Bride & Groom

neither of us had wanted to endure another breath of inside air. Hank Williams was singing “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” The light mounted on the side of the house and the ambient city light let us keep our eyes on our dogs. All five were loose in the yard. When I was alone with them, I let them loose only in carefully selected combinations because I didn’t want to risk a dogfight. Steve trusted his ability to stop trouble before it led to bloodshed. Also, if the dogs tore one another to pieces, he’d be able to stitch them back together, whereas my profession left me with nothing more helpful to do than write about what had happened.
    “Couples who merge two sets of children have it easy,” I said.
    “Kids are just as likely to wreck yards and go for one another’s throats,” Steve pointed out.
    I got up and was heading toward the house when Steve read my intention of startling Sammy with a blast of cold water. “Sammy, leave it,” he said quietly.
    Sammy quit digging. If you live with golden retrievers, you may fail to grasp the astonishment I felt. If you live with malamutes, you will be stunned.
    “You should teach at Hogwart’s,” I said.
    “What?”
    “The school for wizards in Harry Potter. A teenage malamute just obeyed you. You’re magic with animals.”
    “You’re just magic.” Steve clinked his wineglass against mine.
    Before the potentially romantic interlude could develop, the heavily Boston-accented voice of Kevin Dennehy sounded at the gate. “Anyone want a beer?” That’s a translation. The original was Anyone wanna bee-uh?
    The one who did was Kevin, whose mother banned alcohol and meat from the house they shared. Beer and hamburger were the foundations of my friendship with Kevin. Soon after I’d moved in, he’d arranged for space in my refrigerator. Now, I unlocked the gate and welcomed Kevin, as did all five dogs, especially Rowdy and Kimi, who bumped against each other in their zeal to get close to him and sing their weirdly human-sounding woo-woo-woos. Coached by the elders of his tribe, Sammy picked up the song. Lady, eternally fearful, hung back. India, who’d been sensibly resting on the ground to avoid elevating her body temperature in the evening heat, remained exactly where she’d been.
    Kevin was carrying two cold six-packs. To make room for him, Steve and I moved from the bench to the steps, and Kevin joined us there. Steve and I stayed with the red wine we’d been drinking. When Kevin popped the top off his beer, however, Rowdy and Kimi dashed to him, their eyes gleaming, their tails practically beating out the rhythm of a beer commercial. “Tattle tales,” he told them.
    For fifteen or twenty minutes, the three of us and the five dogs hung out together. The youngest dog, the inexhaustible Sammy, roused the others to short bursts of running, but the four grown-up dogs succumbed to summer-night lethargy. Lady overcame her timidity enough to station herself next to Kevin, who was chronically guilty of violating my ban on wrestling with malamutes, but stroked the nervous little pointer as delicately as if she’d been a Chihuahua. Steve and I drank wine, Kevin drank beer, and the dogs drank a lot of water from their communal bucket. I updated Kevin on our wedding plans. Steve told him about the book we were writing together and asked about his progress in recovering from the gunshot wound in the chest he’d received the previous spring. Kevin said that his girlfriend, Jennifer, was teaching him Tai Chi and that he was hoping to be able to start running again in October. We discussed the murder of Dr. Laura Skipcliff. The three of us agreed that anyone could’ve entered the parking garage by taking the elevator in the hotel lobby; patrons of the hotel’s bars and restaurants used it all the time, as did people who didn’t want to bother searching for on-street parking in Harvard Square. No one, certainly not Kevin, said that the murder would go unsolved, but I somehow felt the presence of a comfortable boundary that relegated the murder to the past and kept it safely separate from the lazy, companionable present I was now enjoying. I slipped into a hypnotic haze induced by the combination of the semidarkness, the wine I’d drunk, the humid warmth of the evening, my love for Steve and our five dogs, my affection for Kevin, and the heartbreaking voice of Patsy Cline singing “Sweet Dreams.”
    All of a sudden, I was jarred into vigilant consciousness.