Paws before dying

just as Steve and I took off for dinner with some friends of his in Watertown who have three rescue greyhounds. We tried to leave at eleven because Steve had to get back to check on a recuperating komondor, but it was hard to get away. When we did, Steve was worried about his patient. Because Appleton is a one-way street—you can’t turn onto it from Concord Ave.—he dropped me on Concord opposite the front of my house instead of detouring around to reach my driveway and my back door, the one I always use.
    I usually say that my house is on the comer of Appleton and Concord, but what’s right on the comer, occupying a rectangular section of what would otherwise be part of my yard, is a long, very narrow, rather whimsical one-story structure known as a spite building and presumably built out of spite, revenge for some long-forgotten grievance. It’s hard to imagine why else anyone would have built it. For a while, it was a sandalmaker’s shop, but it doesn’t look any more like a store than it looks like a house. In fact, especially because it has stood empty since the sandal shop closed, I didn’t think of it as a building at all, but as walls that helped to enclose my property, an extension of my fence on which my dogs liked to lift their legs, thus prompting unliberated passersby to mistake Kimi for a male.
    I crossed Concord and covered the narrow stretch of sidewalk that runs between the cars parked on Appleton and the spite building. Beyond the building, the sidewalk widens, and my own fence begins, but it didn’t look like mine anymore. The fence is taller than I am, and so, I think, was the swastika spray-painted on it. The thing was about six feet by six feet, or maybe its obscenity and my rage made it feel bigger than it was. It jumped out at me, loomed over me, and swore wordlessly, but there were words there, too, sprayed on my fence, my fence: “Gas them all,” I read, and “Jew lovers.” I wanted to scream, cry, and belt someone—I actually did slam a foot hard against the fence—but I also felt a peculiar, irrational impulse to hide the thing: to rush to the cellar, grab a wide brush and a can of white paint, and blot it out before anyone else saw it. It was an urge to whitewash someone else’s filth, filth directed at me, an impulse to cleanse myself.
    A car passed by on Appleton, its lights illuminating the fence. I wondered who was in the car, whether anyone had seen the swastika, whether it had hit home. I couldn’t paint it out until the police saw it, but I could call them, and I could screen it with something, throw something over it. Even so, Leah would have to know. I couldn’t protect her from it, and when I wanted to wipe it out and be alone with my unquestioning dogs, she’d need to talk about it.
    I could see from the driveway that the kitchen lights were on, and when I first walked in and caught sight of Leah, I thought that she’d not only discovered the thing but had felt so befouled by it that she’d taken a bath and washed her hair. Water was dripping from her curls onto the kitchen table, where she sat, and onto the adoring dogs whose chins she was rubbing.
    “Damn, Leah. I hoped—”
    But she interrupted me. “I am going to kill whoever did this! It is not funny. Practical jokes are not funny. They’re just stupid.”
    I dumped my purse on the counter and sat down. “It doesn’t seem like a practical joke to me,” I said. “It feels a lot worse than that. It’s not just some prank. You saw it when you drove up?”
    “When I drove up? How stupid do you think I am? If I’d seen it when I drove up, I’d’ve known it was there, and I wouldn’t’ve got hit by it. I didn’t notice it until it fell on me. I mean, I noticed the screen door wasn’t shut right, but how was I supposed to—”
    “Hold it. Start over.”
    “I drove in. I turned off the car. I got Kimi out of the back. Then I went up the stairs. The screen door was open a little, and I just thought, you know how it sticks sometimes? It doesn’t shut all the way unless you pull it or push it. All I did was open it, and this bucket of water fell on my head. Is that stupid? You know what it is? It’s juvenile.”
    “That’s it?”
    “Well, you know, it’s not nothing. I just got wet, but the bucket could’ve hurt somebody, you know, if it’d landed hard on somebody’s head. If it’d been you...”
    “I hate to tell you,” I said, “but it’s not the only thing. I’ll tell you