Gaits of Heaven by Susan Conant

Eumie don’t have any squirrels,” I reported.
    “Then they don’t feed birds.”
    “Oh, but they do! They must have a dozen feeders. Maybe more. Including right on the rails of their deck. There’s a company that comes to clean and fill the feeders.”
    “What kinds of baffles are they using?”
    “None. None that I saw. But the feeders weren’t damaged at all.”
    “Impossible,” Steve said.
    “Fact. Tons of feeders. No squirrels.”
    “You just didn’t see any. Where there are feeders, there are squirrels. It’s a law of nature.”
    “Not on Avon Hill.”
    “Everywhere.” He paused. “Unless someone’s killing them.”
    “Don’t say that,” I said. “Ted and Eumie are…they’re not monsters.”
    That afternoon, we had a little Memorial Day barbeque that left me regretful that Steve and I hadn’t taken all five dogs for a hike instead. Everything was going well until Rita showed up with Quinn Youngman, who made himself mildly obnoxious by droning on to Leah’s friends from school with stories about his wild youth of sex, drugs, Bob Dylan, and radical politics. When Rita had started to date him, I’d tried to support her by concentrating on their shared professional interests and ignoring their age difference. My reaction after the barbeque was, so what if she was a psychologist and he was a psychopharmacologist? He was twenty years older than she was, and a bore to boot, albeit a tall, striking, and fairly good-looking one. On reflection, it seems to me that my annoyance at Quinn Youngman stemmed in part from knowing that Ted and Eumie were his patients and knowing equally well that professional ethics would prevent him from satisfying my idle curiosity about what he prescribed for them and why.
    On Tuesday morning, I was tempted to cancel my appointment with the Greens and Dolfo. Steve and Leah had taken India, Lady, and Sammy to work with them. Steve’s old apartment over his clinic was still furnished, not that the dogs cared; and except for occasional canine tenants, it was vacant, so when he took dogs to work with him, they occupied the apartment and didn’t have to be kenneled at the clinic when he and Leah were busy with clients. At eight o’clock I was settled at the kitchen table with Rowdy and Kimi snoozing on the floor and a cup of good coffee, a yellow legal pad, and a pen in front of me. The traffic on Concord Avenue was low background noise that I tuned out. Thanks to the squirrels that had emptied the feeders outside the kitchen window, there wasn’t even any chirping to disturb me. I could’ve spent the morning dreaming up a topic for my Dog’s Life column, making notes, and starting the first draft. As it was, the prospect of breaking up my morning ruined my concentration. After wasting forty minutes, I gathered my Dolfo-training supplies and drove to Avon Hill. This time, there were no service agency vehicles and no service providers in sight. When I rang the bell, Ted opened the door, and before I could even remove my shoes and walk in, Dolfo jumped on his back and almost knocked him down. “Dolfo, genug ! Enough already!” Ted exclaimed.
    The immediate cause of Dolfo’s excitement was my arrival. His eyes—the hazel and the brown one—gleamed with happiness, and he quivered from funny-looking head to silly-looking tail. Possibly because of a certain authoritative gleam in my own eyes, however, he did not jump on me but loped out of the hallway toward the kitchen. Among his many oddities was a strange gait. I took comfort in the thought that if Dolfo suffered from a major structural flaw, at least his owners could afford orthopedic consultations and surgery.
    After Ted and I had exchanged greetings, he informed me that he was expecting an important phone call from a patient at nine-fifteen and that he had patients scheduled after that. Because of the way he and Eumie had conspired to thwart my efforts during our previous meeting, I was actually glad that only one of