Paws before dying

vaguely bellicose.
    “Um, I was saying I’m not,” I told him. “I thought maybe... Never mind. Could we start over? My name is Holly Winter. Willie and I train dogs together. I need to see him. Is he here?” He shook his head. Willie’s brother didn’t have shoulders like Kevin Dennehy’s, but he was working on them, and he was taller and beefier than Willie, who was squat and stocky. In fact, the brother had probably been building his lats or traps when I rang the bell: His white T-shirt and yellow shorts were soaked, his face flushed.
    A small gray-haired woman with the expression of a frightened squirrel stood behind him and peered at me.
    “Mrs. Johnson?” I said.
    Her eyes opened in alarm, as if I were trying to scare her off a bird feeder.
    “Mrs. Johnson, my name is Holly Winter. Willie and I train our dogs together. May I come in?”
    She tilted her head and looked up at her son. “Dale?”
    “You want me let her in?”
    She jerked her bony little chin up and down, he moved back, and I carried the heavy bag in. Everything I could see—the big front entrance hall, the dining room on the right, the living room on the left, and the wide flight of stairs directly ahead— was papered, painted, carpeted, or upholstered a muddy aquamarine. The lowered blinds let in murky light. I felt as if I had just stepped into a giant aquarium.
    Dale abruptly lumbered off - through the dining room, and I heard the swish of a swinging door. Mrs. Johnson stood bewildered, wrapping the fingers of her left hand around the first finger of the right and squeezing hard. I had the sense that she’d once known what to do next—invite me to sit down, ask me what I wanted—and was hoping that, somehow, if she wrung that finger painfully enough, the memory would squirt out.
    “Willie’s gone to Star Market for me,” she said with some alarm.
    “Do you expect him back soon?”
    Her mindless eyes opened into frightened circles.
    I tried to sound matter-of-fact. “I just need to see him for a second. Do you expect him back soon?”
    She shrugged her shoulders as if I’d asked her the meaning of life.
    “How long ago did he leave?” I asked.
    “An hour? An hour ago?”
    Why ask me?
    “Then he’ll probably be back soon,” I said. “Do you think I could wait for him?”
    She nodded and finally moved toward the living room. I followed her. She perched on the edge of a wing-back chair, and I sat on the couch. I wasn’t looking forward to making conversation with her, but I couldn’t face explaining the complex matter of returning Willie’s present, and, in any case, I didn’t want to embarrass him by talking to his mother about it, and I didn’t want to leave it with no explanation at all. I was beginning to feel uncomfortable about insisting that Leah give the thing back. How was he supposed to have known better? His mother couldn’t manage to answer the doorbell by herself, and when someone had done it for her, she hadn’t been able to remember how to say something as complicated as “Hello,”
    “Come back later,” or “Won’t you sit down.”
    I looked around for something to talk to her about. A stack of magazines sat on the coffee table, but the one on top of the pile was an issue of Outdoor Life, and it felt like a tactless choice. Her flowered housedress was the kind I associate with the women in those McCarthy-era films about what to do when the Russians drop the bomb. I guess we could’ve debated the pros and cons of duck and cover, but we didn’t because I noticed the one sizable nonaquamarine object in the room, a large, framed family tree that hung over the fireplace.
    “Your family.” I smiled and gestured toward it. It was the most familiar-looking thing in the room. Anyone interested in purebred dogs is, of course, expert at reading pedigrees, and genealogical diagrams of human lineage are simple and straightforward compared with the ones that trace canine ancestry. For a start, in human family trees, the same individual tends to appear only once, but in a linebred dog’s pedigree, the same names show up more than once, and if there’s been close inbreeding, the trunks and branches of the family tree twist in and around each other in a scandalous tangle.
    “Johnsons and Smiths.” Her voice was a little hollow, but less than it had been. “Smith was my maiden name.”
    “Oh,” I said brightly.
    “And Johnson is a very old name, too,” she added proudly. I gave her a vacuous