Bloodlines Read Free Page A

suffocating plastic from my navy winter coat until I’d stepped out of my furry house.
    Even so, when Steve found me in front of the optician’sshop studying the display of tortoiseshell frames in the window, he managed to recognize me. In fact, I was the one who almost didn’t recognize him. For one thing, he’d shaved and, for another, he’d obviously just had one of his twice or thrice yearly haircuts, if you can call it that. His hair, when he has any, is brown, and it’s normally wavy, like the coat on the shoulders of a Chesapeake Bay retriever. Now he looked like a tall, upright Airedale with green-blue eyes and bad clipper burn.
    I kissed him anyway and then removed a glove and felt his whiskery scalp. “Um, did Lorraine do that?” I asked. It was a stupid guess. Lorraine, the vet tech who really runs Steve’s practice, is an excellent groomer.
    Steve suppressed a grin, shook his raw head, and said, “Rhonda.” His face shone with the amazed pride I’d last seen there three weeks earlier when India, his German shepherd, took Highest Scoring Dog in Open B. India is a wonderful obedience dog. Rhonda is no groomer at all. The German shepherd is not a clippable breed, but even if it were, Steve wouldn’t have trusted India to Rhonda. At least before. “She did a great job, didn’t she? I didn’t want to ask her or Lorraine, but when I went to take a look and see how booked up I was, Rhonda was there, and I said, ‘Damn, I don’t have time for a haircut.’ So she said she’d give it a try.”
    Steve was wearing the expensive Christmas-present V-necked cable-knit sweater over nondescript khaki pants. Despite weather almost too cold for my dogs, he’d left unbuttoned what is possibly the best men’s topcoat in the city of Cambridge. I can’t even imagine what it must’ve originally cost, but Steve picked it up at one of the world’s most venerable used menswear establishments. You know Cambridge? If not, I should tell you that Keezer’s is where gentleman’s-C-student, son-of-alumni-admitted Harvard preppies short of cash sell their Brooks Brothers and J. Press apparel and where Max Keezer resells it to straight-A-student, admitted-on-merit, full-scholarship undergraduates, thus enabling the brainy nouveau-Cantabrigian proletariat literally towear the cloak of the elite. Anyway, Keezer’s is also open to the public and is how Steve happened to own a camel topcoat made of honest-to-God cashmere that felt as soft as a pussycat’s throat and didn’t advertise his profession by showing pet fur, either.
    Puppy Luv was two doors down from the optician’s shop, beyond a two-pairs-for-the-price-of-one women’s shoe outlet and before a discount drugstore. A large permanent sign hanging in the window advertised AKC PUPPIES . Taped to the plate glass underneath was a big red heart with a message in white letters: LOVE IS A WARM PUPPY . Next Thursday would be Valentine’s Day. Dotted around were small red hearts edged in white paper lace, each bearing a breed name: Scottish terrier, cocker spaniel, Italian greyhound, Pomeranian, Dalmatian, poodle, Boston terrier, Maltese, Norwegian elkhound, chow chow. And Alaskan malamute.
    Steve stepped ahead of me, pushed on the door, held it, and ushered me in. Knowing what I knew about puppy mills, I expected … well, if you don’t know what I knew, maybe you’ll be offended, but I expected a canine Buchenwald Boutique, a woofy Auschwitz Annex—and if the comparison seems to make light of suffering, you know nothing whatsoever about puppy mills.
    Puppy Luv, though, was anything but grim. Red crepe paper streamers were looped from the ceiling, red hearts dangled here and there, and the place was bright, cheery, and spotless. A hint of the fragrance of small dog stood out against a pleasant background of cedar, Nilodor, and dog food.
    Directly ahead of us was a check-out counter banked by bins of what the wholesale kennel supply catalogs always push as “the