Paws before dying

stunned, like my uncle, and they make a full recovery, maybe because what they got was a shock, not the full force.”
    “But,” I interrupted, “if it was because she was touching the metal fence...?”
    “So how much did it hurt her?” Leah persisted.
    “If she’d lived, she might not have remembered it,” Steve said. “Chances are real good that everything just stopped. Her heart stopped beating. She stopped breathing. Just like that.” His eyes were green and serious and fixed hard on Leah. “She did not lie there in pain. She did not struggle.”
    Her eyes filled with tears, but the tension left her face, and when Jeff Cohen called to invite her to a party in Newton, I could tell that she’d had enough of adult grief and adult explanation.
    “It doesn’t seem very, um, respectful,” she said.
    “Leah, Rose would not have minded,” I assured her. “She’d be glad to hear that you cried for her and that you’ll miss her, but you don’t need to stay home. Do you want the car?”
    “Is that okay?”
    “Fine.” One of the reasons I’d agreed to have her stay in the first place was that she did drive and wouldn’t have to depend on me to ferry her around. “But take Kimi with you. Not to the party. Just leave her in the car, with the windows open enough so she gets air but nobody can get a hand in to reach the locks. If you get a flat or something, and you have to walk somewhere, you won’t be alone.” (At night, with the windows open, fine, but never, ever on a hot day—dogs are horribly vulnerable to heatstroke.)
    After Leah left, I told Steve some things I hadn’t wanted her to hear. “I keep worrying that she was burned, that when she reached out to the gate and touched it, what happened was like a horrible burn. I kept trying to tell Leah that she didn’t feel anything, but it keeps eating at me. And not only that it hurt, but that it hurt in some really intense, gruesome way, like those scenes in movies, electrocutions. It seems like the worst way to die. You downplayed it to her. I know you did.”
    “In animals, it can shatter bones,” he said reluctantly. “Teeth. Most of the time, you don’t see burns or marks, but you can. It can be like I told her. But how do we know? We hear what people say if they survive. We don’t hear the others. It is fast. That’s true. And there can be amnesia, but not always. The truth is I think it can be excruciating. I’m sorry.”
     

Chapter 7

     
    WITH the rigid formality of adolescence, Leah dressed herself in only one layer of nonathletic black and wound the indomitable radiance of her hair into a subdued knot for our visit to Jack Engleman. In lieu of attending the Sunday morning funeral (do I need to make excuses? I could not go), I’d had a fancy basket of fruit delivered to the house. It was a poor substitute, I know, but Jack wanted the funeral small and the burial private, Bess had told me, and she’d suggested that we visit sometime in the late afternoon.
    “Are you nervous about it?” I asked Leah as she artfully mounded the chicken salad on a platter of lettuce.
    “No. Why would I be nervous?”
    “I don’t know. I thought maybe you’d be afraid everybody would be crying. Or you wouldn’t know what to expect.”
    “I don’t exactly know what to expect, but it won’t be anything I can’t handle,” said Leah, a human malamute, after all.
    (“Projection,” my friend and tenant Rita commented later. “You project a lot onto that kid. Just who was anxious?” Obviously, Rita is a therapist, and not the physical kind.)
    On my way out to the car, I saw Kevin Dennehy attacking the scrubby row of barberry between his mother’s yard and mine with a pair of rusty hedge trimmers. I once tried to talk Kevin into replacing the ugly, prickly stuff with something classy like hemlock or juniper, and I even offered to split the cost. He rejected the proposal, and although he never said so outright, I had the impression that I’d made a serious gaffe, like offering to pay for half of a new Audi to avoid the humiliation °f having his Chevy visible from my kitchen window.
    When he saw us, he quit stabbing the barberry and lumbered over, holding the pruners with one hand and wiping the sweat off his face with the other.
    He rumbled in my ear in what was, I think, supposed to be a whisper: “Can I have a word with you?” When Kevin lowers his voice, he adjusts the pitch, not the volume. When I sent Leah back inside to put