Ruffly Speaking

to come?”
    Matthew had tightened up again. “Leah, she hasn’t—”
    “But she will!”
    As I’ve explained, the Avon Hill Summer Program offered courses, and if you’re thinking gimp, think Cambridge. Poetry workshops. Black-and-White Photography. Beekeeping. The Art of the Blacksmith. The Suzuki Method, which, thank God, Leah was not teaching. You know what the Suzuki method does? Takes innocent little children and teaches them to torment adults by squealing out “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” on quarter-size violins. Spare me. Urban Flora and Fauna—weeds and cockroaches?—taught by Matthew, who was also doing something about computers (not, I assumed, a module on user-friendliness), and, like Leah and all the other mentors, assisting in the program’s showpiece, a play that the children were writing and producing themselves. Leah had been hired to teach, of all the damn things, Conversational Latin, and at her own initiative was also giving a course on guess-what that included a demonstration by an arson-detecting Labrador retriever, a field trip to Steve Delaney’s veterinary clinic, a guest speaker with a dog from the Seeing Eye, and a hands-on grooming session from which Rowdy’s coat would, I hoped, eventually recover. Matthew was not, of course, coteaching the unit with her.
    “I’ve heard of your mother,” I said to Matthew. From Rita, of course. Morris Lamb’s funeral. Now I finally understood the presence of the dog with the priest.
    Matthew nodded politely. Rowdy reappeared with a red rubber Kong toy. He opened his jaws and watched the toy bounce across the floor. Matthew stayed as focused on Leah as if he’d just done an eight-week attention course with Terri Arnold and graduated at the top of the class.
    “Well,” I went on, “it really would be great if your mother would visit Leah’s course. Those dogs are amazing, and they usually have such wonderful personalities.” As soon as the words left my mouth, I could feel color rush to my face. I remembered a book I’d noticed on one of Rita’s shelves. I hadn’t read it, but the title had hit me: The Betrayal of the Body . I wondered whether this kind of blush was what the book was about. I heartily wished that Matthew would leave. Before long, he did.
    “Nice kid,” I told Leah.
    She lounged in her chair and stroked Kimi’s head. “You didn’t like him.”
    “Of course I did,” I lied.
    “You did not! You thought he was boring.”
    “How can you say that? His mother is a priest with a hearing dog. That’s the last kind of person I’m going to find boring. Maybe he, uh, talks more when adults aren’t around.”
    “You shouldn’t have said anything about being near home.”
    “What was wrong with that?”
    “Matthew wanted to go to Stanford, and he got in, but when he got into Harvard, too, his mother made him turn down Stanford, and then she moved here, so...”
    “Leah, I didn’t know that.”
    “And Matthew is shy,” said Leah, softening. “But isn’t he gorgeous? Didn’t you think he was gorgeous?”
    A more ordinary-looking human being has never crossed my gaze, I wanted to say. Fortunately, I was leaning over gathering up the collection of toys that Rowdy had vainly offered Matthew, so Leah couldn’t see my face. “Yes,” I said. “And I’d love to meet his mother.”
    “So you can write about her,” said Leah, obviously accusing me of something.
    “Yes,” I admitted. “Among other things.”
    “For Dog’s Life.”
    “Probably.”
    “With a pun in the title.”
    “Hey, let me tell you something,” I said, staring Leah in the eye. “I have a mortgage to pay, two big dogs to feed, and an old car to replace one of these years, and if my editors want cute, then cute is what they get, okay? This may come as a big surprise to you, but the fact is that we can’t all teach conversational Latin.”
    Leah looked genuinely abashed. “Holly, I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I didn’t mean—”
    “Oh, yes, you did.” I waited a second. Sometimes I forget how young she is. “But it’s okay. Leah? I’m sorry, too.”
    She brightened up, smirked a little, and said, “Urn...”
    “Yes?”
    She mumbled.
    “What?”
    “I was thinking... But maybe you’ll, uh, be of-fended.”
    “No I won’t. What?”
    “It’s kind of corny.”
    “Say it!”
    The title she came up with was pretty sappy, I’ll admit, not to mention obvious, but she was, after all, an amateur. For an article about a