Paws before dying

can correct the dog in the ring. You can’t at a sanctioned match, but they’re practice, too. Trials are the ones that count. As Rose had to explain to Leah, obedience trials are usually held in conjunction with dog shows, especially in this part of the country, so obedience people usually just say they’re going to a show. Really, though, a show is for competition in breed—in other words, looks, conformation (how well does each dog conform to the breed standard, the ideal?)—and a trial is for obedience.
    “Are they ever nice!” Leah said in the car on the way home. “You know what? My mother is right, and my father is totally wrong.”
    “Well, he is allergic,” I said.
    “Not about dogs. About Jewish people.”
    “What does he say?”
    “He says they’re all right, and he’s got nothing against them and everything, but that they make you feel excluded. I don’t think that’s true at all.”
    “There are members of our own family who’ve made me feel more excluded than Rose and Jack do. Take Sarah, for example. You know Sarah, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Weil, one time I was at a show in Portland, and my car broke down—this was in the middle of winter—and you know what Sarah did?”
    “Sent you to a Holiday Inn.”
    We both laughed.
    “How did you know that?” I asked.
    “She did it to me once, too. My mother asked if I could stay for one night, and she said there wasn’t any room and I should go to the Holiday Inn. And her house has eighteen rooms.”
    “And when Chrissie got married, I’ll bet she didn’t invite you to the wedding, did she?”
    “No,” Leah said. “My mother said she was afraid she’d have to feed us.”
    “You didn’t miss much. It was those tuna fish sandwiches on Wonder bread.”
    “With the crusts cut off,” Leah said.
    “That’s why people make jokes about Protestant weddings,” I said.
    “My father says that it isn’t being stingy. It’s just avoiding conspicuous consumption.”
    “Well, at Chrissie’s wedding, anything to consume was so inconspicuous you could’ve starved to death. And she didn’t even invite you. Talk about people who make you feel excluded. I mean, these are people who don’t just make you feel excluded. They actually leave you out.”
     

Chapter 5

     
     
    “UGLY,” pronounced Kevin Dennehy, who had planted himself squarely on one of my kitchen chairs with his feet apart on the floor. His thighs are so massive that if he sits down with his feet together, he has to spread his knees like a frog in mid-kick. His arms were crossed on his chest, and the muscles in his cheeks and jaws looked as if he’d figured out how to bulk up his face with free weights. He repeated the word and glowered: “Ugly.”
    “It is ugly,” I said. “Didn’t something like this happen a while ago in Weston?”
    “Yeah. And in Newton before, too. One of the high schools.” He was talking to me, not to Leah.
    “So what did it say exactly?” she asked him. Dressed in hot-pink running shorts over a black leotard and footless tights, she was perched on a stool drinking a glass of a diet drink called Crystal Light, the one food—if you can call it that—she’d asked me to buy for her. It tasted so impotable that even Kimi refused to steal it. “When they called, they just asked if I’d seen anything. They didn’t say much.”
    “Swastikas,” Kevin said. “And anti-, uh, Semitic words. Spray-painted. In red.” His eyes rested briefly on Leah as if she might not understand the symbolism of a swastika, the meaning of anti-Semitic, or the significance of the color red.
    “All of that is fascist, you know,” she informed us. “It’s from Nazi Germany, including the color.”
    “Actually, we do know.” I tried to sound as if Kevin and I happened to be unusually well informed.
    The graffiti had been discovered early that morning by a runner taking a shortcut through Eliot Park. He called the police, who talked to the neighbors and discovered either from them or from Parks and Recreation that Nonantum had been using the park the previous night. The Newton police had called me and everyone else from the club to ask if we’d noticed anything. Leah and I hadn’t seen anything to make us suspicious. The Newton police hadn’t told us any details of the incident, and Kevin knew the few he did only because John Saporski, his colleague and buddy, grew up in Newton.
    “So,” I went on, “all we know is that it happened sometime after