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except for those couple of years right at the beginning with old Reyna.”
    “So was that a mistake?”
    Sam shrugged, stirred his ice cubes around in his glass with a straw. “She always kept on forgetting shug would’ve probably died over there in Burma. Elephants have to earn their keep over there, and who’d have hired an elephant who was blind in one eye? And she was just a little bitty thing even after she was full-grown. Don’t get me wrong, it would’ve been nice if the girl would have had another elephant or two to play with, like she does now. But it’s apples and oranges—there wasn’t anything like that back then. I think Miz Biedelman gave her a fine life. Girl never wanted for anything, always had the best food, never had a sick day in her life except for her foot sores.”
    Truman frowned. “But she was alone here. This whale will be, too. Does that make it morally wrong to bring him here?”
    “Never heard anybody say the right thing is the perfect thing.”
    “Max Biedelman—what do you think she’d do, if it were up to her?”
    Sam grinned. “Heck, that’s easy. She’d have already packed her bag to go down there and get him.”
    O N J UNE THIRD the board of directors of the Max L. Biedelman Zoo voted unanimously to bring the killer whale to its facility as soon as arrangements could be made. Three weeks later, Truman and Gabriel departed for Bogotá to transport him home.
    That evening, Ivy and her older brother, Matthew Levy, sat at their respective dining room tables, Ivy on San Juan Island and Matthew in Bladenham, connected via Skype. Matthew, a retired state appellate court judge, had drawn up a legal agreement between Ivy and the zoo, even though he had told Ivy numerous times and in no uncertain terms that she was poised on the brink of a headlong dive into a yawning black fiscal hole. His had always been the Levy family’s voice of pragmatism, even when he was a boy, and over the past several weeks he had spent significant energy trying to dissuade both Ivy and Truman from undertaking such a high-risk, low-yield project. Then, when it became clear that he wouldn’t prevail, he crafted as ironclad an agreement as he could between Ivy and the zoo, protecting her assets as much as possible, not only in the event of the animal’s untimely demise, but also in the case of a flood of surplus revenue.
    While Matthew reviewed the terms of the agreement, Ivy filled in the Os in the document’s immaculate title page with a leaky ballpoint pen and drifted away, wondering if she should burn a little sage to cast out any negative energy and attract positive energy to the whale transport scheduled for first thing the next morning.
    “Are you listening?” she was suddenly aware of Matthew asking her.
    “Apparently not,” she said. “Honey, can’t we do this when I come down there tomorrow?”
    “You should have done it a week ago. Until you and the zoo president sign this, you’re not protected,” Matthew said. “And neither is the zoo. You don’t seem to realize how vulnerable you are.”
    Ivy sighed.
    “Look, let’s just get through it. It won’t take long.”
    And so he took her, page by numbingly tedious page, through an agreement between her and the Max L. Biedelman Zoo (henceforth referred to as THE ZOO) that laid out the conditions under which she (henceforth referred to as THE DONOR) would and would not finance the ongoing care and maintenance of the killer whale Viernes. Under the agreement, she would be the sole contributor to a trust, blah blah blah.
    It wasn’t that Ivy didn’t care; as a rule she managed her significant fortune very attentively. Her grandfather Levy, the family patriarch during her childhood years, had always stressed that it was her duty to support the Needy, including food banks, homeless shelters, and women’s centers; the Greater Good, including the local police and fire departments; and Our Cultural Legacy, including the Seattle Art Museum,