Ruffly Speaking

priest with a canine acolyte? Not bad.
    “Say Your Prayers.”
    We were friends again.
     

11
     
     My determination to meet the rector, whose name was Stephanie Benson, had as much to do with Rita as it did with mortgages, kibble, and cars.
    Rita’s initial agitation about the hearing aids lasted only a few days. What followed was a shift that I found alarming. I saw less of Rita than ever before. She quit dropping in and never felt like hanging out. After a couple of rebuffs, I asked directly whether I’d done anything to offend her, and what happened made me regret raising the issue. Tears spilled out of her eyes. She threw her arms around me and sobbed. But she refused to talk about her hearing loss or the aids, except to insist that she was adapting. She wouldn’t even talk about her analysis, and if you know Rita, you’ll realize that that was the worst sign of all. Her face and body took on the tight, steely look of grim determination. She kept her teeth locked together and her lips immobile, like someone waiting for novocaine to wear off. Her eyes were huge with raw feeling.
    What Rita lacked, it seemed to me, was a positive vision of the possible, in other words, if you’ll pardon the expression, a positive role model. Yuck. But I’m serious. Try to name a single attractive or appealing character in anything—book, movie, TV show—who’s anywhere near Rita’s age who wears hearing aids. Name a celebrity who does. The few who’ve come out are a million times better than no one at all, but can you imagine going to Rita and telling her that the aids were no big deal because, gee whiz, look at Ronald Reagan? So I hoped that Matthew’s mother was brilliant, charming, and gorgeous. I hoped her dog was, too.
    I didn’t have a chance to learn anything about Stephanie Benson until Rowdy and I returned from Thursday night services at the religious institution of our choice, the Cambridge Dog Training Club, to which, like Hasidic Jews on Shabbat, we’d made our way on foot. We arrived home to find a note from Leah that read, “Kimi with me. Back soon. Lava you. L.” Leah actually can spell love. “I lava you” was the punch line of a joke she’d learned from one of her students at Avon Hill, a nine-year-old boy named Ivan—pronounced EE-vahn, Cambridge being Cambridge—who was the terror of the group led by Leah and Matthew. Cambridge being Cambridge, this group, a sort of summer-camp version of homeroom, was called a “core cluster,” but, just to prove that they were human, Leah and Matthew both referred to EE -vahn as Ivan the Terrible.
    The students had started the program the previous day, and Leah had arrived home with the joke and had repeated it nonstop all the previous evening and throughout breakfast. I was hoping that the terrible Ivan had supplied her with a replacement today, but soon after Rowdy and I got home from dog training, when Leah and Kimi burst into the kitchen, the first thing Leah did was sink her fingers into Rowdy’s thick ruff, stare into his eyes, and ask for the millionth time, “Hey, Rowdy, what did the mommy volcano say to the baby volcano?” He dropped to the floor, and while Leah administered a vigorous tummy scratching, she gleefully delivered the inevitable “I lava you!”
    “He lavas you, too,” I said sourly. “So does Kimi, who also lavas to go to dog training, where you were supposed to take her tonight. Where were you?”
    “Roz is away,” my cousin said dismissively.
    “Funny,” I said, “that if Roz happens to be away and there’s no advanced class, then Rowdy and I go right ahead and—”
    “Bernie Brown says—”
    “Bernie Brown says that if you’re training a malamute, you need all the help you can get.” Principally in the form of a golden retriever.
    By then, Kimi had joined Rowdy on the floor, and despite the masses of undercoat that were rapidly turning Leah’s black spandex tights and miscellaneous layers of funereal tops a woolly white, the three of them made a beautiful if somewhat sentimental girl-and-her-dogs portrait. Leah’s contribution to the charming scene was, it seemed to me, entirely contrived. I’d been successfully set up. Instead of taking Leah to task for failing to do what she’d promised, and instead of getting her to answer my initial question about where she’d been, here I was enjoying the picture of my lovely cousin cozily at home with my beautiful dogs.
    As if to confirm my sense of being