It's all a blur

"What stinks?" Miles remembers having asked Giles, when all the trouble started. He doesn’t remember exactly what happened after that, but I do.

"It sounds like the Beef Bourguignon is burning!" Giles said.

"Oh my stars, what have we done?" Miles said, as the three of us rushed into the kitchen. Giles slipped on their shiny white tiles of their nouveau-riche kitchen. His 300-pound tub of a body fell flat on its face. Miles jumped over the pile of blubber and ran to the stove, opened it, and grabbed the roasting pan with his bare hands.

"O O O O U U U U C C C C H H H H !!!!"

Miles turned around, jumped back over Giles, struggling to get to his feet ... ran over to the sink, put my burned fingers under cold water.

"There is a God!"

"It serves you right, you weasel!" Giles stood up, glared at Miles, limped over to the stove, pulled the oven mitts off their hooks, and pulled the beef out of the oven.

Giles groaned at the site of their entrée. “It looks like Wiley Coyote after a bomb's exploded."

So what would Miles and Giles do now, I asked myself, as I ran out of the kitchen and into the living room? They had the Contessa Louisa de Pretenza in the salon, holding court with Letitia Cosgrove, Cornelius Armstrong, Bunny Havers, the Underwoods, de Gooches, and Huntingdon-Worthingtons. And here they were, Miles and Giles, trying to impress the haut polloi with an overcooked Beef Bourguignon, Miles’s fingers about to blister, 300-pound Giles limping, and smoke billowing out from the stove.

After a minute, Bunny Havers opened the kitchen door. "Giles, Miles, come right away! Whizzer has urinated on Contessa Louisa!"

"Oh, no!"

"Saints preserve us!"

They waddled out to the salon, Miles’s hands wrapped in wet rags, Giles limping, and found me baring my teeth at the contessa ,with her Hedda Hopper hat, her full-length dress. And my personalized signature, a Rorschach-blotted wet stain just below the contessa’s knees.

"Dear Contessa, are you wet?” I heard Miles say, as Giles grabbed me by the collar and pulled me toward the back hallway. “I’m soooooooo sorry about this. How can I ever apologize enough?”

"It is no problem, my dear man, though this is merely the dress I wore to my debut ball after marrying my dear, departed husband, the Earl of Pretenza," she intoned, raised eyebrows that broadcast her disgust to Letitia Cosgrove. Letitia, that small-minded bigot who wrote the gossip column for Bar Harbor’s A-listers.

Miles and Giles were finished. Now, perhaps, they might pay more attention to me.