Ruffly Speaking

Morris wired to his dogs and laughing gleefully at himself. “Are you sure?” I added. “Morris wasn’t exactly a home-repair type.”
    “Doug Winer put in the phones,” Leah said, “and he was just there, and he checked everything. And Matthew says there’s nothing wrong with the phone system, but—” Leah eyed me.
    You don’t have to be very handy to put in an extension, and I am a home-repair type, but we’d ended up with a trivial problem. Either the phone in my kitchen or the one in Leah’s room worked fine alone, but when we tried to use both at once, the line went dead.
    “I’ll fix it,” I assured her. “I just haven’t had time.”
    “And Stephanie also keeps saying that there’s something wrong with her hearing aids,” Leah told Steve, “and when she moved here, from New York, she had to start going to this new audiologist, and the one here says there’s nothing wrong, not that she can find.”
    Steve looked as if he wanted to say something, but he just drank Geary’s.
    “Steve, you saw Ruffly, right?” I asked. “Weren’t you supposed to see him today?” All he did was nod. Veterinarians aren’t schooled to blab about their patients’ illnesses, but they aren’t required to take a vow of silence, either. “So did you see him or not?” I demanded.
    “Yeah. She brought him in.” As usual, Steve spoke evenly and slowly.
    Sometimes his calm exasperates me. Sometimes it scares me. I’ve repeatedly explained to Steve that it’s only bad news you have to break; good news you can just blurt out.
    He still doesn’t get it. “A brain tumor,” I said. “Ruffly has a brain tumor. It’s an early neurological sign, isn’t it? Steve, would you please —” I broke off. He seemed to examine his thoughts. After that, I guess, he paused to organize them. The man is a human Casablanca—all that waiting and waiting and waiting.
    Eventually, he cleared his throat. “I can’t find a thing. It’s probably some stimulus he’s picking up on. We’re going to pursue it, to be on the safe side. We’re going to be real cautious, real thorough.”
    “Seizures?” I asked.
    “It’s a remote possibility. Some unusual kind of petit mal seizures. But it’s real remote. Or maybe what’s going on is that this is a dog that’s zeroed in on the owner, hyperattuned, and, at the same time, he’s hyperattuned to the environment, and they’ve moved twice in a few months. So what’s impinging on him is her stress and his own stress. These assistance dogs are prone to stress. They’ve got a lot of responsibility. If that’s his problem, once she settles down and the new sounds start to get familiar to him, he’ll be back to normal.”
    “But, Steve, what about these, uh, episodes?Attacks. That’s what Stephanie calls them. That’s not generalized stress.”
    “A stimulus.Possibly a seizure. Or she jumps, the dog jumps,” Steve said. “We’ll look for other things, but that’s probably what we’re going to find. Stephanie adapts, Ruffly’ll adapt. End of problem.”
    Before he’d finished speaking, Rita’s eyes were narrow with rage. “I have really had it with both of you,” she said coldly, “and with Leah and Matthew and this audiologist of Stephanie’s and everyone else who’s so busy trying to drive her crazy.”
    Rita rose and stood behind her chair with her trembling hands resting on its back. “Here you have an intelligent, cogent, superbly self-possessed, highly-developed, and articulate woman who makes certain observations of two subjects with which she is intimately familiar —her hearing and her dog—subjects about which she understands infinitely more than you do, and when she reports these observations, how do you people respond? You tell her she’s wrong. You tell her that what she knows is happening is not happening. And you know what that does to people?” Rita slammed the chair forward against the table. “It drives them nuts, that’s what. I’m going upstairs, and I’m going to take out my hearing aids, because I’ve heard all I really want to hear from people today. For once, I’m going to really enjoy being deaf.” She stomped out. The door slammed shut behind her.
    Steve looked stunned. “Did I say something?”
    “Yes,” I told him. “The word adapt. Steve, when you said that to Rita, you said the wrong thing.”
    In the silence that followed, I worried more about Ruffly than about Rita. Any veterinary problem that puzzled Steve