Bride & Groom

terrific, I cleaned the house, took a shower, and fixed myself up. The reporter arrived late and stayed for two hours. We talked mainly about the problems she was having with her Gordon setter, problems attributable to her failure to give the dog any exercise, as I tried to tell her in a tactful manner. After she left, I worried that her article would portray me as a nasty, critical person whose book no one should buy.
    After I’d fed all the dogs and given them time outdoors, I tried to ease my worries about the interview by checking the web sites of the big online booksellers. Browsing by category, I got to Home and Garden, then to Pets, then to Dogs, and finally to Care and Feeding. Ridiculous! If I did the categorization, Dogs would a subcategory of Religion. Anyway, having slightly narrowed the field of comparison, I found that 101 Ways to Cook Liver was doing just great; in fact, if there’d only been a subcategory of liver cookbooks for dogs, I’d have had a bestseller. I also checked on Ask Dr. Mac, which was selling even better than 101 Ways to Cook Liver, and, alas for literature, about 1001 times better than Judith Esterhazys Boudicca.
    At about the time I finished “ego surfing,” as it’s called, searching the web for oneself, Steve arrived home with the takeout food he’d promised to pick up because he’d known how busy I was going to be. Sammy, who was loose in the kitchen, sniffed the bag.
    “I feel guilty,” I said. “You’d rather have real food than sushi.”
    “Your greatest fear about getting married isn’t that we’ll end up miserable or that I’ll cheat on you. It’s that you’ll get stuck cooking every night. And I don’t mind sushi. I like horseradish and ginger. And this isn’t just sushi. I got shrimp.”
    “My greatest fear is economic dependence,” I said. “But speaking of cheating, I have been dying to talk to you since yesterday afternoon. I love Gabrielle, but we haven’t had a second together when we’ve both been awake, and this is about one of Rita’s patients. It’s confidential.”
    “Stop worrying about money. We’re in this together.”
    “In a million years, I’m never going to earn half what you do.”
    “So what? It doesn’t bother me. We do different things. We do things we love. We love each other. We share. Let it go, Holly.”
    “It’s not that I want the kind of marriage where each of us pays exactly half of the electric bill and the gas bill and so on, and where we have to figure out who made which phone calls, and how much of the dog food got eaten by whose dogs.”
    “Yours steal more food than mine. We’d have to factor that in.”
    “Sammy does his share. Don’t you, Sammy? And he’s the only one who chews books.”
    “We’d have to hire a bookkeeper. Forget it. It’s a socialist marriage. To each according to need. That’s all. It’s easy.”
    “Yes, but what’s really a need? As opposed to a want? Or a whim?”
    He laughed. “Dogs are a need. All the rest is extravagance. Let’s eat.”
    As we set the kitchen table and spread out the food, we both kept an eye on Sammy, who had never been fed at the table, except possibly by Kevin, but who hadn’t given up hope, either. When Steve and I sat down opposite each other, Sammy eased his nose onto the table and rested his chin.
    “Leave it,” Steve told him and then finally said to me, “So, what’s up?”
    “Judith Esterhazy,” I said. “She was a patient of Rita’s. Yes, no big deal, except that I think I know more about her than I’m supposed to. The day that Rita and I went shopping and had dinner at the mall, Rita had two margaritas and some wine. I was driving. Anyway, she started telling me about a patient of hers. No names, of course. And Rita wasn’t gossiping. She was talking about a dilemma she was in. She couldn’t tell what reality was. The patient was a woman who thought her husband was cheating on her. The husband said that the wife was paranoid. The woman had stopped treatment. That’s the gist of it. And later, when I asked Rita, she said that she should never have said anything. What I think is that the woman was Judith.”
    “Rita didn’t make any connections?”
    “Why would she? I knew something was up yesterday, at the shower, because Rita was being her social self. She wants to keep up a brave front. She was valiant. She was talking to everyone. And then all of a sudden, she stopped. She had that look that she gets when one of her