Gaits of Heaven

appearance at the armory on that Thursday evening, my imagination tempts me to attribute at least a little of the relief to a sort of emotional precognition, a fleeting feeling of happiness that she is not going to die right now, but I don’t believe that Eumie glimpsed the future. As a general principle, I reject the notion of fortune-telling and thus won’t allow it in what is, after all, fantasy, albeit fantasy that is as realistic as imagination can make it. No, the source of Eumie’s relief is the sense that her beloved dog, Dolfo, is going to be in capable hands, which is to say, my hands, and that she is thus going to be able to hire a housekeeper who won’t abandon her the way the last one did. Eumie would, I think, have agreed with this portrayal of her. She’d have acknowledged that safety and money were important to her.
    “Dolfo developed an immediate bond with Holly, don’t you think?” she says to Ted in her squeaky but weirdly sweet voice. “A special bond. There was something so tender about the way he looked at her."
    In the backseat, Dolfo responds to the sound of his name by beating his bizarre tail on the leather upholstery. His face wears the smug look of a dog who understands that life has landed him in an altogether cushy situation.
    “I know who she is,” says Ted. “Holly Winter. She’s married to the ex-husband of one of my patients. Anita Fairley. Anita’s that lawyer I told you about. Beautiful woman. Very traumatized. The ex-husband must be that guy with the huskies.”
    “The hunk.”
    “He’s a vet.”
    “Gulf War?” Eumie asks.
    Ted smiles. “Veterinarian.”
     

CHAPTER 3
     
    I had no opportunity to talk to Steve during our class, which was the second in a series of four workshops on rally obedience. By comparison with the rigid formality of traditional obedience competition, rally-O was relaxed and easygoing. Obedience zealot that I am, I’d initially assumed that since rally failed to demand precision heeling, there was something morally suspect about it; and when I’d learned that rally handlers were supposed to talk to their dogs during the exercises, I’d decided that it was outright heretical. Imagine a Roman Catholic of fifty years ago who dutifully attends mass only to be told that there’s no need to go to confession and that it’s fine to eat meat on Fridays. The new sport turned out not to be sinful. For one thing, I’d found it surprisingly difficult. I was used to having a judge give orders, whereas in rally, the handler receives directions from a series of signs that mark a course. Some signs were readily interpretable: Halt. Others consisted of lines and arrows depicting, for instance, the route to follow around orange traffic cones or the manner in which the team should execute an about-turn. For another thing, rally classes turned out to be fun, and I’m convinced that the heavens smile on any sport that makes handlers laugh and dogs wag their tails. But would the lighthearted atmosphere of rally cure my ring nerves? I had no idea.
    For the first rally workshop, which I’d attended a week earlier, I’d taken Rowdy, who was an experienced obedience dog and as such had left me free to concentrate on decoding the cryptic signs. Steve had been absent because of an emergency with one of his patients, a dog that had been hit by a car after running away from an off-leash playgroup. Tonight, Steve had intended to take India, his highly accomplished German shepherd bitch—a clean technical term here in the dog world—but she’d developed a limp at the last minute, so he’d ended up with Rowdy, and I’d boldly decided to take Sammy, whose only qualification for rally was that he and the sport were both about play. At the age of about sixteen months, Sammy was an adolescent puppy, and even for a young Alaskan malamute, he was wildly exuberant and thoroughly exhausting.
    As Steve, Rowdy, Sammy, and I left the armory for home, I said, “Rally is perfect for Sammy. It’s high energy. Do one exercise, rush to the next one, zip through that, lots of bounce and chatter. The one thing that bothers me is that no one ever comments on how good Sammy is. All anyone ever says is, 'Wow! What a beautiful dog!’ ”
    “He is a beautiful dog,” Steve said.
    Sammy had started out as Steve’s puppy. A few years earlier, Steve and I had split up, in part because I’d repeatedly refused to marry him. He’d soon married someone else, Anita Fairley, the