Animal Appetite

author?”
    “Randall Carey.”
    “When was it published?”
    “Ten years ago. Give or take.”
    “Brat,” I asked tentatively, “did you know Shaun McGrath?”
    Her original immobility returned. Her eyes narrowed. Her jaw clenched.
    “I shouldn’t have asked,” I said.
    “No, it’s okay. He was a little shit. Everyone hated him. Even Claudia had the sense to hate him. Gareth really hated him. We used to go over to Daddy’s office. We’d fool around with the Xerox machine. We used the typewriters. Gareth would type his homework. Daddy would’ve let us use the computers, but Shaun didn’t want us near them. We weren’t babies! Gareth was sixteen when Daddy died. I was eleven. We wouldn’t have hurt them. Shaun was just being a bastard about it, as usual. Daddy was the only one who got taken in by Shaun. Daddy was a soft touch about everything. Everyone liked him. He liked everyone.”
    Brat turned toward her desk, raised a tattooed bodybuilder arm, extracted two photographs from one of the overstuffed pigeonholes, and handed the pictures to me. One was the studio portrait of the young Jack Andrews that Claudia had given me. “College graduation?” I asked.
    “Yeah. But it looks like Daddy. It’s how I remember him.”
    The other, also a professional photograph, was a head study of a golden retriever.
    “Brat, did your father show Chip?”
    She looked pleased. “No, but he was a good-looking dog, wasn’t he? Good bone. Nice head.”
    “Do you know where he came from?” I could tell at a glance that the dog wasn’t from our lines—my mother’s lines—but I was equally certain that he was from another show breeder’s. “Do you know his registered name?”; Little details—the dog’s registered name, his breeder— would please the readers of Dog’s Life.
    “No idea.”
    “Would Claudia have his papers?”
    “Not a chance. If she’d come across Chip’s papers, she’d have thrown them out.”
    “Your mother told me that she found Chip a good home. I wonder if his papers might’ve gone with him.” To my amazement, Brat’s violet-blue eyes filled with tears. She reached out for Johann and let him lick her muscular hands. I waited. Eventually, she said, “I don’t know what Claudia told you, but let me tell you something. The night she found Daddy, the night he died, she didn’t even bring Chip home. You know who she sent him home with? Shaun McGrath! She sent Chip home with Shaun McGrath. After the morning of the day Daddy died, I never saw Chipper again.”
     

Eight

     
    Returning from my visit to Brat Andrews, I took advantage of a second burst of Indian summer—am I allowed?—to tidy my yard, rake leaves, and work on my woodpile. If the stripped, skeletal branches of the trees and the blackened mounds of frost-killed impatiens hadn’t given away the late-November date, the day could have passed for a warm October 1. If you know Cambridge, you’ve probably noticed my house, which is the barn-red one at 256 Concord Avenue, almost on the corner of Appleton.
    What draws attention to my house is the little “spite building,” as it’s known, that occupies the actual corner °f Concord and Appleton, and fences in one side of my yard. Although the spite building apparently memorializes the bitterness of some long-ago property dispute, the improbability of the long, narrow one-story structure adds charm and whimsy suitable to its recent reincarnation as a tiny toy shop. Vines grow thickly up the brick wall on my side of the spite building, and I keep my house and my wooden fences freshly painted. I clean up after the dogs every day, regularly fill in the holes left by Kimi’s bouts of excavation, routinely prune the lilacs and roses, and apply gypsum in a doomed effort to undo the damage caused by dog urine.
    This year, I added a park bench. It’s been a big hit with the dogs. Consequently, I have to hose it down all the time, and it’s already showing rust spots. The bird feeder was a disaster, at least from my point of view. Rowdy and Kimi saw it as a device to lure prey. Mala-mutes, I hereby testify, can catch songbirds on the wing. On the last day of the bird feeder’s residence in my yard, Kimi turned out to have caught what I think had once been a house sparrow. She’d swallowed it whole. Enough said. I gave the feeder to Mrs. Dennehy. Even without it, however, the yard is on its way to becoming a little urban Eden.
    A New Yorker by birth, Rita was seated on the