Paws before dying

look it up in Miss Manners.”
    “I think you’re being a snob,” she said, but at least she said something.
    “You know Kevin Dennehy, right? Is he a snob?”
    She shook her head.
    “Well, if we need an arbiter, or you’d feel better if we got a sort of second opinion, we can tell Kevin about it, but I’m warning you, he’d probably ram it down the kid’s throat or bash him over the head with it. And he won’t demand to know the gentleman’s intentions, either. He’ll assume he knows what they are.”
    She looked stunned. “That is the stupidest... Nobody would...”
    “Kevin would,” I said. “And I agree that that’s sort of archaic. Look, Leah, it’d be just as out of line if you gave him something like this. Can you imagine doing that?” In a way, people are easier than dogs. Try getting a malamute to reverse roles and see the other dog’s point of view. “Really. Imagine going out and spending hundreds and hundreds on something like this and giving it to somebody you’ve met a couple of times. You just wouldn’t do it, right? No matter how much you wanted the person to like you, you’d know that that wasn’t the way to do it. It wouldn’t even occur to you, but if it did, it would feel strange, and you’d find some other way to meet whoever it was.”
    She burst into tears. “What am I supposed to do? Write him a letter and say, ‘Sir, ladies do not accept blah blah blah, and my aunt doubts the purity of your...’?”
    “Do you want me to take it back?”
    Her look was relieved and suspicious.
    “I’ll be nice about it,” I promised. “I’ll say how generous it was, which it was. I know it would be hard for you, and it’s no big thing for me. You want me to?”
    She nodded. “Would you?”
    I returned the nod. “Look, did you remember to take the dogs out? And run a brush through them, would you? And when you do, put the fur in a plastic bag. I’m going to... Never mind. I’ll tell you about it later. And then vacuum in here, or there’ll be fur in everything we eat. I’ll be back soon.”
    The Bronco made it back over the great suburban divide and to the Johnsons’ house in only twenty minutes. If I had three muscular kids and a big house in Newton, or even if I just had the house, I wouldn’t hire a lawn service, but the grass would be cut the way the Johnsons’ wasn’t, and someone would dig out the dandelions the way no one had uprooted theirs.
    At first I thought no one was home. Old-fashioned non-mini, wide-slatted aquamarine Venetian blinds were lowered on all the windows. The front door had a peephole, and mounted to the right of the door, next to a lump of crisscrossed silver duct tape that probably covered a doorbell, was a shabby intercom with a collection of unlabeled buttons and switches. Above it, encased in a plastic food-storage bag, hung a piece of ragged cardboard on which someone had printed in black block letters: Beware of the dog.” I rested the oversize brown shopping bag containing the boom box on a dirty sisal mat that read: “Welcome.”
    I pushed some buttons on the intercom and, after a minute or two, rapped my knuckles on the door. Then I kept pressing what I thought was the most likely button and spoke into the little box: “Hello? Anyone home?”
    One slat on the window to my right rose an inch or two and then sank. I rapped on the door and tried to sound as if the sisal mat meant what it said: “Hello? Anyone home?”
    When I’m in the middle of writing something, I sometimes just let my doorbell ring, too, because often enough, the stranger standing there turns out to be a solicitor for Greenpeace or a Jehovah’s Witness. I knocked hard and called out, “Hello? Is Willie there? My name is Holly Winter.” Just in case the neighborhood was as heavily canvassed as mine, I yelled that I wasn’t collecting for anything. When the front door suddenly opened inward, I found myself looking into the face of Willie’s brother, the one from the fun match, and hollering: “And I’m not a Jehovah’s Witness!”
    I felt like a jerk.
    He must have caught only the last two words. “Mom isn’t interested,” he said. “She’s Presbyterian.”
    I hadn’t seen the brother up close before. Like Willie, he had white-blond hair, but the sides of Willie’s head were shaved bald. His brother’s hair stood luxuriantly and stiffly on end all over his head. His features were chunkier than Willie’s, and his expression was stupefied but