Read Paws before dying for Free Online

of the neighborhood children. Willie was mine. The other two started at Ward, but, if you ask me, the parents decided it was too Jewish, and they switched to Case, in spite of me.
    “Then you’ve been neighbors for a while?” I said. “I mean, you’ve had to . .
    Jack contemplated a forkful of coleslaw. “Fifteen years.”
    “And,” Rose said, “they’ll never move because Edna won’t leave the house.”
    “Edna Johnson, the wife. She suffers from agoraphobia,” Jack said sympathetically. “All the more reason to overlook what—”
    Rose slapped an open palm on the table. “Overlook! Don’t—”
    “Rose, enough,” he said firmly. “This is not—”
    “You’re right. I’m making it worse.” She smiled at Leah. “And the truth is, they are not the only ones. The woods... You know that’s still Eliot Park, across the street. Eliot Woods, they call it. Well, it’s...”
    “It’s a lovers’ lane,” Jack finished.
    “Lovers’ lane!”
    “It’s only in the summer,” Jack said. “They drink beer, they carouse. Who knows?”
    “Who knows? I know. You know.”
    “Every town in the world, there’s a lovers’ lane,” Jack said calmly and indulgently.
    “The problem next door,” Rose said, “is who would bring friends home there? With his drinking and her…“
    Jack nodded to her. “So you see? Who could blame them? They throw beer bottles, cans. It’s nothing,” he explained to me. Then he turned to Rose. “So now we pick them up and recycle them. So what?”
    We stayed for another hour or more. Jack almost succeeded in keeping Rose off the topic of the family next door. Her occasional returns to it left me with the vague impression that there had been years of trouble between the two households, including some trouble involving dogs. Mostly, though, Rose and Leah outlined a totally unrealistic program of taking Kimi to matches during July, then entering her in some trials in August. Fun matches, fine. They really don’t count, and you can correct the dog in the ring. You can’t at a sanctioned match, but they’re practice, too. Trials are the ones that count. As Rose had to explain to Leah, obedience trials are usually held in conjunction with dog shows, especially in this part of the country, so obedience people usually just say they’re going to a show. Really, though, a show is for competition in breed—in other words, looks, conformation (how well does each dog conform to the breed standard, the ideal?)—and a trial is for obedience.
    “Are they ever nice!” Leah said in the car on the way home. “You know what? My mother is right, and my father is totally wrong.”
    “Well, he is allergic,” I said.
    “Not about dogs. About Jewish people.”
    “What does he say?”
    “He says they’re all right, and he’s got nothing against them and everything, but that they make you feel excluded. I don’t think that’s true at all.”
    “There are members of our own family who’ve made me feel more excluded than Rose and Jack do. Take Sarah, for example. You know Sarah, right?”
    “Yes.”
    “Weil, one time I was at a show in Portland, and my car broke down—this was in the middle of winter—and you know what Sarah did?”
    “Sent you to a Holiday Inn.”
    We both laughed.
    “How did you know that?” I asked.
    “She did it to me once, too. My mother asked if I could stay for one night, and she said there wasn’t any room and I should go to the Holiday Inn. And her house has eighteen rooms.”
    “And when Chrissie got married, I’ll bet she didn’t invite you to the wedding, did she?”
    “No,” Leah said. “My mother said she was afraid she’d have to feed us.”
    “You didn’t miss much. It was those tuna fish sandwiches on Wonder bread.”
    “With the crusts cut off,” Leah said.
    “That’s why people make jokes about Protestant weddings,” I said.
    “My father says that it isn’t being stingy. It’s just avoiding conspicuous