Paws before dying

ears against her head in a display of dutiful submission, and gently raised a forepaw. She didn’t squirm and didn’t rake her claws on Leah’s legs.
    “Good for you,” Leah told her. “Wha t a goo d d og!”
    The Julia Child of dog training was the late Barbara Woodhouse, a British woman whose TV series promoted the belief that dogs adore the sounds of d and t and that the correct way to praise a dog is to sing out: “Wha t a goo d d og! ” I was pretty sure that Leah had never heard of Barbara Woodhouse. Kimi kept staring up at her as if begging to be told what to do next.
    “Kimi, okay,” I said. That’s the release word I always use, the word that tells my dogs that they’re free to do what they want. Kimi didn’t move. “Okay!” I repeated happily. Kimi didn’t even look at me.
    “Okay!” Leah said, and Kimi bounced into the air.
    “Leah, have you ever trained a dog before?” I asked.
    “You mean dog school?” The voice was my mother’s, but not the tone of incredulity. Heftily degreed parents like Leah’s should have instilled a proper respect for institutions of higher learning, but she sounded as if I’d asked whether she had an M.A. in découpage or a diploma from an accredited academy of miniature golf.
    I let the subject drop and helped her to transfer the pile of possessions to the guest room. The house belongs to me, or will eventually, but I inhabit only the first floor and rent the second-and third-floor apartments. (In spite of the fresh Sheetrock, good floors, and new kitchens and baths in the apartments—and absent from my own place—I rent only to pet owners.) As I watched Leah haphazardly unpack, I realized that her lukewarm response to the prospect of obedience training stemmed from the sport’s failure to require human participants to wear a uniform or costume. Collars are strictly regulated, of course— no tags, no pinch collars, and, obviously, nothing electronic— but handlers wear whatever they want.
    As I lounged on the bed and the dogs nosed around, she pulled out footless dancers’ tights, leotards, sweatshirts, football jerseys, running shorts, more bicycling gear, and shoes designed exclusively for marathons, walks, tennis, and aerobic workouts. I asked whether she danced, ran, walked, played tennis, or did aerobics, but she thought my questions were funny and admitted that she was not very athletic. She’d also brought a combination radio and tape player that was three times the size of my television (and, as it turned out, ten times as loud), three or four hundred cassette tapes, the complete works of Jane Austen in hard cover, a stack of raise-your-SATs workbooks, and more cosmetics than I have cumulatively bought in my life.
    “You’re not really my niece, you know,” I told her. “We’re actually cousins.”
    She smiled, dashed over to me, and gave me a hug. “I’d rather have you for my aunt,” she said.
    Soon afterward, she asked a disconcerting question about a framed color photograph that hangs in my kitchen: “Is that your boyfriend?”
    I thought she was kidding. “Of course not.”
    She looked blank.
    “Come on,” I said. “Do you really not know who that is?”
    “No. Really, I don’t. Is it some kind of secret?”
    “Leah, that is Larry Bird.”
    Her forehead wrinkled a little, and she started to open her mouth.
    “Larry Bird,” I repeated. “The greatest basketball player in the history of the world.” You usually have to discuss Bill Russell when you say something like that, but I didn’t want to talk over her head.
    That evening, as Leah was in the guest room simultaneously painting her nails and reading Pride and Prejudice, I called Rose Engleman, who was on the board of the Nonantum Dog Training Club, to double-check the schedule of summer classes. While I was getting the information, Leah made the mistake of patting the dogs. When she saw the fur embedded in the tacky lacquer, she yelled at them, booted them out of her room, and slammed the door. Twenty minutes later, she apologized to me and taught Rowdy and Kimi to lap her face when she smacked her lips and said, “Kiss!” It was the stupidest dog trick I’d ever seen, worse than “Say Your Prayers.” Kimi and Rowdy thought it was grand.
     

Chapter 3

     
    FAME was what sold Leah on Cambridge. The morning after she arrived, we did a tour of the Square and ended up at the sidewalk café that sprawls out from under celebrated Harvard’s Holyoke Center