Ruffly Speaking

girl and hers. In the all-seeing eyes of the American Kennel Club, Alaskan malamute SnowKist Qimissung, C.D., had one owner, Holly Winter, and Leah knew my opinion of co-ownership too well to ask directly to have her name added. In pleading for Ivan, Leah was also speaking for herself. I began to wonder how powerfully Leah’s indirect pitch had shaped the picture she’d given me of Ivan. She knew how fussy I was in screening adopters of rescued malamutes. In Leah’s accounts, Ivan’s pranks were tricks without victims. I’d observed the salt-on-the-grass episode myself, and Leah hadn’t intended to tell me about the stolen flowers. I remembered Ivan’s easy mastery of the gas stove that had resisted Bernadette’s efforts. Now I glanced first at the grill, then at Leah. “What else don’t I know about Ivan?” Leah was defiant. “So Ivan picked some flowers! In case you don’t know, I like flowers. It was very nice of him. Besides, the blossoms were starting to fall off, any-way.
    One of the summer gardening tasks Marissa used to assign me was cutting off delphinium stalks to encourage the plants to bloom again in the fall, but I didn’t say so. Leah’s infuriating habit of always being right needed no encouragement; it would produce a second bloom all on its own.
    “I think it was lovely of Ivan,” Stephanie pronounced genially. “Matthew, would you pass the rice to Holly, please? It seems to have bypassed her.”
    Like an overtrained dog—all obedience, no enthusiasm—Matthew immediately handed me the serving dish, and, ignoring Rita’s and Steve’s tactless smirks, I made a show of helping myself to the rice, a food I hate. While I washed it down with swigs of Chardonnay, conversation among Stephanie’s other guests grew animated. Matthew offered Leah a choice of the videos he’d rented for them to watch after dinner. Symbolically enough, it seemed to me, the one he plumped for was Close Encounters. I had a sudden flash to one of my dog-training friends who always comes to class with a hand towel looped through the belt °f her jeans so she can keep mopping up the gallons of saliva that would otherwise mar the appearance of her beautiful Newfoundland, Thor. The image didn’t quite fit. For one thing, I liked Thor. For another, Thor was neutered.
    In happy coincidence with my reflections on her son, Stephanie was telling Steve what a shame it was that Ruffly couldn’t father any puppies. Ruffly, she proclaimed, w as the ideal hearing dog; it was too bad there’d never be more just like him. I wanted to speak up and explain that if Ruffly were intact, his hormonal reek would provoke other males to pick fights with him, and instead of working his sounds, he’d work the perfumes of bitches in season, but I trusted Steve to make the same points— preferably not in those exact words.
    In violation of my mother’s dictates, I mashed a few flakes of salmon into the rice I hadn’t yet choked down, forked a bit onto my tongue, and swallowed, but when I reached for more wine, my glass was empty. The closer of the two bottles on the table stood between Doug and Rita. I tuned into their conversation and decided to settle for water. Doug had discovered that Rita was a therapist. When people find out what I do, they’re apt to ask for professional opinions, and I’m happy to advise either that Rover should be taught what he is supposed to do (How do I get him to quit jumping, barking, leash-lunging...?) or that Rover should not be allowed to run loose in the first place (How do I get him to quit chasing cars, running away…?)
    Although the same two answers cover almost all dog-behavior questions, neither seemed even remotely relevant to the problem Doug was currently presenting to Rita. “Morris kept insisting, ‘Oh, just do it! Do it, and you will feel so much better!’ And his own parents were deceased, so it was easy for him, but, even so, I knew he was right, but then... I remember the moment so clearly, when this realization came tumbling down on me that it was absolutely impossible. It was Mother’s birthday, and my father and I went to the florist, and we’d selected the most gorgeous arrangement for her, from both of us, and there was a little card to go with it.” Doug paused. Rita waited. He sighed. “Instead of signing it first, for some reason, I handed it to him, and I gave him a pen.”
    “And?”
    “And I’ll never forget it. He wrote ‘Albert J. Winer, C.P.A.’