Bloodlines

replace broken glass, and repair garbage disposals. I do my own housework, and I shovel my own walks and driveway.
    “Do you have a heart condition?” I asked.
    “No,” she said.
    “Good. The next time it snows, be here at seven A.M., and you can start working off the money. I work at home, but my tenants don’t, and people start going by here early. I want the sidewalks clear. Or maybe I’ll think of something else you can do. In the meantime, I need to ask you a personal question.” Please understand that I could not stop myself. I couldn’t look at the poor kid another minute and keep quiet. “Gloria, have you ever been to a dermatologist?”
    Involuntarily, I’m sure, she dropped her head and hunched her shoulders in an obvious effort to cover her face. Worse, she blushed furiously, and the addition of yet more red did nothing for her complexion.
    “Have you?” I persisted.
    She managed to shake her head.
    “You need to see someone,” I said. D.V.M.’s are, of course, more in my line than are M.D.’s, most of whom I don’t trust, but when I’d first come to Cambridge, I’d caught a persistent and disgusting case of ringworm from one of my cats, and a good dermatologist had cured me. I liked her a lot. Framed pictures of her family rested proudly on her desk: four English cockers, very handsome dogs. “I know someone good,” I said. “I’ll make the appointment for you.”
    “I don’t have any money,” Gloria said.
    “Then we’ll both pray for snow. In the meantime, don’t worry about it. And don’t go to any more dog shows, either.”
    Gloria smiled. Amazingly, she had beautiful, perfectly even white teeth, a smile out of a toothpaste commercial. Life is a parts match, right? It’s a parts match. Everybody wins.
     

10
     

     
    The frigid temperatures of Sunday night glazed Cambridge in a layer of ice as hard and slick as the coating on a candy apple. When I let Rowdy and Kimi into the yard for their first brief outing of the day, they slid, lost their footing, and had to dig in their nails and scramble to make it back up the stairs. Footing bad enough to take the ground out from under a malamute usually means a productive work day for me and a long snooze for the dogs. They stretch out on the kitchen floor, and I sit at the table drinking cup after cup of sweet tea and covering page after page of yellow legal pad with my illegible scrawl. In case you haven’t guessed, the whole point of being a writer is that you get to stay home with your dogs. And, of course, the article about Sally Brand wasn’t finished. There was a lot more to say than I’d covered so far. For instance, I’d assumed that Larry Wilson’s brace of pec-flex-tail-wag poodles must be Sally’s masterpiece, but when I’d mentioned Larry, Sally had informed me that hula girl tattoos like his had been out since World War Two. The poodles had been a technical challenge, she conceded, but, all in all, they lacked artistry. Please don’t pass that along to Larry. Or the poodles, either, of course.
    Despite the ice outside and the literary temptations of tea, dogs, and words in my cozy cream-and-terra-cotta kitchen, it wasn’t a writing day. I was due on Enid Sievers’s raspberry doorstep at ten-thirty, when I’d promised to pick up Missy and drive her to Betty Burley’s. Before collecting Missy, I intended to stop at Puppy Luv, where I meant to follow Betty’s advice: to stay calm, to introduce myself, and to persuade Diane Sweet to let me leave some material with the malamute puppy’s papers: my own name, address, and phone number; information about training; and the national breed club’s booklet about the Alaskan malamute. The booklet about the Alaskan malamute would present a problem because the section entitled “On Choosing a Puppy” explained, among other things, that pet shops buy puppies wholesale from people who don’t know and usually don’t care whether the pups are free of hip dysplasia, chondrodysplasia, and other genetic faults. Chondrodysplasia causes skeletal distortion throughout the body, grotesque deformities of the joints and limbs. A male and female may be carriers who show no signs of the disease themselves but whose puppies sure do. Puppy mills don’t screen for it, and neither do backyard breeders. And then there’s progressive retinal atrophy. Seizures. Day blindness. Anyway, I suspected that Puppy Luv wouldn’t be eager to pass along a booklet containing that truthful