Paws before dying

the rent? Did you get anything else?”
    “I said Cambridge was a real interesting place, and he said the rents were high.”
    “Is that all? Everyone says that. Did he sound as if he wanted you to send him patients?”
    “Who doesn’t? But he also says he’s there temporarily.”
    “On Washington Street? In Newton?”
    “No, he’s staying in Newton. He knows people. He grew up there. He’s moving to some place in Newton Comer. It isn’t ready yet.”
    “So the financial motive is there. If it isn’t ready yet, it’s new. Or it’s being fixed up, right? He did sound as though he’s moving up, didn’t he? He sounded happy about it?”
    “Oh, yeah. He said he’ll be real happy to show me what he does, but he wanted me to wait until he’s moved. Yeah, it’s definitely a move up.”
    An hour or two after Steve left, Marcia Brawley called about the article I’d rashly proposed writing about her. Larry, her husband, had photographed the Akita wall hanging before the people picked it up. She had a print of that picture for me as well as a couple of others that I just had to see. Should she mail them to me? I thanked her, but said that I had a dog training class that night at the park across from her house. I’d pick them up.
    In the afternoon, Leah, Emma, Miriam, and Monica went into Harvard Square. Leah returned with an embossed leather cowboy belt she’d found in the markdown bin at Ann Taylor, but the other three had big plastic bags of cotton sweaters, shorts, and pants from the summer sales and darker, heavier back-to-school clothes as well. Was the contrast hard for Leah? I watched and listened in, but her lovely, happy face showed no sign of envy, and her voice was as enthusiastic as if the new clothes had been her own. Then they took over the bathroom to do each other’s hair to the accompaniment of a station that every five minutes accurately announced itself as the Blast of Boston. Kimi, Rowdy, and I escaped to the Stanton Library for a few hours of silent work on my column.
    When we returned, I wanted to inform Leah that a mere ten minutes of the time she’d devoted to personal vanity would have rid poor Kimi of the worst of the undercoat that was rapidly forming ugly, woolly lumps on her shoulders, loins, and rump, but I’d adopted a new strategy: Say nothing, and let Leah see for herself just how rapidly her pretty Kimi would turn into a shaggy mess. In the meantime, Kimi wouldn’t suffer. Blowing her coat didn’t bother Kimi. And if I worked her over with a shedding blade when I groomed Rowdy, it wouldn’t bother Leah, either. (A shedding blade, by the way, is a loop of serrated metal attached to a handle. If that’s news to you and you have a dog that sheds, I’ve just saved you about a million hours of brushing, combing, and vacuuming.) On Sunday morning before the match, Leah had perfunctorily gone over Kimi with a finishing brush that hadn’t touched the undercoat. No one had groomed her since, and she looked like hell. We had dog training that night. I was counting on Heather Ross or some other soul of tactlessness to remark what a neglected-looking fright Kimi had become.
    By the time we left for dog training, Kimi’s coat looked even worse than it had in the midaftemoon. Loose white and pale gray guard hairs and undercoat clung to every surface of her body, and the fur she’d already dropped had revealed the lean, muscled, wolflike contours usually softened by her thick, rich coat. When she moved, escaping fur surrounded her as if she were some skinny spirit dog passing through this reality in a ghostly cloud. The dark wolf gray on her head, back, and tail had paled, and, worst of all, the shining almost-black on her face had faded, washing out the full mask—the cap, the Lone Ranger goggles, the bar down her nose. Even to me, she looked almost like someone else’s malamute, some stranger’s pale gray dog.
    But I said nothing to Leah about grooming Kimi. On the drive to Newton, I made small talk.
    “Nice shirt,” I said. “I haven’t seen that before.”
    “Thanks. It’s Emma’s,” she said. I didn’t point out that Emma wouldn’t be happy to have it returned with an angora coating. “Hey, is it okay if I go to Emma’s after class?”
    “I guess,” I said. “But how will you get home?”
    “With Jeff.”
    “Sure. Just be home by eleven or so.” It isn’t easy to set a firm curfew for the reincarnation of your own mother. “Eleven-thirty at the