Paws before dying

before Caprice—had on one of those Christmas collars. With lights? It’s a regular collar, but it has little green and red lights. They’re powered by a little battery in the collar, and they twinkle off and on.”
    “Isn’t that dangerous?”
    “No. It’s only a nine-volt battery or something. Anyhow, when Rose walked in, Vera had on this collar, which wasn’t exactly like putting up a Christmas tree, but... Anyway, they did both, Christmas and Hanukkah, or maybe he didn’t do Christmas, but she did both. Besides, her name was Rose Marie.”
    “So?”
    “So Marie is not a very common Jewish name.”
    “Maybe she was half Jewish.”
    “I don’t think so, because his family wouldn’t have minded so much then, or at least I don’t think they would’ve, and they did. When he married Rose, his family sat shiva for him. You know what that means? For them, it was as if he’d died. Shiva is mourning. The family stays home for a week, to mourn. People bring food for them, and they visit, and, you know, pay their respects. It’s instead of a wake or visiting hours or whatever.”
    “With the body right there? Yuck.”
    I shook my head. “For Orthodox Jews, the funeral has to be right away, within twenty-four hours. This is after.”
    “Is Jack doing that?”
    “I don’t know.” I expected her to ask how we could avoid going, but she looked brighter-eyed than she had since I’d told her about Rose’s death.
    “If he is,” she asked, “can we go?”
    “Sure,” I said. “I’m sure he’d appreciate it. And I’ll ask around and make sure it’s okay, but if you want to take roses, or send them, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. We can do the traditional thing, too. We’ll take food.”
    “There’s a slight problem with that, isn’t there?” She managed a quirky little smile. “You know.”
    “I know what?”
    “That you don’t cook, exactly.”
    “Relax,” I said. “I know not to show up with homemade dog biscuits.” Actually, why not? In her own way, Caprice was presumably sitting shiva, too. “Anyway, it’s not such a bad idea.”
    “No!”
    “We can buy something.”
    “Don’t you even have a cookbook?”
    “As a matter of fact,” I said smugly, “I do.” I retrieved it from a kitchen drawer and handed it to her. It was one of those spiral-bound compilations of everybody’s favorite recipes, the kind of cookbook that PTAs sell to raise money, but this one hadn’t come from a PTA. It was folded open, and I handed it to Leah that way.
    She read incredulously: “ ‘Preparation H works wonders on those little cuts and scrapes your horse is always getting.’ ”
    “You’re in the wrong section,” I said. “It’s from a humane society. There’s stuff for people somewhere.”
    She flipped pages. “Chicken salad, maybe? Unless it’s for chickens.”
    “It isn’t,” I said. “Make a list.”
    But the sadness hit us again, and that time, we both cried and hugged the dogs. Later, we shopped and cooked together, and for once, I didn’t mind and wasn’t bored because, Leah and I decided, we weren’t just cooking, but performing a ritual, one of the traditional rites of women. I also spent some time on the phone calling a few people who might not have heard and taking calls from others who wanted to make sure I had.
    The ritual distracted Leah, but didn’t, of course, answer her original questions. When Steve showed up at six and I told him what had happened, the first thing she asked him was how much it had hurt.
    Steve is always gentle. “People say that first, they feel nothing,” he told her. “That’s what this uncle of mine says. He was out on his tractor and got hit by lightning. First he didn’t feel a thing, and then it was like he got hit with a giant hammer. Sometimes there’s total amnesia.”
    “Is he all right?” Leah asked.
    “Reborn. His breathing stopped, heart stopped. Lightning death, it’s called. But one of the guys revived him, right away. What can happen is that the heart starts again, but respiration doesn’t, and then there’s brain damage. But some people just recover. Anyway, he decided since he’d died and come back to life, it was a sign. So he swore off alcohol and tobacco. You could say it basically improved his health.”
    “So why did Rose...?”
    “If it was a direct strike, maybe. Not a shock, but a direct strike. What tends to happen is that people are either killed outright or they’re