Free Ruffly Speaking by Susan Conant

mother’s: sweet, confident, and utterly genuine. The flame in Willie’s eyes softened to a glow.
    1 suddenly remembered my own manners. “Hi,” I said to Leah’s companion. “I’m Holly Winter. I’m Leah’s cousin.”
    He squared his shoulders, held out his hand, and stiffly shook mine. In a bland way, he was a good-looking kid, medium height, medium build, medium-length medium-brown hair, medium blue eyes... Well, you get the idea. He was a clean-cut guy about Leah’s age dressed in a blue oxford shirt and chino pants.
    Still crouched next to Willie, Leah apologized for failing to make introductions and went on to make amends. Her companion’s name was Matthew Benson, and he was what any normal summer camp would have called Leah’s cocounselor. Unlike Jeff, Matthew lacked the rare gift of treating adults as full-fledged human beings. He was so rigidly polite that I immediately began to wonder what he was like when grown-ups weren’t around. Oh, one other thing about Matthew. As I’ve mentioned, practically everything about him was medium. The exception was his expression, which, far from being medium, was supercilious in the extreme, at least when he managed to take his eyes off Leah. When he looked at her, though, I saw the same soft glow that now warmed Willie’s black eyes. Possibly, just possibly, Leah had already muzzled this guy, crooned to him, and told him what an infinitely good boy Matthew was. Or maybe he’d just plain fallen for her.
    If Rowdy and Kimi had picked up a bland, supercilious companion on one of our walks, I’d have immediately ordered the hanger-on out of my sight: “You go home right now!” With Matthew Benson? The temptation definitely presented itself.
    Before long, however, Matthew was installed at my kitchen table drinking in the sight of Leah pouring fruit-flavored water down her deep seventeen-year-old throat while I fished around in the refrigerator and meditated on a favorite subject of Rita’s, namely, the odd and unpredictable relationship between reality and fantasy. In particular? The reality of this stolid youth and my fantasy of the free-roving character who would trail Leah home if Jeff departed. Jeff and Lance, you see, were hiking the Appalachian Trail, and, in the meantime, here was Matthew, the object of a moist, refrigerated mediation that led me to conclude that reality is what never crossed your mind.
    So what’s your guess about Matthew’s breed? Another Border collie? Wrong. A Chinese crested dog? The Scottish deerhound that went Best of Breed at Westminster? An Irish water spaniel with weirdly human eyes, a Staffordshire bull terrier, a Tibetan spaniel, a puli, a briard, an Ibizan hound, two basenjis, an OTCH flat coat? Wrong, wrong, wrong! Reality, as I’ve said, is what never crossed your mind.
    Consider Matthew, installed here in my cream-and-terra-cotta kitchen at seven o’clock on the evening of Monday, June 15. Has there ever been a blue-eyed calf? If so, its eyes are Matthew’s, and they are trained on Leah, whose red-gold curls spill down the back of the only nonblack garment she owns, a brand-new Avon Hill Summer Program T-shirt, white with red letters. Her glorious laugh ripples as she chatters to this godless bovine clod. A reality. Matthew is clean and wholesome, and, almost exactly three months hence, like Leah herself, will pass through the Gate into the Yard, which is to say that the kid is going to Harvard.... But draw your own conclusions.
    Enter my cream-and-terra-cotta kitchen two magnificent specimens of a flawless breed, bright-eyed, plumytailed living proof of universal love, ambassadors of divinity, heavenly perfection made flesh and blood and fur, radiantly celestial and all-forgiving incarnations of the Great God Malamute. Suck in your breath, sigh in awe, sing their praises, reach out your hands. What do they offer? Redemption, salvation, momentary union with the infinite, life’s one absolute assurance that God does not,