Scratch the Surface

owner.”
    “I don’t know. The people at the front desk take care of that. Hey, I better go. It was nice meeting you. I hope Edith will be back.”
    “She probably will.”
    Before departing, Felicity stepped into the big waiting room, where owners sat with dogs on leashes and small animals in carriers. Then she returned to the corridor and examined a decorative metal tree espaliered on the wall opposite the bench. Each shiny leaf bore the name of a pet. Felicity found herself surprisingly moved by the memorial tree. At the same time, she wondered exactly how much it cost to buy a leaf. On her way out, she again noticed the miniature doghouse with its sign asking for donations to the MSPCA animal shelter. On impulse, she reached into her bag, found Uncle Bob’s suspect hundred-dollar bill, and inserted it in the slot on the roof of the donation box. If there was, in fact, something wrong with Uncle Bob’s cash, there’d presumably be a public fuss about someone’s having donated hot or fake money to the MSPCA. And if not? She’d have supported a good cause.
     

 
    The board of the New England Chapter of Witness consisted of Sonya Bogosian, Janice Mattingly, Hadley O’Connor, Jim Isaac, and Felicity. At the group’s inception, it had been emphasized to the founders that to avoid tie votes, it was crucial to have an uneven number of board members. In fact, as the board was now constituted, votes were nearly always unanimous. Sonya, as president, chaired the board meetings and the general meetings, and Jim Isaac, as vice president, was prepared to fill in for her in her absence. Sonya, however, was always present. Felicity, in the position of clerk, dealt with correspondence by handing it over to Janice, whose official position was that of treasurer. Janice also took notes on meetings and, at each meeting, read the minutes of the last one. Hadley O’Connor attended board meetings. As the two best-known authors on the board, he and Felicity privately believed that their willingness to serve on the board was in itself a valuable contribution to the organization.
    On Sunday, November 9, the board meeting was held at Janice’s apartment, which was in a multifamily house on a narrow street in Lower Allston. The neighborhood was known for providing affordable housing to students and musicians. Although Felicity professed to find the area interesting, she actually considered it a slum. Her prejudice against anything even remotely like a tenement had been handed down to her by her maternal grandparents, both of whom had been born in Glasgow, a city with such a notable history of urban poverty and overcrowding that it now welcomed tourists to a museum called Tenement House. Still, in Felicity’s family, as in all other Scottish-American families, the elders had always passed down the information that their own ancestors had been the kings of the Highlands, thus generating the universal question of Scottish-American children, namely, if they were the kings of the Highlands, why did they leave?
    In any case, on Sunday afternoon when Felicity squeezed the Honda into a small parking space on the narrow street where Janice lived, she experienced an atavistic dread at finding herself about to enter what she must not refer to as a tenement. After all, Harvard was buying up property here, wasn’t it? Albeit with the intention of tearing down the existing buildings, among them, Janice’s perfectly nice dwelling in this ever-so-interesting and culturally diverse neighborhood. After taking no more than her usual care to make sure that the Honda’s windows were firmly closed and its doors locked, she made her way up a short flight of wooden steps in need of paint and pressed the doorbell next to a tattered card that read “Janice Mattingly and Bruno Balboa.” As Felicity knew, Bruno was a fiction who existed strictly for Janice’s protection against evildoers who might harm her if they realized that she lived alone. It had never occurred to Felicity that Bruno inhabited the same universe as her very own late Morris, for whom she was still grieving. Indeed, Felicity half-believed in the existence of Bruno and would have been unsurprised if she’d been at Janice’s and heard the door open and a deep male voice call out, “Janice, I’m home!”
    On this Sunday afternoon, Bruno was, of course, out. When Janice answered the bell and led Felicity upstairs to her one-bedroom apartment, Sonya, Jim, and Hadley had already