Stud Rites

for Thanksgiving when my mother had presented the half-grown puppy, a littermate of Barry’s, to Mildred Fielders, who delivered our mail. Who’d clearly been bought off. I felt so sorry for my teenage self that I wished that my mother and Mildred Fielders were still alive so I could send them to a penitentiary for conspiring to tamper with the U.S. Mail. My mother had objected quite strongly to Finn Adams. Until now, I’d almost forgotten her principal complaint. Her only objection to Finn, she maintained, was that the boy was intolerably uninteresting.
    She’d had no right to interfere with my mail. But I could have gotten pregnant. I could have married him! I felt suddenly light: elevated, levitated, elated, joyous. What a wonderful life I’d had since I’d last seen Finn Adams! What a lucky person I was! My nights with Steve, my days with Rowdy and Kimi, my house rocking with the booming pitter-patter of malamutes crashing off the walls.
    So, I wasn’t angry at Finn. Far from it. I felt a sort of senseless gratitude to him for vanishing from my life, which had been vastly better than his, I thought. Lacking the golden glow of sunny curls and family money to begin with, I’d had little to lose. I felt thankful that my eccentric father was still embarrassing me by being around instead of humiliating me by having had to flee to Brazil for financial wrongdoing. Also, my father had always been mortifying; I was used to it. I felt really sorry for Finn. The popularity of types changes mightily over time. But I shouldn’t have said so.
    To cover up my blunder, I blundered on. ”So,” I said, ”I don’t believe in breeding for sentimental reasons.” A coughing fit seized me. After clearing my throat, I said, ”I mean, before I decide, I have to be sure that it makes objective sense, that at some point in the distant future, the semen would be worth using. Not that it would be junk —far from it—but I don’t want to do it just because I’m bonded with my dog—”
    Rowdy examined me with large, empathic eyes. So far as I could tell, though, Finn entirely missed what Rowdy immediately grasped. Steve Delaney wouldn’t have noticed, either. So what? I pity men who love women who don’t have dogs like mine. Rowdy and Kimi are brilliant and intuitive. They offer me boundless entertainment and unconditional worship. They occupy my time and attention. They are excellent company. Steve is my lover. He doesn’t have to be my dog, too.
    Anyway, whether densely or tactfully, Finn ignored my faux pas and said something that rendered me speechless.
    ”You’re thinking about the distant future,” he said. ”This morning, right outside here, I went for a walk, and what I came across was the body of the guy who was supposed to judge today. Think about it, Holly. Your dog could die tomorrow. So could I. So could you.”
     

 
     
    IF I WEREN’T so cowardly, I’d have made a great cop. When I’d made the claim a few weeks earlier to my neighbor Kevin Dennehy, who actually is a cop, Kevin had suffered what our therapist friend Rita diagnosed as an hysterical seizure, meaning, as I understood it, that the problem was in Kevin’s head, not mine. Rita brought him out of the attack by lying: She said I was joking: I’d make a rotten cop. Kevin believed her. That’s Cambridge: always a mental health professional at hand to pour snake oil on the waters of turbulent truth.
    But I would have. For example, if I’d been Detective Peter Kariotis, I’d have known I was lying or, if not exactly lying, not spilling the full truth. Observing a fishy look in my own eyes, a tightness about the mouth, and a rigidity in my Yankee jaw, Detective Holly Winter would have made a swift verbal pounce. ”Just what,” I’d have demanded, ”did you find on the blacktop under Betty Burley’s van? And what did you do with it? And why?”
    But before I abandon the topic of fishiness, let me summarize what Finn had to say about finding the corpse of James Hunnewell. Summarize is precisely what Finn didn’t do. On the contrary, he went on and on about his reasons for taking a walk, his estimation of the air temperature, the excessive warmth of the windbreaker he’d been wearing, and the makes and models of the ambulances, emergency vehicles, and police cruisers that had subsequently arrived. I’d found Finn boring when he’d delivered his sales pitch about reproductive artifice, but he was even more staggeringly boring when he