Bloodlines

Catahoula leopard dog, a Leonberger, a Löwchen? How about a Chinook? Can you get me a Chinook? My heart sank. A Chinook? I love the breed. Her answer could well be yes.
    “Actually,” I said, “I was out this way because of a malamute. I heard there was one for adoption. But by the time I got there, the dog had already been given away.”
    If Mrs. Coakley had been a horse, she’d have reared up. “I know all about that. That was my ex-husband that had that dog—”
    “Bill Coakley.”
    “Let me tell you something. Bill sold that dog. You don’t give away a dog with AKC papers.”
    True enough. Sometimes, no one will take the dog as a gift. Ask anyone who does purebred rescue.
    “Oh,” I said.
    “Besides,” Mrs. Coakley added, “that wasn’t a puppy. You want a dog that will bond with you, don’t you? You want to be special to your own dog. And puppies are so cute. It’s a shame to miss that.”
    “Of course,” I said.
    “You know, scientists have proved that if you don’t start out with a puppy, dogs’ll never recognize you as their owner,” Mrs. Coakley informed me.
    Rowdy wasn’t really mine? Neither was Kimi? The news would come as a big surprise to them.
    “I’ll think about it,” I said, zipping up my parka.
    Mrs. Coakley smiled. “You do that, and you call me anytime and let me know just what you want. Here, let me give you a card.”
    She stepped behind the checkout counter, fished around by the cash register, and handed me a business card. I glanced at it. Her first name was Janice. Janice and Bill Coakley. I tried to imagine them as a couple. I tried to hear people saying things like, “Hm, how about having Janice and Bill to dinner on Saturday?” Their Christmas cards? “Best wishes for the holiday season. Janice and Bill Coakley.” It seemed to me that instead of inviting them to dinner, everyone would’ve said, “Ick! What did she ever see in him?” And if Bill Coakley had so much as brushed his fingers against the Christmas cards, people would’ve opened the envelopes, taken one whiff, and said, “Boy, you don’t even need to look inside to tell who sent this one.” Had Janice and Bill both started out clean? Grubby? And the divorce? Maybe they hadn’t fought about soap and water at all. Maybe they’d fought about money. Maybe they’d fought about dogs.
     

15
     

     
    Kevin Dennehy has spent most of his life in Cambridge. So far as I know, he’s never been west of the Mississippi. It’s possible that he’s never been west of Worcester, Massachusetts. Lately, though, he’s taken to wearing boot-cut jeans and yoked shirts with pearl snaps, not because he actually wants to cultivate a cowboy look but because Walker’s Western Wear is one of the few stores in Greater Boston that sell clothes big enough to accommodate Kevin’s increasing bulk. At six o’clock on Monday evening, he was dressed for a remake of Red River, but all he was doing was burning onions at my kitchen stove.
    Rita, who’s my second-floor tenant and a friend of Kevin’s as well as mine, had taken him to task a week earlier. She’d insisted that if he didn’t start living differently, he’d end up just like his father, dead of a heart attack at the age of forty. What she’d had in mind hadn’t been a radical change in diet. Rita’s a psychotherapist, not a nutritionist. Besides, the meatiest food his mother ever cooks is gluten-flour mock spare ribs. Also, Kevin’s a runner who averages forty or fifty miles a week. No, what Rita had been pushing was some kind of stress reduction seminar at a local holistic-spiritual-East-West-mind-body outfit called Interface. Rita had even unearthed a course catalog and tried to press it on Kevin. Unfortunately, though, he’d flipped it open to a page that listed a weekend workshop in which participants would travel to a forest in western Massachusetts where they’d track animals in the wild and learn to identify them by their spoor, in other words, their tracks and droppings.
    “Spoor!” Kevin had hollered. “You know what spoor means?” He’d turned to me. “You get this? You really get this? If I don’t want to die of a heart attack, I’m supposed to go out in the woods and stick my nose in raccoon shit? Jesus Christ. I don’t believe it.” Then he’d pulled himself together, taken a big swig of Budweiser, and said, “Pardon my French.”
    That’s presumably what led to Rita’s next piece of advice, namely, that if Kevin would