Animal Appetite

second I opened the shop door. The plan was this: Catching sight of Tracy, I was to appear momentarily puzzled. “You look familiar,” I was supposed to remark. “Didn’t I used to see you at shows with Jack Andrews?”
    But I’ve leaped ahead of myself. The interior of the shop, I should first note, contained more equipment than I’d expected: a pair of waist-high tubs with wall-mounted force dryers nearby, two grooming tables equipped with arms and grooming nooses, three or four tall stand dryers, a row of empty wire-mesh crates, a crate dryer, a fat trash barrel overflowing with dog hair, scads of brushes. The setup was professional. The tubs had been built into the tiled wall, the grooming tables were hydraulic, and lined up on the floor were the same gallon-size brown plastic bottles of Eqyss Bio-Tek shampoo and grooming spray that I swear by and special-order myself. Near the door was a little waiting area for human clients: two plastic-covered chairs and a low Formica-topped table that held a coffee maker, mugs, sugar, powdered creamer, and a stack of dog magazines, including, I was happy to see, the latest issue of Dog’s Life.
    Her back to me, a tall, thin woman with short brown hair—Tracy, at last!—stood at one of the grooming tables and vigorously brushed the coat of a handsome little short-haired dog that, at a guess, was half Jack Russell terrier. Energetically sweeping up from the floor what looked like the shorn coat of a black standard poodle was a young man who wore jeans and a University of Maine sweatshirt. What immediately wrecked my plan was the kid’s uncanny resemblance to the affable face I’d studied in jack Andrews’s college graduation photo: the cleft chin, the pleasant expression, even the oddly expectant suggestion of features on which character hadn’t yet been written.
    So exact and so startling was the likeness that I jumped when the boy spoke. “Hi. Mom’ll be right with you.”
    I nodded stupidly.
    Taking in Kimi, he asked, “What percent?”
    “She’s an Alaskan malamute.”
    His grin was identical to the one that Jack Andrews had flashed to Brat in the family snapshot. “If you say so.”
    Swiveling her head around, Tracy—she had to be— ran her eyes over Kimi, smiled at me, and said softly to the kid, “She’s not putting you on, Drew.” Catching my eye, she asked shyly, “Show dog?”
    As I was bobbing my head, Kimi suddenly emitted a prolonged peal of woo-woo-woos punctuated here and there with ah-roo and culminating in what was obviously a friendly question that demanded an immediate response.
    As Tracy listened to Kimi, her face lit up. An impish smile appeared. When Kimi had finished, Tracy replied, “Relax! I won’t strip out your show coat. I’m an old hand.”
    I liked her gentle voice. Just as everyone had remembered, she was very tall, probably five ten, and her hair was still short and brown, cut in a cap that framed an ordinary face, neither pretty nor homely, with forgettable features. But how could everyone have recalled her height and forgotten that quirky, elflike smile?
    “Drew,” Tracy said, “could you take Lucky home? Owner lives down the street,” she explained to me. “Elderly lady.”
    “Aw, Mom—” the boy started to protest.
    “And if she offers you a Coke, you say yes, and you say please and thank you, and then you sit there for a minimum of ten minutes, because...”
    “...you are going to be old yourself some day,” Drew continued, mimicking his mother, “and it won’t hurt you to take ten minutes to cheer up an old...”
    “...lady who really has been very nice to you,” Tracy concluded cheerfully.
    At the end of the ritual, Tracy picked up the Jack Russell mix and handed him to Drew. As the dog changed hands, the mother and son exchanged smiles. A photograph taken at that second would, I knew, have shown the kind of capture-this-moment family snapshot you see in ads for film and cameras. In reality, the photogenic little family dog belonged to someone else. And—sorry, I know it’s corny, but there’s no other way to say it—the father was permanently out of the picture.
     

Twenty-Five

     
    As soon as Drew left, Tracy took Kimi’s lead and walked her to one of the grooming tables. “You don’t have to wait,” she told me. “Really, I know what I’m doing. I won’t ruin her coat. What’s her name?”
    “Kimi.”
    “Kimi, up on the table! Woo-woo-woo!” Tracy, you see, really did speak