Paws before dying

you hadn’t seen her for ten years,” Steve said. “I haven’t, but Cassie says she’s robust, and that’s got to be a euphemism, right? And the last time I saw her, she looked like Arthur, I think. Okay, guys. Here you go.”
    They didn’t need to be told. Malamutes always know what’s meant for them, and if it isn’t, they try to convince you that it should be. Before the pans reached the floor, the dogs’ red tongues were scouring them, and each dog’s big dark brown eyes were scanning the other dog’s booty to calculate the chance of finishing first and stealing what the other had left. All malamutes have brown eyes, of course, and the darker, the better. In case you didn’t know, the blue-eyed sled dogs are Siberian huskies, although some Siberians have brown eyes. Malamutes, of course, are much bigger than Siberians, with strong bulky muzzles and rounded triangular ears set wide apart. At that time, Kimi, the bitch, weighed an ideal seventy-five pounds, and Rowdy was somewhere between eighty-five and ninety pounds, but don’t go by weight. Malamutes have a thick undercoat of soft, short fur covered by a long outer coat of coarse guard hair, so they look bigger than they are, and they’re even stronger than they look, bitches included.
    “And,” I added, “can you imagine? Here is a member of my own family—my mother’s niece—who grew up without dogs. I mean, it’s practically inconceivable. So obviously, she’s kind of pathetic. She must sense this void in her life and not know what’s supposed to fill it. So this idea crossed my mind that she could handle Kimi for me—you know, as a kind of therapy.”
    “For you?”
    “She isn’t driving me that crazy, and you have to admit, she’s improved a lot. Haven’t you, Kimi?”
    Both dogs were sprawled on the floor with the pans clutched between their big snowshoe front paws. I’d painted the kitchen cream with terra-cotta trim when I had golden retrievers, but if I ever had the money, I intended to do it in silvery gray and white with a real slate floor, not more fake-tile linoleum. In the meantime, though, Rowdy and Kimi’s wolf gray and white didn’t clash, and, in any case, they’d have graced a hovel. Bonnie, who edits my column, won’t let me say it in print, but Alaskan malamutes are the most beautiful dogs on earth.
    When Kimi heard her name, she raised her eyes, but didn’t release her grip on the pan. She growled softly.
    “Her attention is much better,” I added. “And, of course, I’ll find a class for Leah to take her to. There’s one in Newton, in some park. Rose Engleman called me about it the other day. I’ll take Rowdy. She can take Kimi. It’ll be a sort of emotional reeducation. As it is, she’s probably terrified of dogs, and I’m sure she has no idea what to do with them. And mais aren’t one-person dogs.”
    “It’s generous of you,” Steve said, as if generosity to my fellow human beings were as foreign to me as dogs were to Leah. “So? What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “So it’s nice of you. That’s all.”
    Then we washed the dishes and went to bed. Doesn’t your vet make house calls?
     

Chapter 2

     
    ON the day Leah arrived, the thermometer outside my kitchen window hit ninety, and the air was so saturated with moisture that the scribbled draft pages of my new column stuck together, the windows and mirrors clouded up, and my clean, odorless malamutes smelled like dogs. In the late afternoon, the pale gray cloud cover turned deep charcoal, and thunder began to roll. The downpour let loose just as Arthur’s academically correct medium-blue Volvo station wagon pulled into the driveway at the back of my house, which is the barn-red wood-frame tripledecker on the corner of Appleton Street and Concord Avenue. The wagon was obviously a professor’s car, five or six years old and dented, with a multihued collection of campus parking permits stuck on one of the rear windows. If Harvard had seen Arthur’s car, he’d have heard the celestial brass, after all.
    “Holly Winter?” It sounded like a genuine question, probably because he expected to find the yard filled with dog runs, the air rich with yelps, and a clone of one of my parents exuding dander in his direction. I’m not much like either one. Maybe that’s too bad, maybe not. Marissa was spectacular, but Buck is a human moose.
    “Arthur,” I said.
    I hadn’t remembered how tall he was, and I’d forgotten his face because