Paws before dying

that sometimes, a really small shock, like fifty volts, can kill you. In a way, that’s the worst of it.”
    “What is?”
    “That he didn’t know. I don’t think anyone’s going to end up proving it, but if you ask me, he didn’t know whether she’d just get a bad shock or whether it’d kill her. He thought he’d killed Jeff. If you’d seen Jeff, you’d see why. I thought he’d killed him, too. But with Rose, if you ask me, he just didn’t care. Prob-ably if she’d lived, he’d have threatened to do the same thing to Caprice unless she gave him the pictures and kept her mouth shut. But he didn’t care one way or the other about whether she lived or died. After what his parents did to him? After Buddy? Rita, when they killed his dog, they half killed him. How was he supposed to know the difference?”
     

Chapter 30

     
    MITCHELL Dale Johnson, Jr., you’ll recall, having calmly watched his brother Dale shoot their father, lost his temper only when he realized that Dale was stealing his Corvette. After that noble demonstration of his firm sense of priorities, Mitch was awarded the guardianship of his mother, Edna, but I suppose that the court didn’t have much choice. Dale would hardly have been suitable, and Willie was a bit young for the task. At any rate, Mitch rather quickly sold the house next to Jack Engle-man’s and took advantage of the depressed market to buy a three-bedroom condo near Kendall Square in Cambridge. One of the extra bedrooms is for Edna, who is supposed to move in with Mitch as soon as she’s discharged from the psychiatric hospital. The other bedroom is not, as you might suppose, for Willie, but for Dale, in case he gets a furlough or an early release, I guess. Willie, you see, has broken the family rule. He’s been accepted at a junior college with a canine science program. He’ll spend two years learning to groom and handle dogs. I wonder whether he’ll come home for Christmas.
    Speaking of Christmas, I never wrote that article about Marcia Brawley, but she finished the scarf for Buck, and I paid her for it. It’s still here, packed in mothballs. I’ll have to decide whether to give it to him. If I do, I won’t tell him what else she puts around people’s necks... or, more precisely, around dogs’ necks.
    Dr. Charlotte Zager’s fluoride treatments have done wonders for my teeth, and contrary to Buck’s predictions, haven’t affected my politics at all. Her son moved into his new offices, and when Steve told Rita that there was nothing more he could do for Groucho, she started taking Groucho to Dr. Don Zager for acupuncture treatments. Groucho is as stiff and lame as ever, and his yellow-tinged eyes stare more and more deeply into nowhere, but Rita is convinced that his energy is improving, and she likes Dr. Zager a lot. In fact, she and Don Zager have had dinner together twice, but I am not optimistic about their future. Some interfaith relationships work fine, but theirs is a doomed combination: She is devout Cambridge, and he’s born-again California.
    Jim O’Brian adopted Tina’s rescue dog, the malamute bitch. He named her Rose. It seemed a peculiar choice to me, but Jack didn’t mind. He told me that it’s a Jewish custom not to name your children after the living and that Rose would’ve been flattered.
    In late August, Kimi completed her C.D. in three straight trials and with good scores, too. Leah handled her. Not long afterward, on the morning Leah left, the phone rang about two dozen times. Not one of the calls was for me. Leah went out to visit Kevin Dennehy’s mother and a lot of other neighbors. After that, Miriam, Ian, Seth, and some more people came over to say good-bye to her. They played a lot of loud music. Miriam somehow ended up wearing a sweatshirt that I recognized as mine, but I didn’t say anything about it. Jeff brought a single red rose, and I dragged the dogs away so he and Leah could have some time alone in the living room.
    Rowdy and Kimi, of course, knew that she was leaving. Even the stupidest obedience-school flunk-out knows when someone’s going away, but the ancestral memory of Alaskan malamutes reminds them that no one hangs around on a fast-disintegrating ice floe to whistle for a stray pup. Eyes bright, muscles tense, ears pricked up, new fall coats gleaming, they sniffed Leah’s luggage, barricaded the door, pranced from room to room, and tried their best to look too cute to leave behind.
    When Leah and Jeff