"What was that?" Silky asks, the way she asks when her mouth is full of stuffed animal (which it was), ears perked and tan eyebrows raised. 
     The animal in Silky's mouth was a black and white cow, acquired from an enormous bin at the local second-hand store for forty-nine cents, along with a small pink cat and a giraffe with removable legs. 
     Silky had torn a hole into the cow and was shaking the stuffing loose, as she always does, when we heard the caplink, tink, tink, of something hitting the floor. 
     We found it beneath the table, a little red heart, no bigger than an apricot's pit. 
     There's a list of stuffed animals that we never purchase at the second-hand store: puppies, bunnies, nothing with beans, and no Pooh-shaped bears, which limits the selection greatly. How it was that Silky knew what she saw lying on the floor, is beyond me. But she did. And she looked as though she might cry. She lay the black and white cow down gently and touched its red heart with her wet nose. 
     "Can you put it back?" she asked me. 
     "I think we can," I told her. 
    And we did, Silky helping me nest the little red heart back into the cow's stuffed insides. 

     No puppies no bunnies, no Pooh-shaped bears, nothing with beans ... and no cows, heart-filled or otherwise.