say, sneaking Bingo a bit of chicken skin, then tipping his chair back and sighing. I had radically reduced the guest list, but I’d kept the menu the same: roast chicken stuffed with herbs and lemon and garlic, a salad dressed with pomegranate-seed vinaigrette, potato latkes, and a store-bought dessert—cream puffs from Whole Foods and chocolate sauce that Ellie and I had made together.

“She has a JAUNTY WALK,” said Ellie, imitating Bingo’s brisk stride down the street. “And at night she sleeps CURLED IN A CRULLER in Mommy’s bed.”

“I bet Mom likes that,” he said. His eyes didn’t meet mine. I would like you better, I thought at him.

“Hey, El, let’s show Daddy how we clear the table.”

“Daddy knows that I can do that.” She pouted, but she got up and carefully, using two hands, carried every plate and platter from the table to the sink.

We played Sorry! after dinner—oh, irony! I tried to breathe through my discomfort, the restlessness, tried to sit with my feelings, like Bernice advised, and ignore the questions running laps in my brain. Will he stay? Or at least come and kiss me? Does he love me a little? Is there anything left at all?

Dave stayed as I coaxed Ellie into, then out of, her tub, combing and braiding her hair, getting her into her pajamas and reading her This Is Not My Hat. After I closed her bedroom door, Bingo bounded down the hallway to assume her position, curled on top of my pillow. Her tail thumped against the comforter as she watched us with her bright brown eyes.

“B-I-N-G-O,” Dave sang. We were in the narrow hallway, practically touching. “You seem well.” He reached out, took a strand of my hair between his fingers, and tucked it, tenderly, behind my ear. Then his body was right up against mine, his chest warm and firm, shoulders solid in my hands. “I know they said no changes for the first year, but we’ve both done this a bunch of times already . . .”

I laughed, walking backward, as he maneuvered me onto the bed . . . and, later, I cried when, with my head on his chest and our bare legs entwined, he got choked up as he said, “Allison, there was never anybody else. It was always only you.”

“I promise . . .” I started to say. I wanted to promise him that I’d never hurt him again, never go off the rails, never give him cause to worry again . . . but those were promises I couldn’t make. One minute, one hour, one day at a time. “I never stopped loving you,” I said . . . and that was the absolute truth.

We didn’t move back in together. Part of me wanted it desperately, and part of me worried that we were disrupting Ellie’s stable environment—some mornings Dave was in bed with me, some mornings he was at his own place, and some nights Ellie stayed there with him—but she seemed to be thriving, to be growing out of the awful yelling and stubbornness.

As for Dave and me, I often thought that we were, as coaches and sportswriters liked to say, in a rebuilding year. Not married, exactly, but not un-married. It was almost as though we were courting each other again, slowly revealing ourselves to each other. My mom or our sitter, Katrina, would come for the night, and we’d go to a concert, or out to dinner, or we’d take Bingo to the dog park where, on warm spring nights, they showed old movies, projecting the picture against a bedsheet strung between two pine trees.

“Ellie’s getting big,” Dave said on one of those nights. I’d been looking at the picnics other people had packed: fried chicken and biscuits and canned peaches; egg-salad sandwiches on thick-sliced whole-wheat bread; chunks of pineapple and strawberries in a fruit salad . . . and wine. Beer. Sweating thermoses of cocktails, lemon drops and Pimm’s cups.

“She is,” I had agreed. Every day she looked a little taller, her hair longer, or she’d bust out some new bit of vocabulary or surprisingly apt observation about the world. Sometimes at night she’d cry that her legs hurt. Growing pains, Dr. McCarthy had told us.