Pete having drunk all the beer at his leaving shout last week, we’re down to the chardonnay, Jake and I. He doesn’t seem to mind. He swirls it round and holds it up to the sun, looking through the oversized glass at my tangle of a garden.‘This’d be a great place for a dog.’I wasn’t allowed a pet as a child. Maggie could never see the point. All that work and mess, when you could be doing something constructive. The habits of cats offended her. Fishbowls were unhygienic. Rabbits were noxious pests, and anything in the rodent line was completely out of the question. I was the only kid in school without so much as a guinea pig to bring to Pet Day.Dogs, naturally, were the worst of all. She claimed she was allergic, but I’m pretty certain she just couldn’t stand them. (The feeling was mutual, in fairness — butter-soft Hector erupted into heart-stopping barks every time my mother went near the Cousins’ fence. You have to get over yourself to get on with dogs, and through the years, Maggie came to think herself a lot of things, but never unimportant.)I raise my eyebrows at Jake and smile, in the way you do when you have no intention of talking about a subject.
