Ruffly Speaking

Stephanie. I just wrote an article about her.” Ruffly played a considerably more prominent role in my prose than Stephanie did, but I didn’t want to disappoint Rita, who’s a mother hen about my career. In particular, she persists in trying to incubate the infertile hope that one of these days I’ll transfer my membership in the Dog Writers’ Association of America to the People Writers’ Association, and I haven’t yet broken the news to her that whereas the former crows and cackles in merry unison, the latter consists of dozens of broken eggs.
    “Did I thank you?” Rita asked. “I didn’t even thank you. And I’m sorry I snapped at you. And, really, Ruffly is remarkable.”
    “All hearing dogs are.” They’re merely a special case in point, but when I say things like that, Rita worries about me. Unnecessarily, of course, but she does. “Did Stephanie say anything to you about this problem with Ruffly?”
    “She mentioned something about all the transitions.”
    “Maybe she’s decided that’s all it is.”
    “What did you...?”
    “Seizures, maybe.Some kind of neurological thing. He’s having weird attacks, she says. Maybe he’s hearing something. I didn’t see a thing.”
    While I was warming the coffee to refill our mugs, Leah and Matthew showed up with two quarts of Toscanini’s ice cream, a frozen confection so vastly superior to all others that it practically deserves an entirely different name. They also had a video they’d just rented, the remake of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matthew’s selection, no doubt. The title, I was certain, represented the precise nature of his intentions toward Leah, who, on her own, would have been content to re-view The No-Force Method of Dog Training or would have chosen an undubbed French film and stuck a strip of masking tape over the bottom of the TV screen to blot out the subtitles.
    “Leah,” I said as she dished out ice cream, “what do you know about Ivan’s mother?”
    “She’s nice,” Leah said unhelpfully.
    I clarified my request. “Would she let him have a dog?”
    Leah and Matthew exchanged glances. Leah suppressed a grin.
    “What’s that about?” I asked. “Is there something wrong with...?”
    Leah interpreted. “There’s nothing wrong with her. It’s just that she might not even notice. She’s really nice. She’s just kind of oblivious.” Leah fished spoons out of the drawer and stuck them in the ice cream. She and Matthew distributed the bowls.
    “How oblivious can she be?” I said. “She’s a professor of something, isn’t she? And she’s raising Ivan. If she manages to work and—”
    “I don’t know.” Leah shrugged. “You just always have the sense that her mind is somewhere else. On the rain forests or something. But with Ivan, she really tries. She just doesn’t understand much about kids, and she never really expected... The thing is that she and Ivan’s father had a prenuptial agreement that he was supposed to be responsible for, like, seventy-five percent of the child-rearing, and then—”
    “When did his father die?” I asked.
    Leah looked toward Matthew. “When was it? A while ago.”
    “Two years ago,” Matthew said confidently.
    “In Cameroon,” I said. “What did he die of?” Matthew answered. “Septicemia. He was there doing research, and by the time they decided to evacuate him, it was too late.”
    I wondered exactly how Ivan’s father had managed to abide by the prenuptial agreement to do most of the child care while simultaneously conducting research on the other side of the globe. Then a possibility occurred to me. “Was Ivan there? Was Ivan with him in Cameroon?” Matthew shook his head.
    “No,” Leah said, “I know he wasn’t. Ivan’s been at Avon Hill since kindergarten.”
    “So Ivan never got a chance to say good-bye to his father,” said Rita, who’d accepted one small scoop of vanilla and was slowly feeding herself minute lumps of it.
    Matthew nodded politely—he really did have meticulously correct manners—but his face looked blank.
    “Does that matter a lot?” Leah asked. Before Rita could respond, she added, “I wondered, because Ivan... He’ll tell you his father died—he’ll kind of drop it like a bomb, especially with people he doesn’t know—but other than that, he doesn’t talk about it at all, and it’s kind of hard just to go up to him and say, ‘Hey, Ivan, how do you feel about...?’ because, obviously, you know how he