Paws before dying

my father still lives. Rowdy’s big color-coordinated red tongue is hanging out, he’s smiling, and especially in harness, he doesn’t really look much like a wolf. Because of the snow, you can’t see that the lawn isn’t a proper lawn anymore, and neither Buck nor his wolf hybrids appear in the picture. In other words, I do my best to introduce life and love into what my mother called Cassie’s blighted existence, which is probably why she felt free to phone me one May evening to ask whether I would keep Leah for the summer.
    Arthur, it seemed, had obtained some frivolous grant that would pay him to gallivant around Europe under the pretense of conducting scholarly research, and although he had managed to include Cassie as a boondoggling research assistant, Leah couldn’t go unless he paid her way. Cassie didn’t phrase it quite like that. She didn’t have to.
    “In any event,” Cassie added in my mother’s voice, “she needs to study for her SATs.” She paused. “Scholastic Aptitude Tests.”
    “I know what SATs are,” I said. “Believe it or not, I even took them.”
    “And then there’s Cambridge,” Cassie said. “Of course, we always hoped that Arthur would get the call, but...”
    Don’t be misled. Although Arthur went to graduate school down the street from my house—at Harvard, in other words— he didn’t go to theological school. He and Cassie both think that the entire institution is divine.
    “But the trumpets never sounded,” I said gracelessly, mostly because I realized that Cambridge was simply Arthur’s idea of a classy-sounding boarding kennel. I wouldn’t trust my dogs to someone I knew as slightly as Arthur and Cassie knew me. “How old is she?”
    “Sixteen.”
    “And she didn’t, uh, inherit...?”
    “She is in robust health,” Cassie said. I took that to mean that she was fat. “And she is your niece.”
    “Cousin.”
    “But she does call you Aunt Holly. Because of the age difference?
    “I’m not that much older than she is, you know. I’m only a little over thirty.” And why would Leah have an occasion to call me anything? She hadn’t seen me for ten years. My promotion to aunt was probably one of Arthur’s transparent ploys to finagle two months of room and board. If Leah’s species and breed had been what my mother originally supposed, I wouldn’t have given in. Much as I adore golden retrievers, I’d have had to explain to Cassie that the first time her bitch tried to drink out of Kimi’s or Rowdy’s water bowl, one of my malamutes, probably my own bitch, Kimi, would crush her muzzle. But Leah wasn’t, after all, a golden retriever, and I’m not Kimi. I said yes.
    “So if you feel that way about these people, why didn’t you tell her no?” Steve Delaney, Rowdy and Kimi’s vet, has a quiet, reasonable voice. He is tall and lean, with curly brown hair and blue eyes that change to green. He’d arrived soon after I talked to Cassie and was sitting at my kitchen table fooling around with the dogs while I scrambled some eggs and toasted an English muffin for him. He doesn’t really like breakfast for dinner, but I can’t cook much else and hadn’t been to the store recently, anyway. The alternative that night was IAMS Mini Chunks, which is more nutritious than my cooking and, in fact, may well taste better, too.
    “Why? Probably because she sounds like my mother.” By the time I was born, my mother had spent years obedience-training spirited dogs. A mere small person was no challenge. Don’t think that she was harsh, though. She never raised her voice, but her tone made you want to do whatever she wanted. I lost her more than ten years ago, and, in case it isn’t obvious already,
    I’ll tell you that I miss her all the time. “Also, I guess I felt sorry for this poor ugly, fat kid, with her parents taking off for Europe and obviously just wanting to get rid of her for the summer.” I buttered the muffin, scraped the eggs out of the two skillets onto the plate, plunked Steve’s food in front of him, and let the pans cool so the dogs wouldn’t burn their tongues. When Kimi first entered our household, I tried to keep track of whose turn it was to lick pans, but the concept of taking turns is somewhat abstract even for Alaskan malamutes, dogdom’s geniuses— hence two pans. The concession stands at dog shows sell sweatshirts embellished with stylized paw prints and the words “My dogs walk all over me.” I own one.
    “I thought