Paws before dying

their only problem, of course.”
    “Names aren’t the Johnsons’ only problem, either. Another is what I was telling you before, that the house is like some dirty aquarium. Anyway, another thing is that Edna never leaves home. She has whatever that phobia is.”
    “Agoraphobia?”
    “Yes.”
    “And how old are the kids?”
    “They aren’t. Willie is eighteen or so, I think, and Dale— that’s the second Junior—is older. The birth dates were on the family tree. Dale is maybe twenty or twenty-one. And the oldest one is somewhere around twenty-five.”
    “They all live at home?”
    “You know, you really have a prejudice about that. There are lots of perfectly nice, ordinary families where that’s normal.”
    “Sometimes it is,” Rita said. “It depends.”
    “Jesus.”
    “I’m serious. It depends on whether they don’t leave or they can’t. There’s a big difference.”
    “Well, I hope Willie can. And does. Although...”
    “Although?”
    “Although they both, Willie and Dale, they both treat her as if she’s not all there, not compos mentis, which is true enough, if you ask me. I feel awful. I didn’t mean to, but I really did make things worse for Willie. I shouldn’t have done that.”
    People who don’t have a therapist as a friend and tenant sometimes imagine that therapists are always telling everyone not to feel guilty about anything, but those people don’t know Rita. “No, you shouldn’t have,” she said. Then she added, “But how were you to know?”
     
    The next morning after I fed and walked the dogs and gave them some water, I took both of them back outside to the driveway and used a shedding tool, a wire slicker brush, a metal comb, and three or four hairbrushes to remove what I guessed was enough woolly undercoat to make one mitten or a narrow scarf. After that, starting in the kitchen, I vacuumed up the fur in every room except Leah’s—she was still asleep—and finished by redoing the kitchen, because the baseboards and comers were already starting to fill up again. As I vacuumed, I thought about what would happen if you crossbred poodles, which don’t shed, with malamutes. If you planned it right, you see, you’d get the ultimate perfect dog, the French-Alaskan poolamute: a nonshedding, weight-pulling sled dog of wolflike appearance that would become an Obedience Trial Champion and say woo-woo instead of ruff-ruff. But will the American Kennel Club recognize the breed?
    When Leah finally got up, I said to her, “Hey, since you’ve basically taken over Kimi’s training, and since they’re both really starting to shed, I wonder if maybe you could take over grooming her? I mean, since she’s more or less your dog for the summer.”
    “Sure,” Leah said, and with a mock-Spanish accent added, “No pro-blem,” exactly what Jeff, Ian, Emma, Noah, and all of the others kept saying and exactly how they kept saying it.
    “And help with the vacuuming?”
    “No pro-blem.”
    “Good. Kimi’s been out and fed, so don’t let her convince you she hasn’t had breakfast, because she has. I want to do an article about Rose, a memorial thing, and probably it’s not national enough for Dog’s Life, but one of the local ones might take it, and I just feel like doing it. Anyway, I need to go look something up, and then I’ll be back.”
    The famous person-obedience academy down the street from me has the largest university library system in the world, but its canine collection is limited. That’s okay. Although the AKC library is inconveniently located in New York City, the Stanton Memorial is right on my own Appleton Street, and dogs are allowed. By the time Rowdy and I crossed Huron Avenue, the heat was getting to Rowdy, and at the Stanton he sprawled on his side and slept under the long oak table in the reference room while I looked up the old stats on top obedience dogs and top obedience poodles. Rose Engleman’s last poodle, Vera, had just under a thousand lifetime points, and in the last year she was listed, about a hundred more than Heather Ross’s last poodle. On the other hand, Panache, the poodle Heather had now, was in the top twenty-five by points earned last year, and Caprice wasn’t, maybe because she was younger than Panache, and also because Heather hit a lot more trials than Rose did. In the Delaney System, which recognizes only the dogs that place first through fourth in an obedience class and in which the dog gets one point for every dog it