Brute Strength (16 page)

In defense of Avery, I told Gabrielle about seeing her with Quinn Youngman. ‘So,' I finished, ‘she's attracted to older men. Even if Hatch weren't her brother, he'd probably be too young for her.'

The mention of Quinn triggered a conversation about Rita, whose response to the news about Quinn and Avery had been to take off for a week on the Cape with Willie. The vanishing act was totally unlike her. She was devoted to her patients and never took time off without giving them notice weeks or months in advance. I had no idea what explanation she'd offered, but she'd probably stayed close to the truth. Willie was a member of her family, and she'd hoped that Quinn would become one, so maybe she'd pleaded a family crisis. By now, Steve had excused himself. I couldn't usually read his mind the way I could read Rowdy's or Kimi's, but on this occasion, I plainly saw what he was thinking:
Girl talk.
(And Sammy's mind? I envisioned it as a complex series of interlocking roulette wheels. Although I could see them turning, I had no better than chance luck in guessing where the ball would land.)

Anyway, Gabrielle decided that since we had a few free hours, we should put them to productive use by working on the ridiculous mock survey that she and Betty had concocted. At her insistence, I got out one of the folders in which I kept applications that I'd printed from our Malamute Rescue website, the folder that included rejected applications.

‘I don't like this,' I said. ‘These are . . . well, they're somewhat confidential.'

‘Of course they are,' Gabrielle agreed. ‘We aren't sharing them with anyone outside the organization. Besides, there's nothing really personal in them, is there? Of course not. All we need are names and phone numbers, and anyone can get those online. Now, once we have a list of likely candidates, I'll get on one phone, and you'll get on another, and you'll—'

‘Not on our phones,' I said. ‘They're cordless. One person only. And no speakerphone, either. The, uh, system was one of my bargains,' I confessed. ‘And not one of my better ones.'

Gabrielle rejected my suggestion that we use a cell phone or a computer. ‘We need maximum fidelity,' she declared. ‘We need a
real
phone. If you can't hear his voice clearly, that defeats our purpose.'

So, that's what happened to the rest of the afternoon: we shopped for new phones. When Steve heard about the project, he said that it was nuts and that he wanted nothing to do with it. I agreed with him, but I couldn't bring myself to take on both Betty and Gabrielle.

NINETEEN

I
t wasn't until Monday morning that my would-be-crime-solving stepmother got into action. By the time we'd returned from the Saturday shopping trip with Gabrielle's idea of a real phone, that is, a corded phone, the dogs needed to be fed, and we had to get ready to go to Newton to have dinner with Ceci and Althea, elderly sisters who were dear friends of ours. On Sunday morning, Gabrielle was itching to make her first call, but the plan required her to use the speakerphone while I listened in, and she was convinced that Steve would voice his opinion of our endeavor and give us away. Her suspicion was probably unwarranted. In the same circumstances, my father would've bellowed and butted in. There was, however, nothing loud or interfering about Steve. Still, to my discredit, instead of standing up for Steve and challenging her insistence on viewing him in Buck's image, I took advantage of her irrational distrust to postpone the ludicrous survey. The weather was again clear and dry, and I was aching to rid the house of the peeling paint.

My determination to do the work myself had irked Steve from the moment I'd told him of my intention, and on Sunday morning, we had probably our tenth argument on the subject.

‘I don't like you using the high ladder,' he said.

‘You use it. You used it when you installed all the outside lights, which you did, if you remember, even though I don't like you to do electrical work.'

‘We can hire a painter.'

‘We could've hired an electrician, only you refused.'

‘We can afford a painter.'

‘No, Steve,
you
can afford a painter. I've been doing repairs and maintenance on this house since the day I moved in.'

‘It's always going to be
your
house, isn't it, Holly?'

‘No, it is not! It is
our
house. All I'm trying to do is my share, and the way I can contribute my fair share is to do the work myself. And I am very careful with the ladder.' That was true. When I first owned the house, I was timid about extension ladders, but the cost of hiring painters eventually got to me. Old wood-framed houses like this just don't hold paint, especially on the north side and especially when they are battered by New England winters. I'd hired professional painters, and I was still willing to hire them, but not all the time, not when I was perfectly capable of doing touch-ups and maintenance myself. ‘You're the one who walks the ladders, Steve.' Walking a ladder means moving it by rocking it from side to side . . . while you're standing on it. ‘I never do that. I always make sure that the ladder is level, I check the ropes, I'm careful to lock the rungs, and I never use the ladder when the dogs are in the yard. I am a model of ladder safety.'

‘You sound just like your father,' Gabrielle said.

When I was growing up, it was actually my mother who did almost all the repairs. She could install plumbing, and she was a whiz at laying tiles. But I didn't want to say so in front of Gabrielle. ‘I'm much more careful than Buck is,' I said.

Steve said, ‘But just as stubborn.'

The argument pretty much ended there, except that I made one concession: I allowed Steve to convince me to hire someone to fix the gutters and downspouts instead of tinkering with them myself. I also agreed to quit in the early afternoon so that we could spend time together grooming our dogs, but that agreement didn't count as a concession. We'd have fun.

So, in the mid morning, there I was high on the ladder scraping paint off the trim around one of Rita's windows when what did I find lodged next to a sash, way up there on the third floor of the house? A great clump of what was instantly identifiable as malamute undercoat! When you're prepping a house occupied by shedding dogs, you don't just have to remove peeling paint; you also have to scrape off dog hair. Anyway, the discovery led me into deep philosophical speculation about free will: does there exist an agent of any sort capable of taking rational control of actions? Of making decisions? Answer: yes! And the reason that all those philosophers had debated endlessly without reaching a clear, definitive conclusion, I realized, was that none of them had owned Alaskan malamutes. If they had, you see, they'd have nearly choked to death on the humble answer to the classic problem of free will: dog hair! It not only controls its actions but habitually makes malicious decisions about where to go and what to do. ‘A
free agent
is he that
can do as he will
, and
forbear
as he will, and that
liberty is the absence of external impediments
.' Thomas Hobbes on the subject of dog hair. I rest my case.

Have I digressed? Sorry. To return to my observations from the top of the ladder, as I was up there working, I heard first Vanessa and then Ulla, both of whom called out to me. Vanessa confined herself to hallooing and using my name, but Ulla broke into her irresistible I'm-crazy-about-you version of
woo-woo-woo
. Looking down, I saw them at the gate to the yard.

‘Hasn't anyone told you that Sunday is a day of rest?' asked Vanessa.

‘I'm having fun,' I called. ‘Fun counts as rest, doesn't it? And this side of the house is in terrible shape. The downspouts are practically falling off. Hey, congratulations on the CGC. It's very well deserved.'

‘Thank you! Too bad about Molly. She almost made it.'

‘She will next time,' I said.

We said goodbyes. Maybe a half hour later, after I'd climbed down the ladder, carefully moved and repositioned it, and climbed back up, I took a moment's break, glanced down Appleton Street, and spotted two women emerging from the McNamaras' house with Persimmon on leash. Assuming that the women were Elizabeth and Isaac's daughters, I descended the ladder with the intention of introducing myself and saying how sorry I was about their father. When I reached the ground, I realized that in my paint-stained jeans and ragged T-shirt, I was ill-dressed for offering condolences. Still, if the daughters were anything like Isaac and Elizabeth, they'd care about nothing except my sincerity.

But as I reached the gate, a conversation taking place on the sidewalk just on the other side of the wooden fence brought me to a halt.

‘With Daddy barely cold!' a woman exclaimed. ‘What
can
Mommy be thinking?' And then: ‘Do you have a plastic bag? Good girl, Persimmon!'

The other woman spoke. ‘I am so sick of hearing about Tom that I could scream! And after what Daddy went through, how can Mommy go on and on about her ailments! When there's nothing wrong with her.'

‘She does have celiac disease.'

‘Big deal! She's used to it, and she never used to harp on it, and she wouldn't now except that she's being encouraged.'

‘Plus, she can hardly wait for us to . . .' The voice trailed off.

I climbed back up the ladder.

What's the best thing to do when you're guilty of eavesdropping, even unintended eavesdropping? Nothing, I decided. Besides, even if I'd wanted to interfere, what could I have done? Order Elizabeth and Tom to end what was evidently becoming more than a friendship? Have a little talk with Elizabeth, who'd hardly welcome the advice of someone who was no more than a neighbor and a member of the same dog-training club? Explain to Vanessa that she had to make her father quit courting the widow next door until a decent interval had elapsed? Ask Rita for her professional opinion of the situation? Or ask Gabrielle to apply her admirable social skills? No! Furthermore, I knew without asking that Rita and Gabrielle would offer the same good advice, which would be to mind my own business. Ah hah! Therein lay the source of my urge to interfere. Especially because dogs were my business, I was at great risk of succumbing to the real dog person's compulsion to offer unsolicited observations and advice:
Your dog is twenty pounds overweight. Get him on a diet right now! You should get rid of that prong collar and use an Easy-Walk Harness instead. Take that dangerous toy away from your dog this minute!
And on and on! But dogs really were my business. If I had to issue advice, I should confine myself to my field of expertise.

Consequently, I climbed back down the ladder, went into the house, and said to Steve, ‘These dogs are getting fat and lazy. What they need is a good long walk.'

They got one. The route we had in mind was a bit much for Lady, so we left her with Gabrielle and Molly. After supplying ourselves with bottles of water, folding fabric bowls, sandwiches, and dog treats, we headed to the river with Rowdy, Kimi, Sammy, and India. When we reached the Charles, we followed the path on its banks upstream to Watertown Square and beyond before we turned around and retraced our route. The round trip was about twelve miles. During the entire time that it took us to cover that distance, I refrained from quarreling with my husband, from sounding like my father, and from handing out free advice. According to one of the old saws of the dog world, a tired dog is a good dog. Maybe the same is true of human beings.

TWENTY

T
hat evening, Steve, Gabrielle, and I were in the living room watching the Red Sox. Gabrielle was on the couch with Molly in her lap; India, tuckered out, was sleeping on the floor in a corner of the room; and Steve was in a chair with Lady lying down on the rug to his right. Doglike, I was sitting on the rug just to the left of Steve's chair, and Sammy was cuddled up next to me. Kimi then strolled into the room, paused to size up the situation, and did something so unprecedented that all of us stared at her: with obvious deliberation, she marched up to Sammy, planted herself directly in front of him, and executed a classic front-down, rear-up play bow. In the past, it had absolutely always been Sammy, the baby of the family, our permanent puppy, who had initiated play with Kimi; she was often happy to accept his invitations and to tear around with him, but never before had I seen Ms Queen of the Castle stoop to begging her serf for anything. Sammy was as astonished as I was. With no hesitation, he leaped to his feet, ready to fly around the house after her. A second later, Kimi's true intention became clear: having enticed Sammy into vacating the prize spot next to me, she flung herself down and occupied it in his stead. With a smug expression on her face, she rested her head on my legs.

Sammy knew that he'd been outfoxed, as he certainly had been. Kimi had walked into the room, analyzed the situation, and observed that Sammy occupied the position that she wanted and, in her view, deserved. The play bow had been a mere means to an end. Instead of using force to get Sammy to move so that she could take his place, Kimi had applied her considerable intelligence. Interestingly, the means she had chosen, the play bow, was way down at the bottom of her own behavioral repertoire but was an element of canine body language that Sammy was guaranteed not only to understand but to react to in an absolutely predictable way. Kimi had also known that if she had shoved Sammy out of the way or used some other forceful or even aggressive tactic, I'd have stopped her, whereas I'd been as charmed as Sammy had been to see her unexpectedly issue the beguiling invitation to get up and play.

It's possible, of course, to see Kimi's tactic not only as brilliant but as shamelessly manipulative: there was Sammy, innocently and happily curled up next me, when mean Kimi came along and tricked him into ceding his position to her; it's possible to judge Kimi as if she were a human being. But even in our own species, rank has its privilege. The British monarch isn't expected to defer to a commoner unexpectedly discovered on the coronation throne. In our little canine kingdom, Kimi greatly outranked Sammy. In a way, she behaved nobly. And in his own way, so did Sammy, who happily settled down next to Kimi, content to have been gently put in his place.