Ruffly Speaking

sure what he’d do. He wouldn’t just order her out. He’d be very polite about it, I think. He’d keep apologizing, and he’d fuss about where she was going to go, and he’d give her all the time she needed, that kind of thing.” Rita looked skeptical. My friendship with Doug Winer was a mere acquaintanceship, but Rita didn’t know him at all. “Holly, tell me something.” She took the Yap Zapper from my hand. “Just how accessible are these things?”
    “Well, you just saw. They’re in the catalogs.”
    “Have you ever seen one anywhere else? In a store?” I tried to remember. “Not that I can think of. Maybe at shows, but I don’t think so. As far as I know, they’re mainly a catalog item.”
    Thus accessible to...? I remembered the stack of kennel supply catalogs on the cookbook shelves in Morris Lamb’s kitchen, catalogs available to Morris, of course and to Doug Winer and to his tenants, Stephanie and, of course, Matthew. And only a few hours earlier, I’d seen Ivan with the same catalogs.
    Rita patted the R.C. Steele catalog, which sat on top of the pile on my table. “Holly, does Stephanie order from these?”
    “She might. But Morris Lamb did, I’m sure—Morris was a dog person—and his catalogs are still there, at his house. At least I assume they were Morris’s. But Stephanie wouldn’t... Rita, why would Stephanie...?”
    “I wasn’t thinking of her,” Rita said. “I was wondering about the son.”
    “Matthew?”
    “Matthew. Didn’t you or Leah tell me that it came as something of a surprise to him, having his mother move here with him?”
    “Yes.” I hesitated. “On the other hand, Rita, he seems quite devoted to Stephanie. That’s how he talks about her, and, before she got Ruffly, apparently, Matthew rigged up gadgets to help her, and he’s still the one who checks her phones, stuff like that.”
    Rita made one of those noncommittal therapist noises.
    “He’s too polite to go around bad-mouthing his mother,” I argued, “but the sense I have, honestly, is that he’s, if anything, more devoted to her than most kids that age are to their parents. Like tonight? Stephanie is having this little barbecue.”
    “I know. She invited me. I’m going.”
    “Good. Well, Matthew and Leah are going to be there, and a lot of kids that age would refuse. It’s the last thing they’d want to do. But, you know, I’m just guessing-
    It really is hard to tell how Matthew feels about anything. Except Leah. How he feels about her is pretty obvious.” I thought for a second and added, “And dogs. You can’t miss it. One thing that’s perfectly obvious is that Matthew does not like dogs.”
     

27
     
     Stephanie Benson was a little too heavy of body and mind to approach cuteness, but when I aimed the Yap Zapper at her and said, “Okay, stick ’em up,” her wide grin displayed those clean, square teeth, and she dutifully raised her hands. I pressed the button, the little red light blinked, and, instead of lowering her arms, Stephanie raised them high, waved her hands from the wrist, and made her fingers dance gleefully.
    “The applause of the deaf,” she explained.
    Although science would also have had us aim the Yap Zapper at Ruffly, Stephanie and I agreed to assume that we’d found the cause of the dog’s problems. Before trying the device, we’d banished Ruffly to the deck, where Doug Winer was puttering with the valve of the gas grill, and, to make doubly sure of sparing Ruffly any discomfort, we’d gone all the way to the living room, at the front of the house, before activating the Yap Zapper. When the experiment was successfully completed, we immediately returned to the kitchen, not only because Stephanie was in the middle of preparing food for what she persisted in calling Ruffly’s birthday party, but also because she was determined to find out whether the Yap Zapper would explain her problems with the telephone as miraculously as it had demystified both Ruffly’s episodes and the apparent malfunction of her aids.
    “Stephanie, I honestly don’t think—” I started to protest.
    “What harm will it do? We’ll give it a little try, and if the phone rings, there we are!”
    “It’s only this extension? The white phone?”
    In Morris Lamb’s day, as I’ve mentioned, the kitchen had been a cheerful jumble of great food and pretty dogs, but Stephanie kept the counters and the granite work island tidy. The only area that looked even slightly messy