Miranda’s Last Gift

I was at the kitchen counter making coffee when my daughter Miranda’s dog approached. Ringo stands about 10 inches high at the shoulder, but he carries himself with supreme confidence. He fixed his lustrous black eyes on mine. Staring straight at me, he lifted his leg and urinated on the oven door.

After the mess was cleaned up, I complained to Miranda, “I don’t think Ringo likes me.”

Miranda replied, “Ringo loves you. He just doesn’t respect you.”

Theoretically, Ringo is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. You may have seen depictions of the breed peeking at you from portraits of monarchs and aristocrats. But the spaniels in the paintings are almost always the cinnamon-and-white variety known as a Blenheim spaniel. My wife, Danielle, has a Blenheim. The Blenheim Cavalier is a true lapdog: easygoing, obedient, insinuating. Ringo is very different. He is exactly the color of a cup of espresso, mostly black-haired with a little brownish tinge at his extremities. He’s commonly mistaken for a miniature Rottweiler. That confusion is less absurd than it sounds. If an unwelcome stranger steps in his way, 18-pound Ringo will stiffen and growl, murder in his eyes.

Ringo came into my life in the spring of 2018. Miranda had returned to the United States after four years living in Israel. She had thought seriously about staying there, but then the romantic relationship that had kept her in the country ended. Miranda was cast alone upon the open world. She relocated to Los Angeles to start over.

She chose L.A. because the landscape reminded her of Israel, even if the people were as different as could be. “My Israeli friends criticize Los Angeles as so fake,” she told me. “But let me tell you, fake nice is a lot better than authentic rude.”

Los Angeles, however, is not a good place to recover from a broken heart. The huge distances that must be traveled to see a friend, the cultural obsession with the surface of things—they can reinforce loneliness. Normally so cheerful and optimistic, Miranda was slowly succumbing to depression. So Danielle and I bought