Paws before dying

me.” He shrugged. “And I’m supposed to know what to do? I’m supposed to know where to begin? So I take it, and I tell her ‘Good girl,’ and maybe I take her out for a walk or I get her to dance or roll over or something, and then I give her a cookie, but she knows. She knows.”
    Cookie, by the way, is what a lot of old-time handlers call a dog biscuit. Don’t ask me why, but they do, and the word reminded me of Rose, who always used it. My mother did, too. I hoped Jack also knew the right kind of cookies to buy, not those mushy supermarket ones, but the expensive, really hard ones that remove tartar.
    “Jack, I know everyone must be saying, ‘If there’s anything I can do...’ But is there?” It occurred to me that he might ask me to work with Caprice, to train her and handle her, or, preferably, from my point of view, to help him find a professional to do it. “Do you need any help with Caprice?”
    He shook his head slowly and smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “She’s no trouble. The only trouble is she’s still looking for Rose. And Heather Ross offered. She offered to handle her. But I don’t think Rose would’ve liked that.”
    “I don’t think so, either,” I said, and then tried to make it clear that, unlike Heather, I wasn’t fishing for a chance to handle Caprice. “I didn’t mean... I mean, if you decide you want someone to handle her, I can find you someone, but I’m not a professional handler.”
    “Oh, no, no, I wasn’t asking,” he assured me. “No, no. Maybe sometime, but... No. What I want is... From time to time, you do some rescue work?”
    Caprice gave a sudden bound and landed in Jack’s lap. He rubbed the black curls on her head. I stared at both of them. It had never occurred to me that he’d want to get rid of her.
    I must have looked horrified, but I nodded. “A little. Hardly any. Mostly a few malamutes. You want...? But you don’t need...” If he didn’t want Caprice, he could sell her. The poodle rescue league, like all the others—for Akitas, goldens, malamutes, Dobermans, shelties, you name it—ends up with some wonderful, perfectly trainable dogs, but nobody but nobody hands over a dog like Caprice to a rescue league.
    But I’d misread Jack. It was the first time since Rose’s death that I’d heard his rolling laugh. “You should see your face!” It was probably red. “I couldn’t imagine, but...”
    Then he turned serious. “Let me show you something. Caprice, move.” She hopped to the floor. He got up, opened a cabinet, pulled out a photo developer’s envelope, and came back to the table. “Rose was the world’s worst photographer,” he said. “Every picture she ever took had a tree sticking out of someone’s head, or people had their eyes closed, or it was out of focus. But take a look at this, anyway.”
    In the photograph he handed me, the only object in sharp focus was the tall Norway maple between his house and the Johnsons’. The man and the dog to the right of the tree and some distance behind it, in the Johnsons’ yard, were too blurred to identify with any certainty. The man’s hair was blond, but he was even more out of focus than the dog, probably because he’d been moving. The dog looked like a shepherd, but I couldn’t tell for sure which one. The man could’ve been either of the sons I’d seen. He seemed to be hitting the dog with something, maybe a baseball bat, but even the action wasn’t entirely clear.
    “Rose took this,” I said. “Did she say who it is? And which dog?”
    Jack shook his head. “Never said a word.”
    “Why?”
    “The why’s the one thing I know,” he said, patting his thigh to call Caprice. She ran toward him and leapt into his lap. “Good girl.” Then he seemed to change the subject. “You want to know something about a good marriage? I’ll tell you a secret. You want to find a good husband, you find somebody who’ll always give you a good argument. Religion, politics, anything. Whatever else you do, Holly, if you want to stay married, you don’t marry yourself. You have to agree to disagree. And maybe nobody likes it, and nobody understands why you did such a crazy thing, but forget it. You do.”
    I wasn’t sure I understood, but I nodded, anyway.
    “So about any kind of trouble—causing any kind of trouble, stirring things up—Rose and I did not always see eye-to-eye. I wanted peace. I still do.”
    “With the Johnsons.”
    “With the Johnsons. And now? This