Paws before dying

icons nor Zuni fetishes placed the menorah in a meaningful cultural context.
    Rose’s husband, Jack, a burly guy with radiant health-club skin, walked in from the kitchen carrying a plate that held a mound of potato salad and a fat, lettuce-garnished sandwich on a bulkie roll. When he was introduced to Leah, he didn’t make her self-conscious by remarking on her beautiful red hair or, worse, asking where she’d got it. Although I don’t think he’d ever owned a dog, I’d met him at shows. Once years ago when my old car broke down at a show in Rhode Island, he’d located a mechanic to patch it up and insisted that he and Rose follow me back to Cambridge in case it conked out again. Two weeks later, when the same thing happened at a show in Portland, Maine, my cousin Sarah, who lives there, lectured me about joining Triple A and directed me to a Holiday Inn.
    “Thanks,” I said when he offered us food, “but we’ve eaten.”
    “Just a little something,” Rose said.
    After Jack covered the table with plates of sandwiches and containers of potato salad, coleslaw, and pickled tomatoes that we had with iced tea, he joined Rose in apologizing for the louts next door, but also tried to temper her indignation.
    “It was that Dale.” Rose’s pretty voice was angry. “I caught sight of him, all right. He’s the one with all the hoodlum friends. Mitch is outgrowing it, and Willie’s always just let himself get dragged in.” Her clenched fist rested on the table, and Jack covered it with his hand.
    “Enough,” he told her, then, glancing at Leah, added, “The less said, the better.”
    Rose ignored him. “Willie is not a bad boy. You know, he was at dog training tonight? I was so surprised to see him. With the new dog? Obviously he’s been reading a dog-training book and practicing on his own.”
    Willie, it seemed, had been one of Leah’s two admirers in the Novice group, the one with the half-shaved head and the young, light-coated German shepherd.
    “The dog is Righteous. I didn’t get the guy’s name.” Leah already spoke like a true dog person.
    “Willie’s one of mine.” Rose sounded as if a poodle of hers had whelped his litter.
    “Rose was his kindergarten teacher,” Jack translated for Leah. “Everyone here had Rose.”
    “Not everyone,” Rose corrected him. “Newton has open enrollment. But quite a few. Case is a small school, only one kindergarten. You know where it is? Not far from the park. So I had most of the neighborhood children. Willie was mine. The other two started at Ward, but, if you ask me, the parents decided it was too Jewish, and they switched to Case, in spite of me.
    “Then you’ve been neighbors for a while?” I said. “I mean, you’ve had to . .
    Jack contemplated a forkful of coleslaw. “Fifteen years.”
    “And,” Rose said, “they’ll never move because Edna won’t leave the house.”
    “Edna Johnson, the wife. She suffers from agoraphobia,” Jack said sympathetically. “All the more reason to overlook what—”
    Rose slapped an open palm on the table. “Overlook! Don’t—”
    “Rose, enough,” he said firmly. “This is not—”
    “You’re right. I’m making it worse.” She smiled at Leah. “And the truth is, they are not the only ones. The woods... You know that’s still Eliot Park, across the street. Eliot Woods, they call it. Well, it’s...”
    “It’s a lovers’ lane,” Jack finished.
    “Lovers’ lane!”
    “It’s only in the summer,” Jack said. “They drink beer, they carouse. Who knows?”
    “Who knows? I know. You know.”
    “Every town in the world, there’s a lovers’ lane,” Jack said calmly and indulgently.
    “The problem next door,” Rose said, “is who would bring friends home there? With his drinking and her…“
    Jack nodded to her. “So you see? Who could blame them? They throw beer bottles, cans. It’s nothing,” he explained to me. Then he turned to Rose. “So now we pick them up and recycle them. So what?”
    We stayed for another hour or more. Jack almost succeeded in keeping Rose off the topic of the family next door. Her occasional returns to it left me with the vague impression that there had been years of trouble between the two households, including some trouble involving dogs. Mostly, though, Rose and Leah outlined a totally unrealistic program of taking Kimi to matches during July, then entering her in some trials in August. Fun matches, fine. They really don’t count, and you