Paws before dying

smile, and she went on. “And one of my ancestors was a cousin to President Zachary Taylor.”
    “Oh,” I said again, unimpressed. A mere cousin? Why, Rowdy and Kimi are direct descendants of Ch. Gripp of Yukon. But I didn’t tell Edna. It might have made her feel inferior.
    “And on Mitchell’s side, the Johnson side, there’s a Clark and a French.” Her face had brightened up, and her little eyes changed from flat to beady. “And, of course, his mother was a Dale, and his grandmother was a Mitchell.”
    In lieu of saying something—what?—I got up and took a look at the framed diagram. Like Rowdy’s and Kimi’s pedigrees, it consisted mainly of precisely arrayed names, but neither of their pedigrees has a tree sketched around it, and the lines aren’t embellished with tiny oak leaves. Anyway, I didn’t have trouble deciphering the two most recent generations in the Johnson-Smith pedigree: Mitchell Dale Johnson had married Edna Elizabeth Smith, and they’d produced three sons. The youngest was William Smith Johnson, and—I swear I am not making this up—both of the others were named Mitchell Dale Johnson, Jr. Yes, both. The American Kennel Club, for God’s sake, won’t let you register two dogs under the same name. Who protects children?
    “What did you say your name was?” Edna sounded as if I might not have one.
    “Holly Winter,” I said.
    “Winter,” she repeated suspiciously.
    “Winter.”
    Rufous Winter fought in the American Revolution. Consequently, I’m eligible for the DAR, but damned if I’ll ever join, and damned if I’d tell Edna Johnson, particularly because I knew what she was going to ask me next, and I had the perfect answer all ready. My mother coached me on it. Edna was about to ask, “Oh, and what kind of name is that!” Marissa taught me to smile politely and answer: “A kennel name.”
    But I didn’t have the chance. Willie rushed into the room, slammed to a halt, and looked first at me and then at the brown paper bag on the floor near my feet. “Ma, your stuffs in the kitchen,” he told Edna, who obediently scurried off. He looked at me and said, “Yeah?”
    “Willie, Leah is only sixteen,” I said. “She hardly knows you. This is really a generous present, but, um, it’s a little too much. I just can’t let her take it.”
    He put on the same look he'd had when he told Jack that he was sorry about Rose, stiff and apologetic, but this time, I realized that whatever manners he’d learned he’d got from TV or the movies and that he wasn’t surprised to find that he’d got something wrong.
    “I know it’s really a good, uh, one,” I said with that stupid adult fear of using a dated word to someone not all that much younger. “And you’re welcome to come and visit, or whatever. It was really generous of you. It was nice of you.”
    Preoccupied as I was with my own prissy insensitivity and the look of stolid, repeated hurt on Willie’s face, I didn’t hear either Edna or Dale, but when I’d assumed that she’d gone to the kitchen to unpack the groceries, she’d evidently gone in search of Dale. They stood in the front hall looking at us, the
    mother half hidden behind the oafish son. Edna looked confused and frightened. Although she never left the house, her face said that, even so, she felt a terrifying uncertainty about where she was and, probably, who she was and who these other androids were.
    Dale, though, understood. “My brother’s not good enough?” He puffed himself up and folded his arms across his chest.
    “You probably just heard me telling him we’d be glad to see him,” I said.
    “You know how much he paid for that?” Dale demanded.
    “A lot,” I said.
    He proceeded to tell me how much. He also told me how hard his little brother worked and how much overtime he put in. I was pretty sure that at the fun match from which he’d been evicted, he’d been too far away from me to notice or remember me, but it was clear that he’d at least connected Leah, dog training, and me, because he started making the same accusation Leah had made earlier, that I was a snob, and went on to damn everyone else who trained dogs, too. His little brother was good enough for anyone, he said. Then I thought I heard him say that Leah and I were both Japanese, but a second later I decoded the acronym. JAPs, he’d called us, Jewish-American princesses.
    A happy look of comforting recognition crossed the empty perplexity of Edna’s face, and she