Ruffly Speaking

with her.”
     

14
     
     “Stephanie Benson says that Matthew is absolutely smitten with you,” I told Leah. “Those were her exact words.”
    “Matthew is being sort of a jerk,” Leah said.
    It was Saturday morning, and we were heading south on Route 128 on our way to a show-and-go at the Canine Emporium in North Attleboro. I was driving. Leah, still half asleep, was drinking coffee. I’d been awake for hours. By eight o’clock, Steve and I had had breakfast and taken a shower. (Always, always shower with your vet. Clean profession.) When Steve left for work, I walked the dogs, tidied up the house, and made two unsuccessful attempts to rouse Leah, who was displaying that notorious sign of incipient moral dissipation, sleeping late when you ought to be out showing your dog. The salvation of youth requires radical measures. Rapping on the door and calling her name had done no good at all, and the dogs were pestering to get into her room, anyway. All I did was open the door. The credit for wresting Leah’s slothful soul from Satan belongs exclusively to Rowdy and Kimi. “How is Matthew being a jerk?” I asked.
    “He thinks that Stephanie should go back to New York.”
    “You can’t really blame him. How would you like it if your parents had just suddenly decided to move to Cambridge?”
    “He doesn’t mind that much that Stephanie’s here.” If so, it seemed to me that Matthew Benson was the first freshman in history to be perfectly happy that his mother had followed him to college. I didn’t say so.
    Leah continued. “What he doesn’t understand is why his parents don’t work it out. And also, Stephanie and Phillip—that’s his father—gave him this whole line about the family and not going too far away. So what he thinks is that since they weren’t going to stay together anyway, they might as well have let him go to Stanford.”
    “Maybe they didn’t know they were going to split up,” I pointed out.
    “That’s what I said.”
    “So that’s what he’s being a jerk about?”
    “It’s more about the rector, because Stephanie only got to be a rector by moving here, and Matthew thinks that she should’ve just stayed in New York instead of advancing her career.”
    “So his parents just separated? Recently?”
    “When the rector left. Stephanie got offered this job, and she packed up and left. Really what Matthew thinks is that since Phillip is a physicist, and she’s a rector, Phillip’s work is important and hers isn’t. Matthew doesn’t say that, but you can tell that’s what he thinks.”
    “I wonder whether St. Margaret’s knew.”
    “Knew what?”
    “That if Stephanie took the job, she’d leave her husband.”
    “What does that...?”
    “Nothing. I just wondered. Anyway, it sounds as if Matthew really confides in you.”
    “Of course he does,” Leah said smugly. “He’s utterly smitten with me.” She drank some coffee and made a soft noise of discontent. “This car smells funny. It smells like… like orange rinds or something. Lemonade.”
    “Lime. It isn’t the car. It’s Kimi.”
    I’d spent the week writing the article about Stephanie Benson and working on the product evaluations. The previous day, Rowdy had been my guinea pig for yet one more new line of Australian miracle coat revitalizers, shampoos, conditioners, and grooming sprays—dog fancy is high in Down Under these days—and Kimi had been allotted the equally trendy citrus goos and glops. An obedience show-and-go is the lowliest link in the Great Chain of Being Shown, just above a run-through and below a fun match, so I didn’t have to groom the dogs at all, but they’re inevitably the only malamutes entered in any obedience event, and I like them to serve as good ambassadors of the breed. The Aussie shampoo I’d used on Rowdy had disconcerted me by failing to foam or bubble, but it had done a good job. Kimi’s citrus products had left her looking terrific, too, but she smelled like a gin gimlet.
    “Didn’t you notice it when Kimi and Rowdy woke you up?” I asked.
    “The dogs didn’t wake me up. Rita’s radio did.”
    “I’m sorry. I’d speak to her about it, except that I keep complaining about Willie’s barking and I hate to do anything to make things worse. Rita’s not doing very well these days. It’s the hearing aids—she hates them. That’s why the radio’s so loud in the morning. She doesn’t like to put her aids in until she’s been awake for a while.”
    “I