Creature Discomforts

carries a message about God’s Country: KEEP MAINE GREEN, SHOOT A DEVELOPER!
    Not that Holly’s father is in any way Holly’s fault. Still, Steve feels an irrational gratitude to Anita for having a father who is neither a private irritant nor a public embarrassment. As Steve heads north on the turnpike, he looks forward to seeing Malcolm Fairley. Steve reminds himself that if he keeps his ears open at dog shows and flees at the first hint of a mooselike bellow, he will never see Buck Winter again.
     

Chapter Twelve
     
    NOT THAT I WANT TO COMPARE Anita Fairley to the raspberry pies. The simultaneous arrival was a meaningless coincidence. The pies were made of fresh raspberries and topped with whipped cream. Fresh raspberries, as everyone knows, are wildly expensive because they’re so fragile. They don’t keep. One minute, they’re delectable. The next, they’re covered with mold. Sometimes it’s white fuzz. Sometimes it’s green slime. Then you have to throw them out. Whipped cream, when you think about it, pretends to be something it isn’t. It’s an ordinary liquid puffed up to artificial heights by having a lot of air beaten into it. At bottom, a raspberry pie is just crust. One other thing. Even if the raspberries are beautifully fresh and taste wonderful, they still leave seeds stuck between your teeth. But as I hope to emphasize, there’s no comparison. I like raspberry pie.
    I don’t want to compare Anita to a dog, either. And not just because I like dogs. Love dogs. Whatever. The point is that even a resounding crack on the head hadn’t eradicated my facility for what I assure you is not mental telepathy or clairvoyance or any other psychic power. Take, for example, my apparently uncanny ability to predict when a dog is going to vomit. Not to brag, but I really can do it. Not years, months, weeks, days, or even hours before the event. But minutes before. Seconds, sometimes. Still, seeing the future is, after all, seeing the future, even if the future in question is only seconds away. I mean, one minute the dog is standing in the middle of a rug that can’t go through the washing machine. And the dog obviously intends to keep standing there. Specifically, he has no intention of ambling onto some conveniently washable surface like linoleum, tile, or even wood, and he certainly doesn’t plan to run considerately to the bathroom in the fashion of a person suddenly hit with nausea. And the dog, being a dog, doesn’t groan, grab his stomach, and say something readily interpretable like, “Hey there! I’m about to deposit a gooey mass of intestinal juices and half-digested food on your rug!” If there’s a real dog person around, he doesn’t have to. What the dog does, you see, is to lift the comers of his mouth. If you’re a dog person, that’s what you see, anyway. And in plenty of time to rush up, grab his collar, and hustle him off the rug and onto the nearest washable surface. If you’re not yet a dog person, of course, you’re so tickled by the dog’s darling expression that you exclaim, “Oh, look! He’s smiling! Isn’t that cute!” But after you’ve cleaned up after a few of those smile episodes, you make the connection. You develop the apparently inexplicable ability to read the dog’s mind and to predict the future. Clairvoyance! The gift of prophecy! Admittedly, it would be better to be able to foresee something really valuable or useful, like what the stock market is going to do next or whether saying yes to a marriage proposal means a half century of true love or six months of noisy desperation. But gifts are gifts, no matter how small, and surely it’s better to be able to predict when dogs are going to vomit than to be unable to see the future at all?
    To return to my original point, which concerns Anita Fairley, there’s nothing psychic about my occasional flashes of insight about what my fellow creatures are thinking and what they’re going to do next. Anita, I hasten to add, was not on the verge of getting sick to her stomach. Not that it would have mattered. We were outdoors, on the rocky shore of the ocean, not in the middle of a rug. Anyway, in a flash, I suddenly knew as surely as if Anita Fairley had spoken aloud that she just ate up being seen with this man. She gobbled it up with the ardor my dogs would’ve shown if they’d been turned loose on the raspberry pies. And how could I blame her? If I’d been with him, I’d have felt the same