Paws before dying

refuse to come home, and you father a litter of mixed breed pups. How do I feel? Okay, angry. It may be silly, but I can’t help it. And since we’re talking about people, let’s magnify it a lot, because the fact is, I could always get some more dogs, but children are hard to replace. And do I want your mate dead? Am I angry enough to kill her? If it’s the only way I get you back? Of course not. I don’t want anything enough to kill a dog.” But not everyone feels that way about dogs. Or about other people.
    Half an hour later, when Rita stopped in for coffee, I told her what I’d been thinking about, and she told me not to do what I’ve just done, namely, tell anyone.
    “Holly, look,” she said emphatically. “I never give advice. Hardly ever. But I’m telling you, don’t say any of this to anyone else, okay? I know you, and I understand that you’re not kidding. Dogs are how you understand Arabs, the Mideast situation, feminism, the Holy Trinity, psychotherapy, higher education, and everyone and everything else, but I’m telling you, you need to be aware that most people are going to find this frivolous and offensive, and you need to keep it to yourself. If it ever comes up, just say that you think you can empathize a little, or whatever. Don’t mention dogs.”
    “Well, I won’t mention them to Charlotte Zager,” I promised.
    “Who?”
    “Jack Engleman’s sister. Charlotte Zager. She’s cleaning my teeth this afternoon.”
    “What?”
    “Well, she is a dentist,” I said.
     
    In the midafternoon, I was sitting in a blue plastic stackable chair in a yellow plastic office in Newton Centre. I was trying to fill out the patient information form handed me on a clipboard by the receptionist. The form asked how I was referred to Dr. Zager, and it seemed inappropriate to write that I’d met her while visiting her brother when his gentile wife had just died under suspicious circumstances, that it was the first time Dr. Zager had been in the house, because the family sat shiva for Jack when he married Rose, that Dr. Zager seemed to me to be making herself all too at home there all of a sudden, and that wondered what kind of person she was and couldn’t think of any easier way to pursue an acquaintance with a dentist than to get my teeth cleaned. Besides, there wasn’t room on the form.
    The memory of Charlotte Zager’s molar-wrenching handshake made me a little nervous, but after an assistant showed me into an examining room, put a bib around my neck, and cranked me in a  reclining dental chair, Dr. Zager came in, remembered me, didn’t ask any weird questions about how I happened to be there, and said she’d check my teeth when the hygienist finished cleaning them. Although I’d seen my own hygienist only a month earlier, this one, a pickle-mouthed blonde who delivered a moralistic scolding about regular flossing, spent half an hour lacerating my gums. When she finally tore her gloves off, Charlotte Zager came back and took a remarkably gentle look.
    “Holly,” she pronounced, “I think your teeth can be saved.” In case you think sh was kidding, you should know that my father considers fluoride to be one of the principal instruments of the communist conspiracy. My teeth are a cold-war battlefield. Charlotte Zager was the Gorbachev of dentistry. She made me chomp into a mass of nauseating wax and told me I’d get a call when my fluoride trays came back from the lab and that when they did, the hygienist would show me how to use them. Then she asked whether I had a dog.
    “Two,” I said.
    “You do know about caring for their teeth?” she said. “They have teeth, too, you know.”
    The most recent proof I bore of the truth of her claim was a scar left by Kimi, but I didn’t hold up my hand and point to it. It was mostly my own fault, and people don’t always understand that Kimi didn’t mean it. (I never tell people that if she’d been serious, I wouldn’t have the hand at all.)
    “I do try to brush their teeth,” I said.
    If this sounds bizarre, you’re behind the canine times. These days, the well-groomed Rover has his own toothbrush and special toothpaste that’s safe to swallow. If he suffers from halitosis, he also gets his gums squirted with mouthwash glop, and if he’s lucky, he gnaws on a bone-shaped hunk of dental floss.
    “And regular professional cleaning?” she asked.
    “No,” I said. “They’re both fairly young, and their teeth are good, and I don’t