Bloodlines

but damning paragraph about pet shops, and, with considerable reluctance, I’d glued a blank sheet of paper over that page of the booklet and laboriously printed in some information about the Cambridge Dog Training Club. The result looked patched up, but I was hoping that Diane Sweet would simply thumb through the booklet and accept it.
    Actually, I was hoping that Monday happened to be Diane Sweet’s day off and that someone else would be in charge at Puppy Luv. If you’re afraid to make a fool of yourself, you have no business owning a dog, but it’s one thing to make a fool of yourself with someone who loves you no matter what and quite another thing to confront someone like Diane Sweet and admit that you’ve been a total jerk. And I had been. On Friday, instead of maturely striding in, presenting myself as who I am, and making a reasonable request, I’d acted childish. Too many baby greens lately. So instead of costuming myself as someone else, today I dressed in honest, self-revealing L.L. Bean—flannel-lined jeans, flannel shirt, heavy parka, Ragg socks and mittens, boots with good traction—and set out in my cold Bronco.
    At my first glimpse of the seedy strip mall, my heart raced and fell. I’d expected the parking lot to look as icy and empty as the center of the Boston Garden before a Bruins game. In fact, the glare was so bright that I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a Zamboni machine chugging away, but the area directly in front of Puppy Luv was packed with cars. God damn, I thought, Valentine’s Day. In the yearly cycle of the American pet shop, summer is a time of hibernation. Pet shops do most of their business between Labor Day and Easter. Christmas, the period of greatest activity, was past. Easter was distant. Despite the cheerful display of hearts and clichés I’d seen in Puppy Luv, I hadn’t expected this pre-Valentine’s burst of business.
    Four of the cars, however, turned out to be police cruisers. A few others were official vehicles, too. Some apparently belonged to the innocently curious or genuinely worried, the rest to the truly ghoulish. Yellow crime-scene tape cordoned off Puppy Luv. Stomping his hefty way out of the pet shop was my friend and neighbor Kevin Dennehy, who’s a Cambridge cop. I pulled the Bronco into a space near the hardware store a few doors down from Puppy Luv, killed the engine, got out, and watched Kevin, who did something unprecedented.
    In case you’ve never met Kevin, I should tell you that he’s a big, burly guy, shorter than Steve, but about twice as wide. How someone who works out at the Y and who runs, too, can sustain that ever-enlarging gut, I don’t know, but Kevin manages. By the time he’s thirty-five, Kevin is going to have a real beer belly, even though he isn’t allowed to keep beer in the refrigerator a t home or drink it in the house. He can’t keep or consume meat there, either, because his mother is a Seventh Day Adventist, a vegetarian as well as a teetotaler. Consequently, Kevin owns a corner of my refrigerator. That’s how I happen to be an expert on his consumption of flesh and Bud. Rita, my second-floor tenant and resident shrink, says that in granting Kevin access to my kitchen but not my bed, I am fostering his prolonged dependence on his mother by encouraging him to transfer a libidinal cathexis from one Oedipally unavailable object to a symbolic substitute. That’s a direct quote. Honest to God, that’s how Rita talks. Also, Rita places particular emphasis on the refrigerator, but I’m too embarrassed to tell you what she says about it.
    Anyway, as one who knows more than Kevin himself does about how much he drinks, I’ll swear that his consumption is what Rita calls “socioculturally normative.” Furthermore, the hamburger and bologna in Kevin’s corner of my refrigerator were fresh. All this is to explain that when Kevin stomped out of Puppy Luv, staggered to the edge of the concrete walk, bent over the fragile barrier of crime-scene tape, and vomited, it probably wasn’t because he had a hangover or a case of food poisoning.
    Nor does he have a weak stomach. Nor, in general, does he dislike dogs. On the contrary, he’s fond of them. Even so, when I went tearing across the ice, skidded up to him, and solicitously placed a mittened hand on his beefy shoulder, he dragged himself fully upright, trained his bloodshot blue eyes on me, and said with a note of unmistakable accusation, “Oh, Christ. Dogs.”