Excerpt from The Wrong Heaven by Amy Bonnaffons, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The flyer was on the bulletin board at ShopRite. It said FREE DOG, and underneath there was a picture. She was an unclassifiable mutt, with deep cocker-spaniel eyes and matted terrier fur and a wrinkled bulldog brow; she looked both anxious and mournful. My heart lay down, rolled over.

I didn't rip off one of the detachable slips at the bottom, I just took the whole poster. I even took the thumbtack. I'm not sure why. I called the number and drove over immediately.

The owner's directions took me to a trailer on the edge of the woods outside of town. A woman answered the front door. (Is "front door" the right term, or are trailer doors defined like car doors, driver and passenger?) She was extremely pregnant, but also extremely fat. You couldn't even have told except that the roundness of her belly had a convex tautness, a definition that the rest of her lacked. The rest of her was slack, weary, blurred. Two small children played on the floor in diapers.

"There she is," said the woman. She gestured toward a card table that apparently served as the family's combination dining room table and changing pad. A bowl of congealed SpaghettiOs stood next to a steaming diaper. Beneath the table, Billie Holiday cowered, shaking like a leaf.

I crouched down. "Come here, darling," I said. The dog took a tentative step forward, then retreated. She began to whimper.

"She's a nice dog," said the woman. I looked up at her. Her hands rested on her high belly. Her eyes were even sadder than the bowl of SpaghettiOs, which is saying a lot. "Not much trouble. But my boyfriend said someone had to go." She looked down at her belly and shrugged.

I coaxed Billie Holiday out of the corner and picked her up. She stared into my eyes with a humanlike intensity. It was clear what her eyes were saying. They were saying: I still have hope. They were big, quivering, Liza Minnelli eyes.

But I didn't name her Liza. I didn't name her anything until a week later, when I put on "Lady Sings the Blues," and I watched her stop what she was doing—which was batting around a toy rubber martini glass I'd bought her—and listen. She actually listened. She cocked her head to the side and her ears perked up. Then—and here's the amazing part—she closed her eyes.

I watched her listen to the rest of the song, with her eyes closed. When it was over, she lay down and fell asleep. In her dog-dreams, she moaned a low dog-moan, full of tenderness and pain.

I played the song several times that week, and always the same thing happened. And so I had no choice, name-wise. Billie she was, and Billie she would always be. Until last month, when she died of dog leukemia. That's when I started making the list. Because what kind of God would give leukemia to a dog? I often tell my students to marvel at the small and myriad wonders of the world. A caterpillar's many feet, the tiny veins of a leaf. I have them look at the veins in their hand, then back at the leaf. Hand. Leaf. Hand. Leaf. After a while, are they that different? Does it matter? I don't say this, because it would be anti–separation of church and state, but I believe—or want to believe—that the world is full of these miracles, little filigrees personally added by the Creator. But that would mean that the self-same Creator also came up with dog leukemia. And what kind of a filigree is that?


I fell asleep that night on the living room floor, in front of World's Most Interesting Autopsies. In the morning, when I pulled myself up and went outside, my clothes were stiff with the gin and tonic; it had soaked through them and dried overnight.

I stared at the statues for a moment, then plugged in only Mary. I couldn't deal with the other one right now.

"Good morning," she said. "Sorry about yesterday. He sometimes gets carried away."

Excerpted from The Wrong Heaven by Amy Bonnafons. Copyright © 2018 by Amy Bonnafons. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.