Paws before dying

Steve’ll be here, and he’ll be staying all night.’ ”
    My own interpretation differed slightly from Rita’s. In wolf packs, it seemed to me, juveniles were too busy chasing and pouncing on each other to pester the adults, who were thus free to stalk musk-oxen, win each other’s favors, and otherwise do their canine equivalents of writing their articles and sleeping with their vets. I’d made what Rita would call my intervention on Monday morning. “Maybe you’d like to have some people over,” I’d said. “Jeff? And anybody you met at that party.” As Rita pointed out, then, it was my own soft howl that first incited the pups to gather. On Monday night, when I returned from interviewing a guy in Arlington about the dating service, the juvenile pack had established itself in my living room in front of Rita’s VCR, borrowed for the evening. On Tuesday, Leah had called all of her new packmates, each of whom had called her at least once. When we got back from dog training on Tuesday night, my answering machine had messages for Leah from Ian, Seth, Miriam, Noah, Monica, and Emma, and didn’t have one from Jeff only because he’d been at dog training with us. I quit answering the phone. Not one of the calls was for me.
    Shortly after I explained what tail spraining was, the bell rang. When I opened the front door, a happy-looking kid holding a big glass vase of long-stemmed red roses asked, “Winter?”
    Nobody sends me flowers.
    “Yes,” I said, “but, uh, there’s a mistake here. We sent roses. They were supposed to go to someone else.” In fact, I’d had them sent to the funeral home on Saturday and had assumed that Jack had thanked Leah during their tête-à-tête. “The names must’ve got mixed up. Damn, that means they never...”
    The kid read from a slip: “Leah Whitcomb, care of Winter, two fifty-six Concord.”
    Her parents? Maybe normal parents do things like that. It’s always hard for me to guess. Not that Marissa was stingy, or that Buck is, either, but, for one thing, Marissa loved flowers and hated to see them cut, and Buck never gives anyone anything except guns, dogs, fishing rods, and relevant accessories, none of which can be sent FTD.
    But the roses weren’t a mistake and weren’t from her parents. They were from Willie Johnson, the youngest lout.
    “What is this white stuff they’re in? It looks like ice.” Awe filled Leah’s voice. She was delighted.
    “Plastic, probably. Some kind of mush that retains moisture.”
    “Aren’t they wonderful?”
    “They’re very romantic,” I said. “I didn’t know...”
    “He’s called a couple of times.”
    “But how did he know...?”
    “From the list,” she said. The list of people in dog training, of course. “Remember?”
    I counted the roses. There were a dozen. I wanted to ask Leah whether she knew how much a dozen long-stemmed roses cost, but I didn’t.
    “I guess I should call and say thank you.”
    “I guess you should,” I said. Marissa always drilled me on the fine points of show ring and social etiquette. “Or you could write a note, I guess. Isn’t that what Jane Austen would’ve done?”
    Leah grinned. “I think I’ll call.”
    When she finally got off the phone, she took Kimi outside to train her, and I called Steve, who was a little irked.
    “Just leave her and come over,” he said. “What’s going to happen?”
    “She’s only sixteen,” I said, “and I don’t know these kids, except Jeff, and what if this one shows up? I don’t want her alone with him. He must be at least two or three years older than she is, and you should see the way he leers at her. Maybe he’s a perfectly nice kid, but she looks older than she is, and I don’t know him, and I’m not all that crazy about what I’ve seen. And, look. Weird stuff is happening. I need to talk to you. Anyway, I need to be here.”
    “And if he asks her out?” Steve said. “You intend to tell her no?”
    “I don’t know. I should’ve got this straight to begin with.
    hen Jeff appeared, I thought I wasn’t going to have to worry about limits like that. Anyway, I don’t know what she’s doing tonight. Maybe Jeff will call, but I don’t want all the rest of them here when I’m not home. Half an hour or something, okay, but not the whole evening. And I don’t want her here alone. Look, these roses are sort of out of line. I mean, he’s seen her maybe four times. At two classes, at the match the other night, and then on