Gaits of Heaven

physical contact with him, I’d enter his energy field and be healed in places I wasn’t even wounded. Tracker, however, needed him more than I did. If I awakened Steve, he wouldn’t mind and would be able to go instantly back to sleep, but my hand would scare Tracker away. I settled for using my eyes in place of my fingertips. Within a few minutes, I felt peaceful and sleepy and overwhelmingly fortunate. I turned off the light and slept until eight the next morning.
    I almost never sleep that late, but it was the kind of dark, rainy morning that almost anesthetizes dogs, and, in any case, Steve had left me a note to say that he’d given the dogs a quick trip out before he and Leah, together with Lady, India, and Sammy, had left for work. Now and then, I enjoyed a morning of regression to my unmarried life with my two original dogs. ( Unmarried! With dogs, you’re not exactly single.) At nine-thirty, Rowdy and Kimi were dozing on the kitchen floor, and I was writing a column about custodial pets, as I called them, Tracker being a good example. I’d rescued her from a horrible life that had been about to come to a cruel end when I’d intervened. After restoring her to health, I’d done my best to find her a good home. Rowdy and Kimi had made my own far from ideal, but no one had wanted her, in part because of her disfiguring birthmark and torn ear, in part because of her unfriendly behavior. People want cute, sweet cats, preferably kittens. I’d reconciled myself to keeping her. Her life was, I believed, far better than none at all—and death was the alternative. The column was about what I’d learned from Tracker. The main lesson was humility: after a lifetime spent with dogs—and a few cats—I’d finally learned that I’d been taking far more credit than I deserved for sweet temperaments and loveable behavior. I’d have denied it. But I’d been doing it all along. By comparison with most other people, I am still a Higher Power when it comes to dogs, but I now know in my heart what I previously knew only in my thick head: that there are animal behaviors I can’t modify. Damn it all. But there are. I’d learned other lessons, too: provide vet care, food, grooming, physical safety, and emotional availability to even the ugliest and nastiest animal, do it all out of a sense of responsibility and none of it out of affection, and damned if you won’t end up feeling loyalty and even a weird kind of love for the custodial pet.
    “People aren’t going to like this,” I told the dogs. “My readers are going to e-mail a lot of complaints about what a lousy cat owner I am. Even people who read Dog’s Life'. But there are dogs like Tracker, and they deserve to live, too, and I’m not going to apologize for saying so.” The dogs’ beautiful brown eyes shone with eagerness and admiration. I sometimes wish that Dog’s Life were for dogs and not just about them. If that were the case, the publication would have to be edible to be popular. We could offer it in different flavors: liver, beef, or peanut butter. The canine subscribers, however, wouldn’t care what was printed on the delicious pages, so I’d be out of a job.
    At noon, when Caprice appeared in the kitchen, I’d completed the first draft of the column. Her hair was damp from the shower, and she was dressed up for lunch with her father. Her outfit, like the one she’d worn the previous night, bore what I found to be a disquieting resemblance to a little girl’s dress. It was pale blue, and her shoes were white Mary Janes. Her weight, I thought, didn’t account for the voluminousness of her clothing, and it certainly didn’t explain her preference for pastel colors. Leah, with her red-gold curls, would’ve looked great in the pale blue traditionally recommended for redheads, but, in the hope of being seen as a young Simone de Beauvoir, she favored black, which really is slimming. I’d have been happy to see Caprice in black linen, which she did own. Holly Winter, fashion consultant: specializing in faded jeans, dog-themed T-shirts, and kennel clothes. I was no one to talk.
    Although I offered Caprice a ride, she insisted on calling a taxi. After she left, I made myself some chicken salad and looked through the newspaper, which had one short paragraph reporting that Eumie Brainard-Green’s death was being treated as a homicide. A husband who organizes the kind of big memorial service I’d attended the previous night might be expected to