Bloodlines

and the Bronco might as well have had DOG PERSON painted in big professional red letters on its old blue doors. A new Euro-style wagon barrier fenced off Rowdy and Kimi’s area, which also held two large metal-mesh crates and two old blankets originally made of wool but now richly interwoven with soft, pale malamute undercoat and long dark guard hairs. The new seat cushions and floor mats, Christmas presents from Steve, were the ones you may have noticed in the Orvis catalog—gray background with handsome black paw prints? The bumpers didn’t proclaim that I heart Alaskan malamutes or urge “Caution: Show Dogs,” but a bumper sticker on the front read “My dog is smarter -1 than your dog or your brother,” which is true except that they both are... and probably smarter than the average sister, too.
    I could’ve stripped off the brag and removed the barrier, crates, blankets, cushions, and mats, of course, but I’d had barely enough time to transform myself from a malamute-owned dog writer—furry jeans and T-shirt—to a semblance of my image of the ideal pet shop client, which is to say, as people actually do say here in Cambridge, the Significant Other of the kind of husband who knows that the little lady needs something to love and senses that in spite of his MasterCard, Visa, and American Express Platinum, he isn’t it. I’d washed and moussed my hair and blown it dry, rather skillfully, I might add, thanks to my experience in readying golden retrievers for the show ring and what my father flatteringly considers to be the uncanny resemblance of my own mop to their glowing coats. Marissa, my mother, disapproved of the AKC-banned practice of cosmetically eradicating pink spots on otherwise dark noses, and none of my show dogs has ever had pigmentation problems, anyway. Nonetheless, I own mascara, as well as foundation makeup, blush, and lipstick, all of which I’d applied rather heavily. I’d put on good knee boots and a suburban-looking green corduroy dress, and I hadn’t removed the dry cleaner’s suffocating plastic i from my navy winter coat until I’d stepped out of my furry house.
    Even so, when Steve found me in front of the optician’s shop studying the display of tortoiseshell frames in the window, he managed to recognize me. In fact, I was the one who almost didn’t recognize him. For one thing, he’d shaved and, for another, he’d obviously just had one of his twice or thrice yearly haircuts, if you can call it that. His hair, when he has any, is brown, and it’s normally wavy, like the coat on the shoulders of a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Now he looked like a tall, upright Airedale with green-blue eyes and bad clipper burn.
    I kissed him anyway and then removed a glove and felt his whiskery scalp. “Um, did Lorraine do that?” I asked. It was a stupid guess. Lorraine, the vet tech who really runs Steve’s practice, is an excellent groomer.
    Steve suppressed a grin, shook his raw head, and said, “Rhonda.” His face shone with the amazed pride I’d last seen there three weeks earlier when India, his German shepherd, took Highest Scoring Dog in Open B. India is a wonderful obedience dog. Rhonda is no groomer at all. The German shepherd is not a clippable breed, but even if it were, Steve wouldn’t have trusted India to Rhonda. At least before. “She did a great job, didn’t she? I didn’t want to ask her or Lorraine, but when I went to take a look and see how booked up I was, Rhonda was there, and I said, ‘Damn, I don’t have time for a haircut.’ So she said she’d give it a try.”
    Steve was wearing the expensive Christmas-present V-necked cable-knit sweater over nondescript khaki pants. Despite weather almost too cold for my dogs, he’d left unbuttoned what is possibly the best men’s topcoat in the city of Cambridge. I can’t even imagine what it must’ve originally cost, but Steve picked it up at one of the world’s most venerable used menswear establishments. You know Cambridge? If not, I should tell you that Keezer’s is where gentleman’s-C-student, son-of-alumni-admitted Harvard preppies short of cash sell their Brooks Brothers and J. Press apparel and where Max Keezer resells it to straight-A-student, admitted-on-merit, full-scholarship undergraduates, thus enabling the brainy nouveau-Cantabrigian proletariat literally to wear the cloak of the elite. Anyway, Keezer’s is also open to the public and is how Steve happened to own a camel topcoat made of