Paws before dying

Rose Engle-man’s death by lightning.
    I heard the phone ring only because I’d come inside to refill my glass with real lemonade and Leah’s with fake. In the arid ninety degrees, Leah and I were playing Tom Sawyer with the section of fence that encloses the Appleton Street and driveway corner of my yard. We wore old T-shirts and jeans of mine— big on me, small on her—that had descended even below my relaxed standards for kennel clothes. Daubs of white Benjamin Moore augmented the bright freckles on Leah’s arms and nose a nd the paler ones on mine.
    I’m awkwardly blunt at breaking bad news, and especially because Leah had seemed so self-confident and almost nerveless, like a human malamute, I was unprepared for her sobbing. When I’d jammed the lid on the paint can and dropped the brushes in a bucket of water, I put my arm around her shoulders, and I could feel her shaking. We sat in the shade on the paint-spattered grass.
    “I shouldn’t have told you so...,” I started to say. “Bess just called.”
    “Did it hurt her a lot?” Leah was crying so hard that I had trouble making out the words. I found her suddenly a child and myself suddenly the grown-up.
    “I don’t think so. It must’ve been almost instant. I don’t know if it hurt. But if it did, it was only for a second. She was in the tennis court, at the park, where we had class the other night. This was last night, just before dark, when we had all the thunder. Remember?”
    She nodded.
    “It must’ve happened just when she was leaving. The lightning must have hit just when she was opening the door.” The door, of course, was metal. So was the entire high chain link fence surrounding the tennis court. Did the metal bum? Did it hurt? I wanted a real grown-up to assure me that it hadn’t. “Jack found her.”
    “What about Caprice?”
    “She came home alone. That’s how Jack knew something was wrong, because Caprice came home without Rose. He heard her scratching at the door. He went to look and he found Rose.”
    “Holly?”
    “Yes.”
    “Could we not paint anymore now?”
    A few minutes earlier, we’d both been Tom Sawyer. Now I was Aunt Polly, a character, I might add, I’d never liked: the enemy, the ultimate adult. Death means that someone has to be the grown-up, the person who gets stuck pretending to know what the hell is going on. When it comes to dogs, of course, I do know what the hell is going on, at least most of the time, and I don’t mind explaining it to them and telling them what we’re going to do about it and why. But when it comes to people? If Leah hadn’t been crying and asking questions, if she hadn’t been there at all, I’d probably have thrown a clean pair of jeans, a toothbrush, and my dogs into the car and driven to Owls Head, Maine, where Rose’s death would have been far away and where no one—certainly not my father—would have expected me to pay attention to the needs of human beings. I’d have written Jack a letter, sent a donation to a good cause, and, when some time had passed, I’d have talked with people about what a great handler Rose was.
    One of the advantages of living alone—not that anyone with two malamutes is really alone—is never having to explain why you have to leave town. You put the dogs in the car and go. There is no one—a cousin, for instance—who might assume that you’re running away. My mother disapproved of running away. Every time one of our dogs died—and with a lot of dogs, you have a lot of deaths—she made me watch everything, including the burials, especially the burials, because I was supposed to say good-bye and understand it was for keeps. The last one I watched was her own. I haven’t been to a funeral since then. They all feel like hers.
    We did not, of course, have to paint anymore. We washed the paint off our hands and sat glumly in the kitchen drinking tea, patting the dogs, and talking about Rose. To mourn Rose, we still wore our ragged old jeans and shirts, as if we’d torn our clothes in grief.
    “I want to send flowers,” Leah said. “Would roses be stupid?”
    “No, of course not, only you don’t usually send flowers. It’s not a Jewish custom. You send a basket of fruit or something. Or you take food. Or...”
    “So we can’t...”
    “Actually, I don’t know. Rose wasn’t Jewish, but Jack is. I know because one time Rose and I both took a handling seminar sometime around Christmas, and Vera—that was her last poodle,