Bloodlines

honest-to-God cashmere that felt as soft as a pussycat’s throat and didn’t advertise his profession by showing pet fur, either.
    Puppy Luv was two doors down from the optician’s shop, beyond a two-pairs-for-the-price-of-one women’s shoe outlet and before a discount drugstore. A large permanent sign hanging in the window advertised AKC PUPPIES. Taped to the plate glass underneath was a big red heart with a message in white letters: LOVE IS A WARM PUPPY. Next Thursday would be Valentine’s Day. Dotted around were small red hearts edged in white paper lace, each bearing a breed name: Scottish terrier, cocker spaniel, Italian greyhound, Pomeranian, Dalmatian, poodle, Boston terrier, Maltese, Norwegian elk-hound, chow chow. And Alaskan malamute.
    Steve stepped ahead of me, pushed on the door, held it, and ushered me in. Knowing what I knew about puppy mills, I expected... well, if you don’t know what I knew, maybe you’ll be offended, but I expected a canine Buchenwald Boutique, a woofy Auschwitz Annex—and if the comparison seems to make light of suffering, you know nothing whatsoever about puppy mills.
    Puppy Luv, though, was anything but grim. Red crepe paper streamers were looped from the ceiling, red hearts dangled here and there, and the place was bright, cheery, and spotless. A hint of the fragrance of small dog stood out against a pleasant background of cedar, Nilodor, and dog food.
    Directly ahead of us was a check-out counter banked by bins of what the wholesale kennel supply catalogs always push as “the perfect impulse items”: latex toy dragons, hedgehogs, ducks, fire hydrants, trumpets, pianos, and ears of corn in bright primary colors; rawhide chews ranging in length from three inches to a yard; plastic packets of beef jerky treats, freeze-dried liver, and dog cookies shaped like people. Ha-ha. Presiding over the cash register was a pretty woman with dark ringlets and the foreshortened face, wide cheekbones, and ever so slightly strabismic amber-green eyes of a Siamese cat. I am not making this up. Why should I? And if you don’t trust my take on her, consider that she’d evidently noticed the resemblance herself and liked it enough to accentuate it: The pink-tinted plastic frames of her glasses narrowed and flared up at the outer corners. Also, under a white surgeon’s coat she wore a pink angora sweater. Yes, angora. Real life, though, unlike fiction, never goes too far: According to the name tag pinned to the lapel of her white cotton coat, she was not called Kitty. There was nothing even remotely feline about her name, which, according to the tag, was Diane Sweet.
    “Good morning,” said Diane Sweet, briefly looking up from a pile of papers she was sorting. “Let me know if you need any help, okay?” Her unnaturally bright pink tongue darted rapidly in and out of her mouth. I wondered whether the intense rose color could be a sign of some mild zoonotic illness I’d never heard of: cat’s tongue fever, Persian glossitis.
    “Sure,” Steve told her. “Thanks.”
    He led the way across the front of the store, past a rack of greeting cards (basset hounds wearing sunglasses, goldens in silly hats), big displays of premium dog food (Eukanuba, Science Diet, Natural Life), and piles of plastic-protected dog beds in every size from ultratoy to maxigiant in colors to coordinate with every decor and ranging in shape from the basic circle to that popular anomaly, the dog-biscuit-shaped sheepskin nest. I mean, do you see children’s double bunks in the form of a Big Mac? Well, maybe you do. Anyway, turquoise fiberglass cages lined the left-hand wall of the store. Directly ahead of us were two tiers of small cages, twelve above, twelve below. A waist-high clear plastic barrier parallel to the cage banks was evidently intended to deter customers from sticking their fingers into the cages or opening the wire mesh doors. Each cage bore a placard showing the puppy’s breed. The labels were accurate. A neatly lettered and discreetly worded sign fastened to the wall above the cages read: “ASK ABOUT PUPPY LUV’S UNIQUE LUV ON TIME PLAN.” Another sign advertised Puppy Luv’s “six-month complete health guarantee.”
    At the extreme right of the cage bank were four one-story cages meant for large-breed dogs. Each of these cages was about the size of the inside of a dishwasher and just as interesting, too. The Alaskan malamute resided twenty-four hours a day in the first dishwasher.
    I