The Dogfather

me a new car. Meanwhile, here’s Leah commandeering Steve and his van, and it’s humiliating to have him know that I can’t afford—”
    Rita almost never interrupts. “Stop it! As if Steve cares what you drive. Or how much money you make.”
    Rita knows me so well that I don’t have to bother explaining abrupt transitions. “Rita, how could he have married that horrible woman?”
    “You’ve read The Odyssey. Remember Circe? She turned men into swine. Steve did what a million other men’ve done. You rejected him, and he fell under Anita’s thrall.”
    “Sssshh! He’s here.”
    Steve and Sammy the Baby Rowdy entered the kitchen trailed by my cousin and three other undergraduates, a woman and two men whom Leah must have chosen for their brawn. Leah is not only practical but polite. She introduced everyone to everyone else. Then, to Sammy’s delight and to the grinning Steve’s as well, she and her friends sat in a puppy-centered circle on the floor and fussed over Sammy, handed him around, and let him untie shoelaces and scramble from lap to lap. The young woman was African-American with braided hair as black as Leah’s was red-gold. One of the young men was Eurasian, the other almost comically Yankee looking, raw boned, big footed, and lantern jawed. Together, the four students and Sammy could’ve been posing for a photo intended to illustrate the universality of dog love. Steve and Rita shared my pleasure in the beauty of the scene; all three of us smiled knowingly. For me, there was the added joy of glimpsing Rowdy as I’d never seen him. Our lives had intersected when he was a young adult; I’d never known him as a puppy. Now I could.
    Beauty is never more fleeting than in the case of a puppy too young to be reliably housebroken. When Sammy began to sniff and circle, Steve scooped him up and took him out, and then all of us turned to the task of moving the love seat from Rita’s apartment to Steve’s van.
    My house, I remind you, is at the corner of Appleton and Concord. The driveway is on Appleton Street. It’s wide enough for two cars and easily accommodates two more behind the first two. When I’d driven the ailing Bronco home earlier that day, two cars had already been there, side by side, Rita’s new BMW and my third-floor tenants’ second car, a Honda sedan. I’d parked behind Rita’s car. Steve’s van was now in back of the Honda. Since moving the love seat didn’t require all of us, Rita and I decided to switch cars while Leah and her friends went upstairs to get the love seat and while Steve crated Sammy in his van. The point of trading parking places with Rita was that my expiring Bronco belonged in a spot where it wasn’t blocking another car and where it could just sit until I got rid of it. After a couple of noisy attempts, I got it started, pulled out of the driveway, backed a little way down Appleton, and watched as Rita backed out and drove forward on Appleton to wait for me to take her place. That’s when the Bronco quit. And not quietly, either. Imagine the painfully amplified roaring of diseased intestines. Steve’s soon-to-be ex-wife, I might mention irrelevantly, drove a silver sports car, and not the kind that made racetrack vrooms, but the kind that made no sound at all. To Anita’s discredit, her car had no room for dogs because she really hated them, whereas my Bronco had lots of space for big dogs and had transported them for thousands of miles. In fact, there’s no doubt in my mind that Rowdy and Kimi were involuntarily responsible for its demise because every formerly moving part was now clogged with malamute undercoat. So, right in the middle of Appleton Street, the luckless vehicle died of dog hair.
    By this time, the love seat was in the van. Rita’s idea of moving broken cars is to call AAA, but everyone else helped to push the Bronco to the space on the street just beyond my driveway. To minimize the duration of my embarrassment, I insisted on leaving the Bronco there instead of trying to push it into the driveway. Steve, Sammy, Leah, her three friends, and the love seat departed. Rita went upstairs to her apartment. I ate dinner, puttered, checked my e-mail, took the dogs for a short walk, and went to bed early. Rowdy and Kimi slept on the bed. At three o’clock in the morning, both dogs were still dozing on the comforter. Almost nothing ever bothered them. Thunder didn’t scare them, and they were used to the Bronco’s habitual rumbling and