Brute Strength (12 page)

But after rising to canine heights, I made the inevitable descent. ‘Elizabeth, have you eaten anything?' I asked. ‘Could I get you anything? Tea? Ginger ale? A sandwich?'

‘Nothing,' she said. ‘Thank you. If you could just take care of Persimmon?' From a Peruvian shoulder bag, she removed a key chain with a single key and a pewter disk depicting a stylized puli. ‘This is a spare key. It's for both doors, front and back. You can just let her out in the yard. It's fenced.'

When Elizabeth had finished telling me where to find Persimmon's food and how much to feed her, I renewed my offer to do anything at all, including drive her home. Then I made my departure. Once I got back to Appleton Street, I parked in our driveway and walked to the McNamaras' house, where Persimmon heralded my arrival even before I'd put the key in the front door. Her barking was energetic rather than threatening. The puli – correct plural
pulik
– is a medium-size Hungarian sheepdog, a lively, charming companion and often a fine watchdog. When I opened the door, Persimmon delighted me by bouncing up and down, thus sending the long black cords of her coat flying in what looked like gleeful abandon. I'm tempted to compare her to a black dust mop in flight, but the image would be misleading, mainly because Persimmon devoted herself more to play than to work of any kind.

‘Hey, Persimmon,' I said, ‘you must be desperate to get out. Let's go!'

As we made our way to the back of the house, I scanned the shining wood floors and the handwoven area rugs for evidence that Persimmon had been unable to wait, but she'd apparently held it; and when I opened the door to the backyard, she dashed out and immediately squatted, thereby confirming my guess. Following Elizabeth's instructions, I found a metal canister of dry food and a stack of stainless dog bowls in a kitchen cabinet. When I'd given Persimmon her dinner and refilled her water bowl, I made a quick call to Steve and then cleared the breakfast dishes off the table, loaded the dishwasher, wiped the counters, and took Persimmon back outside.

As I was watching her sniff around, I heard Vanessa's voice from the opposite side of the cedar fence that separated the yards. ‘Elizabeth? Is that you?

‘It's Holly,' I answered. The fence was about five feet high, so by stepping on one of its wooden supports and standing on tiptoe, I was able to stick my head over it. ‘Isaac is in the hospital. Elizabeth is with him. I'm here taking care of Persimmon.'

Vanessa was alone in the yard. ‘I would have done that!' She sounded almost insulted. ‘Or Tom. Or even Avery. What's wrong with Isaac?'

‘Something serious,' I said. ‘I don't know exactly what. Elizabeth said that the doctors are talking about liver and kidney damage.'

‘Well, I can't say that I'm surprised,' Vanessa said. ‘Isaac hasn't been well for years, you know. My father knows all about it. Naturally!'

‘Whatever's going on with Isaac was sudden, I think. He collapsed this morning. Elizabeth called an ambulance. He's in intensive care.'

‘Huh. I didn't hear the ambulance. I must've been out. My father was with me. At Loaves and Fishes. I wish he'd never discovered that place. He spends hours poking through all the vitamins and remedies and whatever, and the salespeople encourage him. He refuses to swallow any kind of pill, but he spends a fortune loading up on all sorts of disgusting liquids, and he won't listen to a word that Hatch says. But what can I do for Elizabeth?'

‘For now, nothing, I think.'

‘Where is he? Which hospital?'

‘Mount Auburn. At least it's nearby, and Elizabeth knows that if she needs a ride, all she has to do is call me.'

‘Well, the same goes for me,' Vanessa said. ‘And my father. And even Avery. She's capable of making herself useful when she feels like it. Just let us know.'

‘Of course,' I said. ‘And thank you.'

‘We'll be happy to help,' Vanessa said. ‘With Persimmon. With anything. We just love Elizabeth. We'll be more than happy to help.'

FIFTEEN

A
t ten o'clock that Wednesday night, when we'd finished dinner and after Rita had gone upstairs to her own apartment, I'd heard nothing from Elizabeth and decided to check on Persimmon. Since Kevin and Jennifer were leaving, I walked them to their car, which was actually Kevin's, and was parked in his driveway, which was actually his mother's. If I sound awkward, it's because that's what the situation was – in more ways than one.

Until Kevin met Jennifer, he and his mother lived on Appleton Street in the house next to ours. Kevin still lived there, in a sense, but he increasingly spent his nights at Jennifer's. Many conservative parents could have adapted to the reality of changing times. Mrs Dennehy was not such a parent. She had been a committed Roman Catholic before her conversion to Seventh-Day Adventism, and neither her former religion nor her present one made her inclined to approve of what she sincerely felt to be sin. She was a woman of severe appearance, demeanor, and character. She wore her hair knotted on top of her head in a bun so tight that she must have lived in unremitting pain, and she was forever quoting the Bible. Over the years, I'd come to like and respect her. She and I got along mainly because she had a soft spot for animals and knew that I was on their side. She made a fuss over our dogs, and she was the rare person who appreciated what I'd tried to do for my difficult cat, Tracker, after I'd rescued Tracker, rehabilitated her, tried to place her in a good home, and eventually realized that the only home Tracker would ever find was the one she had, namely, with me, because no one else would want her. Tracker was missing part of an ear and had a disfiguring mark on her face. Unfortunately she was not a
belle laide
, a creature so ugly that she was beautiful. Worse, she was outright unfriendly to absolutely everyone except Steve, whom she adored. He could pick her up and carry her around. In spite of my efforts, she barely tolerated me, and because my initial optimism about teaching Rowdy and Kimi to accept her had been unfounded, she spent most of her life in my office, which was filled with cat furniture and cat toys. Many people thought that Tracker was simply a dreadful cat and that I was a fool to have kept her. Others felt that it was mean of me to doom poor Tracker to an existence of confinement. Mrs Dennehy, however, understood that the life I gave Tracker was better than the alternative – none at all. Furthermore, once I'd married Steve, Mrs Dennehy had decided that I'd become respectable, and she'd abandoned her belief in what she'd groundlessly suspected were my designs on Kevin, who'd never done anything worse at my house than eat meat and drink beer, activities banned at home.

As to the dark-haired, voluptuous Jennifer Pasquarelli, Mrs Dennehy knew perfectly well what Kevin was doing with her and found in Jennifer no redeeming qualities. It counted for nothing with Mrs Dennehy that Jennifer, like Kevin, was a police officer and a runner. In fact, whereas Kevin's career was successful, Jennifer had such trouble getting along with people that she was lucky to have a desk job with the Newton police. In some ways, Jennifer had been a good influence on Kevin. She forced him to eat vegetables and various soy-based products, and although he complained about being fed weeds and slime, he looked great and was clearly crazy about her in spite of her obvious failings, which included a hot temper, a sharp tongue, and a thinly disguised dislike of animals. Mrs Dennehy couldn't stand her. Steve, Rita, and I weren't wild about Jennifer, either, but excluding her would've meant excluding Kevin, whose friendship we valued.

Kevin? Oh, Kevin is a gigantic Irish cop, a powerhouse, a red-haired dynamo with a Boston accent who once took a bullet in the chest in the line of duty and is afraid of nothing except possibly his mother, who was emerging from her back door when Kevin, Jennifer, and I reached the bottom of my stairs.

‘Hey, Ma,' Kevin called out.

Mrs Dennehy stood silently by her back door, her arms folded.

‘Hi, Mrs Dennehy,' I said.

‘Hello, Holly,' she replied.

‘Thank you for dinner,' Jennifer said to me. It was probably a line she'd memorized in one of the social-skills courses she'd flunked.

‘You're welcome,' I said.

Kevin gave me a hug, and he and Jennifer walked to his car, got in, and drove off.

Mrs Dennehy snorted and uttered one word, ‘Jezebel!'

With that, she retreated into her house, and I made my way to Elizabeth and Isaac's. Seeing no sign that Elizabeth was there, I let myself in and gave Persimmon a few minutes in the yard and a bedtime cookie.

Early the next morning, I made another visit and saw no indication that Elizabeth had been to the house during the night. Although I was reluctant to abuse the privilege of having the house key, I didn't want the exhausted and worried Elizabeth to arrive home only to discover that there was nothing to eat. Consequently, I checked the refrigerator. Having noted that the McNamaras were low on milk and eggs, I shopped for Elizabeth and Isaac when I went out to stock up for us. When I returned to their house at ten o'clock, everything was still as it had been. I put away the groceries and spent a little time with Persimmon, who wasn't used to being alone.

Back in my own kitchen, I thought about calling Elizabeth on her cell phone but decided not to intrude. Sadly, at eleven thirty, she called to say that Isaac had died only an hour earlier. She'd been with him all night and at the end. She was now at home. Incredibly, she'd noticed the food I'd bought – I refused the offer of reimbursement – and she thanked me for leaving it as well as for taking care of Persimmon. We talked for only a minute. Her daughters would be flying in, one from Tucson, the other from Dallas. Would I let people in the club know about Isaac? I promised that I would.

The news of Isaac's death took the edge off my happiness about Gabrielle's visit. She was due in the late afternoon. After I'd dusted the guest room and supplied it with towels, I went ahead and worked on an article about research on social cognition in dogs. Example of social cognition: the ability of domestic dogs to understand human communicative signals, including the ability to read the human gaze. The topic was difficult. For one thing, my training in journalism had schooled me to be unbiased, whereas I felt anything but objective on the subject of the research, which I was utterly wild about. Finally, serious researchers understood that dogs
think
! These people went so far as to write dense academic papers not only about the tendency of dogs to follow the human gaze but about the apparent ability of dogs to read the human mind! The principal difficulty I encountered was my own ignorance. My background in ethology consisted of having read Lorenz and Tinbergen long ago, and I had a lot of catching up to do in the field of cognition as well. What a fool I'd been to study journalism! In my next existence, I'd enroll in the Department of Ethology at Eotvos University in Budapest and study with Ádám Miklósi, the guru of canine cognition, assuming that my next existence included the opportunity to become fluent in Hungarian or at least to learn to pronounce
Eotvos.
But in spite of my deficiencies, I was fired up and labored on.

At four thirty, Gabrielle still hadn't called to alert me to her arrival. Because she and I were due at dog training at seven, I stopped deciphering articles that were as fascinating as they were challenging, and turned to the familiar, easy job of feeding my family. Steve, who had India and Lady with him, was having dinner with his fishing buddies to plan the trip to Grant's Camps, but I wanted to offer Gabrielle something other than pizza or subs. Also, in spite of Avery's having spurned the lasagne I'd made after Fiona's death, I intended to cook for Elizabeth, who was older and much more civilized than Vanessa's daughter was. I put two chickens in the oven to roast, washed lots of romaine for two Caesar salads, and reminded myself to omit the croutons from Elizabeth's because of her celiac disease. As I got ready to give the dogs an early dinner – they usually eat around five – it occurred to me that feeding malamutes seemed easy only because I was good at it. An inept or naive person would've let Rowdy, Kimi, and Sammy loose in the kitchen, put three bowls of kibble on the floor, and ended up with a three-dog brawl, bloodshed, and gigantic vet bills. Steve wouldn't have charged me to patch up the dogs –
not
why I married him, by the way – but I still didn't want a fight. Before I'd taken the usual measures to prevent one and before I'd done anything at all about preparing the bowls of food, while I was merely
thinking
about feeding the dogs, Kimi leaped up and began to dance, whirl, zoom around, and emit piercing shrieks of joy. Taking their cue from her, Rowdy and Sammy joined in.

‘You've been reading the same articles I have,' I told Kimi. ‘What a coincidence! I hope that you understand them better than I do. Actually, if you felt like it, you could probably teach me to pronounce
Eotvos.
'

Malamutes being the food-driven creatures that they are, they're capable of squabbling not just about dinner itself but about the prospect of eating. To avert catastrophe, I crated Sammy and Rowdy and left Kimi loose, mainly because her reaction to the imminent arrival of food was so violent that she was capable of damaging one of the crates. As I doled out three portions of food into three steel bowls, she switched from flying around to hurling herself three feet up into the air, and her yelps became screams. It's been suggested to me that as a dog trainer, I could and should diminish the intensity of my dogs' lunatic reaction to the arrival of dinner time, as I certainly could but definitely don't want to. I have seen sick and dying dogs become indifferent to food and refuse it altogether. These raucous displays of appetite are confirmations of health and celebrations of life, and I revel in every leap and every shriek. Quick as could be, I put Kimi's bowl down at a safe distance from the crates and rapidly opened the door of each crate, shoved in the bowl, and latched the door. About thirty seconds later, all three bowls were empty. I removed Kimi's from the floor and Rowdy's and Sammy's from their crates before I freed the dogs. After all three dogs had had time in the yard, I left Rowdy and Kimi there, and just as Sammy and I got back indoors, Gabrielle called from her car to say that she was five minutes away.