Gaits of Heaven

must’ve used her last name. It stuck with me.” Caprice wasn’t gazing at the ceiling or shifting around. Her eyes continued to meet mine.
    “Or possibly you looked her up. On Google? Or somewhere else. On one of the Deep Web sites? Let me guess something else. You looked me up, too. And Steve.”
    The facade broke. Tears ran down Caprice’s face.
    “Hey,” I said, “it’s okay! I’m sorry! Caprice, I don’t care. What’s there to find out about Steve and me? Nothing!” I got up, found a box of tissues, and handed it to Caprice. “If you looked me up, all you found was more than any sane human being has ever wanted to know about dogs.”
    A smile crossed her face.
    “It’s okay. I mean that. What’s getting to me isn’t that you checked us out. I use Google, too, you know. What’s making me uneasy is this feeling of secrecy. Not that I expect you to come right out and say, ‘Hey, I see that you’ve published forty thousand articles about flea control, and they all say the same thing.’ It’s—”
    “It’s that I was sneaky.”
    “We would’ve told you, you know. All you had to do was ask. But for all you knew, we had something to hide. I did. Or Steve did.”
    “If you do,” said Caprice, “it’s not on the Web.”
     

CHAPTER 29«
     
    Caprice apologized, and I ended up giving her a big hug. I then repeated my request not to open the door to Anita, and Rowdy and I left. Even though I was relieved to have confronted Caprice and even though I felt justified in having ordered Anita off my property, I needed time to commune with Rowdy.
    As planned, I drove Rowdy to the park behind the Fresh Pond Mall. Newcomers to Cambridge probably wonder how many trees were felled to create so large an area of grass. The answer is none: as I prefer to forget when I’m there and as you’d never guess to look at it, the place was once a dump. My only objection to it was the occasional presence of dog-aggressive off-leash dogs. That afternoon, there were no dogs in sight. The sky had clouded up, and the temperature had dropped. More to the point, there was no wind to blow away the rally signs I was placing here and there on the rough grass. At rally events, the signs are fastened to wooden stakes in the ground, and the particular signs are chosen to mark off a varied course, but my signs had no stakes, and I chose the particular exercises more or less at random. At the Novice level, rally offered no challenge to Rowdy or to any other dog with experience in competition obedience, but the shift was as difficult for me as it was easy for Rowdy. Learning to interpret the rally signs was like learning to decode traffic signs. I was becoming accustomed to the rules of the rally road, but I was still finding it hard to shake the high-pressure attitude of competition obedience, which is to say, the attitude responsible for my ring nerves. My reflexive response was to say, Well, perfect heeling doesn’t cost points, and scoring is scoring, so don’t settle for less than perfection! Worse, when I mulled over the idea that rally was supposed to be fun, I thought, Fun? Oh, we’ll be good at that. We'll be better than everyone else!
    Anyway, once I’d finished laying out the course of stations marked by signs, Rowdy and I moved to the first station, marked by the start sign, where I automatically said, “Place,” and raised my left hand to signal Rowdy to get into flawless heel position and focus on my face. Losing myself in his all-but-black eyes, I said, “Rowdy, habits are hard to break. We don’t need to do this, buddy. In fact, we’re allowed to rush hell-for-leather-leash into the rally course. You get to bounce around. I get to clap my hands and talk and whistle and cluck my tongue. And not just here, either. At real rally trials. If, that is, I have it left in me to loosen up. You do. So please remind me of how it’s done, chum. I need you.” I paused to take deep breaths in and out, and I released Rowdy: “Okay!” Then we started all over by running to the first station, a left turn, easy enough, and on to a moving side step right, into a fast pace, on to three spirals with Rowdy on the outside, and so forth, and all the while, I chattered and whistled and kept going so fast that precision was out of the question, and when we finally reached the finish sign, I was overjoyed at our success in having performed the exercises with admirably sloppy exuberance. Then we dashed through the course