Paws before dying

finally asked the big question that Willie’s arrival had cut off: “What kind of a name is ‘Winter,’ anyway?”
    Before I’d decided whether to let her think it was Jewish or to tell her the canine truth, Willie, who’d been cringing in silence, said sharply, “Mom, enough.”
    “Willie, shut up and stay the hell out of this,” Dale growled at him. He turned on his brother just as fiercely as, seconds before, he’d defended him.
    Although Dale hadn’t actually threatened me, I’d imagined that if I tried to cross the hall and reach the front door, he might block my way. Maybe it was cowardly and opportunistic to take advantage of his rapid switch to targeting Willie, but I did. Never step into a same-sex dog fight. You’ll only get bitten.
    “Willie, I’m sorry,” I said lamely.
    I brushed past Dale and the pathetically cowering Edna. As I undid a dead bolt and pulled open the front door, I heard Dale laughing at Willie. Then, of all things, Dale started singing an old Beatles song. His voice wasn’t bad. The effect was freakish and weirdly poignant, partly because he was right. You can’t buy love.
     

Chapter 12

     
    “SO is that sick or what?” I said to Rita, who was curled up on her couch with Groucho, her rapidly aging dachshund, on her lap.
    Leah, Ian, Seth, Miriam, a mollified Jeff, and four or five of Leah’s other best friends had taken over my place to study the immortal James Dean (double feature: Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden ) on Rita’s VCR. She and I were drinking gin on the rocks in her maturely furnished and frigidly air-conditioned living room, which is a floor and a cut above mine.
    I went on telling Rita about the Johnsons. “The same names! Three Mitchell Dale Johnsons! I mean, people think that, in a way, my family is sort of eccentric. And I was embarrassed, once I got old enough to really understand that if you heard ‘Holly Winter,’ especially if you heard my middle name, you’d assume I was a dog. What else could you think?”
    When Rita took a sip of her gin, the gold bracelets on her wrist clanked, and Groucho’s eyes opened. “What is your middle name?” she asked. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard it.”
    “Good,” I said. “Anyway, I went through a phase of being ashamed of having a name that sounded like a dog’s, but that isn’t half as bad as having exactly the same name as everyone else. So why would anyone do that? I mean, why name your first two kids after yourself? And the only rational explanation is that the guy Mitchell, Senior, was really determined to have a son named after him, and he did it twice in case one of them died. And the first didn’t, or at least he hasn’t yet. So wouldn’t the second one feel like sort of a spare part? Wouldn’t he end up saying to himself, Well, they had me in case the first one got broken? But since the first one didn’t, they’re probably thinking that they’re sorry they wasted their time and money on me. Sick, right?”
    “It depends.” The more gin Rita drinks, the more everything depends. “Narcissistic. But pathological?”
    “Come on. How would you like it?”
    “You think I’m kidding? It does depend. Sometimes it’s clearly pathological. I once saw a family where the mother, the daughter, and the dog were all named Alice.” When a therapist says she saw a family, she doesn’t mean that she just looked at them. “Fact. Alice. All three.”
    “Oh,” I said. “What kind of a dog was it?”
    “Holly, really. The point is, it was a dog. As a matter of fact, it was a cocker spaniel.”
    “Oh.”
    “What does it matter?”
    “Some breeds are more sensitive than others,” I said authoritatively. “So what happened to the three Alices?”
    “You don’t want to know.” She looked down at Groucho and patted his head. I hoped she couldn’t see how frail he’d become.
    “Yes, I do,” I corrected her. “How come they ended up with you?”
    “They put the dog to sleep, and the daughter got the message. What happened was that one day she got home from school, and the dog wasn’t there, and they told her they’d taken it to the vet and had it put to sleep.”
    “They murdered a dog named after...? Jesus. So what happened?”
    “So the daughter became more and more reclusive, developed a severe school phobia. And, naturally, insomnia. ‘Put to sleep’ was the parents’ phrase. And she had a psychotic episode. The business with the names and the dog wasn’t