Stud Rites

perched °n the edge of a chair too high for her peering with
    Kimi-like intensity at a menu too big for her small hands. ”Now what,” she demanded, ”would you say that Norwegian salmon Delmonico might be?”
    I took a seat. ”Cream sauce, maybe?”
    Outraged, Betty said, ”Well, I find it hard to believe that anyone would drown a nice piece of salmon in cream sauce!”
    I couldn’t resist the impulse to try to mollify her. ”Maybe it’s smoked salmon on toast,” I suggested. ”That would be good.”
    ”I should hope so,” she snapped. ”It’s certainly expensive enough.”
    Before Betty had time to take further offense at the grill’s offerings, a waiter appeared and took orders for drinks, and my cousin Leah, who’d been checking on my dogs, arrived. Leah, a Harvard freshman, had driven to Danville with me the day before. First thing in the morning, she’d handled Kimi in obedience. Immediately afterward, she’d borrowed my car and headed back to Cambridge, where she’d taken two exams, one in chemistry, one in Latin, before turning around and returning to Danville. Despite her accomplishments, Leah’s a good kid. She doesn’t go around swathed in crimson with Veritas plastered across her ample bosom. In fact, her wardrobe is so overwhelmingly and exclusively black that if it weren’t for her cheerful countenance and gleeful mass of long red-gold curls, you’d mistake her for a raiment major at a mortuary college. She started talking nonstop before she’d even sat down. ”I have a message for both of you, actually, two messages from two people who both said that when I found you I had to tell you right away that there’s a rumor going around about someone selling puppies, and you won’t believe it, but both of these people wanted to know what Rescue was going to do about it!”
    ”That’s not our business,” I said. ”It’s the rep’s.” Rep: AKC rep, representative of the American Kennel Club.
    ”That’s what I told them,” Leah informed me.
    ”There’s no rep here,” Betty said.
    I was surprised. ”Really? Why not?”
    ”I don’t know,” Betty said. ”There doesn’t have to be one.” She shrugged. ”Anyway, if someone’s selling puppies, it’s Freida’s business, not ours. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
    ”Who’s it supposed to be?” I asked, intrigued. ”Who is it who’s selling puppies?”
    ”No one knows,” my cousin replied. ”Maybe it’s just a rumor, anyway.”
    The waiter returned. I ordered a second Johnnie Walker and a seafood casserole. The fare at the Liliu Grill was bafflingly un-Hawaiian; pineapple appeared on the menu only in conjunction with a slice of baked ham, and coconut was completely absent. Leah chose steak with Bearnaise sauce—pure butter—and a diet soft drink that I wouldn’t give to a dog. Without finding out what ”Delmonico” meant, Betty asked for the salmon. When the waiter left, we debriefed the showcase.
    ”It is too bad that we didn’t have a reporter there,” said Betty, buttering a cinnamon roll. ”Or better yet, TV.” She trained her intense gaze on me. It occurred to me that maybe she knew exactly what had happened out in the parking lot and was wondering whether I did, too.
    ”Yvonne tried,” I said. ”If we were a little closer to Boston, we might’ve gotten someone, but I guess no one thought it was worthwhile schlepping all the way out here. I hope the video turned out all right.”
    The judging of the conformation classes, including the nonregular classes like Brace and Team, was professionally taped and edited by a company that produced videos, which you could mail order. On the grounds that the few people deranged enough to enter a malamute in a so-called obedience event should be allowed to blot the experience from memory as soon as possible, the company did not bother to tape the trial. A fearless obedience fanatic, however, an otherwise nice guy named Jim Kuehl, videoed the obedience at all our national specialties. Jim had even gone so far as to produce an underground classic, a tape of bloopers that showed malamutes zipping madly around obedience rings, leaping over baby gates, and crashing into handlers. We’d also amateur-taped the Showcase of Rescue Dogs.
    ”I hope so,” Leah said, ”so you can play it tomorrow instead of all that gory—”
    I kicked her under the table. One of Betty’s tapes was about family pets stolen and sold to research laboratories. The video of