Ruffly Speaking

of hair. A cloudlike halo of escaped bronze tendrils framed her flushed, eager face. (Cloudlike. You noticed? Indeed, the ad copy for Wonder Fluff dog shampoo. There’s an off-chance that Leah had actually used it.)
    “Ruffly saved Matthew’s mother!” she exclaimed. “You have to hear all about it!”
    Most of the time, I manage to ignore Leah’s resemblance to my own mother—the voice, the astonishing hair, the remarkable way with dogs—but once in a while, when Leah catches me off-guard, I feel as if I’ve encountered Marissa’s ghost. With my mother, too, no one ever bad much choice about hearing all about everything. On this occasion I really was eager to hear all about Ruffly. The piece about him had turned out pretty well, but, after mailing it, I’d realized that something was missing: a good rescue story. If it hadn’t been Friday night, I might even have dashed to the phone to tell my editor to put the article on hold. Monday morning would be soon enough. I’ll also confess something: As a person, I genuinely hoped that Leah’s news was about some trivial incident that hadn’t even alarmed Stephanie. As a dog writer? Well, I prayed that little Ruffly hadn’t merely nudged Stephanie away from a slow-moving vehicle or warned her about a minor grease fire, but had heroically dragged his large-framed and bosomy mistress from the brink of some major, eminently publishable, and preferably ecclesiastical disaster.
    “Oh,” I said, disguising these warring emotions. “What happened?”
    By now, Steve had dished up and distributed the ice cream, and Matthew seemed more intent on working away at his bowl of vanilla than on enriching my forthcoming contribution to canine, ahem, literature, but maybe he simply accepted the inevitable. When Leah is bent on holding the floor, it’s useless to compete.
    “It just happened! Right after Stephanie got home, she went out to the deck, and you know how there’s a big gas grill there?” The question was one in intonation only; Leah didn’t pause long enough for me to nod, but went breathlessly on. “There’s one of those built-in grills, and she’d been out to dinner, and after she got home, she made some coffee and went out to the deck because Matthew won’t let her smoke in the house.”
    Stephanie had mentioned the ban. I remember how surprised I’d been to learn that she smoked at all. I still was. I glanced at Matthew, who was almost frowning. It occurred to me that I might be misjudging him. Maybe he was just hard to read, like a tailless shaggy dog with a curtain of hair permanently drawn over his face.
    Leah was gesturing enthusiastically with a spoonful of ice cream. “And Stephanie sat down, and there was ... You know how windy it is? And she sat where the wind was blowing away from the grill, and she was just about to light her cigarette, but Ruffly bumped her arm, and then he just stood there staring at the grill, practically like a statue, and then Stephanie got up, and when she got really close to the grill, she could smell the gas. The valve wasn’t all the way off, and if it hadn’t been for Ruffly, especially if the wind had changed, she’d have been blown up!”
    “How did Ruffly know?” I asked.
    “You can hear it,” Matthew answered. “My mother can’t hear it, but the gas hisses a little. And if she’d been paying any attention, she would’ve smelled it.”
    “No, she wouldn’t,” Leah said firmly. “Not with the wind blowing away, would she?”
    “Well, it wouldn’t make much difference,” I said. “What she should’ve noticed wouldn’t really matter. Steve, would Ruffly have responded to the gas? To the smell?”
    He shrugged. “More likely the sound. Those dogs are all ears.” He asked Matthew how the gas happened to have been left on, but Matthew said he didn’t know— maybe the valve was faulty. His mother had used the grill a couple of times. He’d had to turn it off and on for her; she didn’t understand how it worked, and it made her nervous.
    It seemed to me that any woman capable of getting herself ordained should be able to overcome a sense of female helplessness about gas grills. If the Church gives you the power to look God more or less in the eye and yank souls from the flames of hell, why go all fluttery in the face of a backyard barbecue? But I didn’t say so; I didn’t know much about priests. Or gas grills. What Leah and I both said was the obvious: how fortunate that Ruffly had