Gaits of Heaven

of pale lavender. Her pale blond curls were held back with little white barrettes. Baby girl, indeed. Daddy’s plump baby girl.
    “Holly, this is my father, Monty,” Caprice said. “Daddy, this is Holly. She’s the one I’m staying with, Holly and her husband. Holly is my friend Leah’s cousin.”
    “I’m very grateful,” Monty said as he shook my hand. His late ex-wife, I suspected, would’ve thrown her arms around me, gushed about her gratitude, and told me how special I was. By comparison, Monty’s ordinary civility felt... I am tempted to say that it felt special. After all, if everything is special, what’s left to be truly special? Ordinariness.
    Caprice, her father, and I exchanged a few words. I said that Steve and I were happy to have Caprice stay with us. Monty said that he was going back to New York tomorrow after he’d taken Caprice out to lunch. Ted came rushing up to me, threw his arms around me, and told me how glad he was to see me. He wore a sage green linen suit with a shirt of what looked like unbleached, unironed muslin. “You were so special to Eumie,” he said. Diverted by the arrival of yet more people, he hurriedly pointed toward the dining room, told all three of us to help ourselves to food, and moved away to greet the new visitors.
    If I were entirely human instead of half malamute, I’d have been driven toward the dining room by my sensitivity to Caprice’s desire to have time alone with her father. In fact, the driving force was my quest for food. The diningroom table and a long sideboard held an almost incredible spread that was being neglected by most of the other guests, who, I assumed, lived the kinds of unappetizing lives characteristic of people who fail to receive daily infusions of big, hungry dog DNA. The offerings were characteristic of Jewish rites of passages but combined the typical dishes of a big Jewish wedding with those of a big Jewish breakfast. Tremendous platters contained delectable arrangements of chicken, roast beef, and grilled vegetables. There were baskets of bagels, bialys, and black bread, bowls of cream cheese, plates of lox, tomatoes, and cukes, dishes of half-sour pickles, and two supersize green salads. My initial survey also identified noodle kugel, a gigantic poached salmon, and—oh, bliss!— blintzes, which are the Jewish version of crepes, thin pancakes filled with ambrosial cheese and served with sour cream and jam. To convey my appreciation of this display of gustatory generosity, I should mention that I come from a New England WASP background and have yet to shake the expectation that the so-called food offered to fifty or a hundred mourners will consist of one small plate of 1/2-by-1/2-inch brownies and another of l/2-by-l/2-inch lemon squares accompanied by your choice of watery tea or see-through coffee.
    Anyway, filling their plates were two people, one of whom I was surprised to recognize as Rita’s psychopharmacologist date, Quinn Youngman. The other was a young woman with long, straight dark hair, Asian features, and a rather tall, athletic build. When I approached, Quinn was telling her that his choice of psychopharmacology had been a natural extension of his previous interest in drugs of all sorts, if she knew what he meant. After I’d interrupted, he introduced us, and that’s how I met Missy Zinn, Caprice’s therapist, whose plate held a bagel with cream cheese and lox, a chicken breast, and roasted eggplant. As I ate blintzes with sour cream and blueberry jam, we were joined by a lanky, sandy-haired guy who turned out to be an adult rather than the teenage boy I’d taken him for. In fact, he was Peter York, Wyeth’s therapist. Fortunately, I didn’t have to mention Wyeth. Instead, I said, “You’re in supervision with Rita. She’s a good friend of mine.”
    “And mine,” said Quinn Youngman.
    As we ate, we said flattering things about Rita. A pleasant-looking fortyish woman I’d never seen before overheard and misunderstood us. “Eumie was a dear friend to a lot of people,” she said. “Eumie changed my life.”
    I didn’t know what to say. That’s nice would’ve felt hopelessly inadequate. Luckily, Ted spoke up to ask everyone to move into the living room and the family room. Brushing past me, he murmured, “Damn Johanna. I invited her, and I expected her to have the decency to turn up.”
    Following the crowd, I found that the wall between the two big rooms was actually a pair of sliding doors