The Neighbor Who Fed My Dog

“Since the first week of August,” he said. “Sit down a minute, Ashley. You’ve been traveling.”

I sat on his top step. Bo lay down across my feet with a groan like an old man settling into a recliner.

Walt lowered himself into his rocker, slow, the way his knees made him do it now.

“I heard him howling two days running,” Walt said. “Nobody’s car in your drive. I went and looked in the window and he was in there with an empty bowl and an empty water dish, lying by the door.”

He said it plainly, like a weather report. I looked down at Bo and put my hand on his head, and I could not say anything for a while.

“I had the number on that note you left,” he went on. “The girl’s number. I called it. She said she’d moved in with somebody and she’d be by for him on Saturday. She didn’t come Saturday.”

“Did you call again?” I asked.

“Twice more. She said she was working it out. Said she’d be by.” He shrugged. “After a while I quit calling and started buying dog food. He’s a good boy. He was no trouble.”

“Walt, that was seven months.”

“It was,” he said. “Went by quicker than you’d think.”

I need to tell you how it got set up, so you understand how stupid and how ordinary it was.

Because it was ordinary. It was the kind of arrangement half the women I know have made with somebody.

Kayla Dunn and I have been best friends since we were fourteen. We rode the same bus. We worked the same summers at the custard stand by the highway.

She was my maid of honor at the wedding that did not happen, and she held my hair the night it didn’t.

When my unit got its orders for Poland, I was more worried about Bo than about anything else.

I am a vet tech at the animal clinic in town. I know what boarding nine months does to a dog, and I could not afford it anyway.

Kayla was between apartments. Her lease was up, her landlord was selling, and she was sleeping on her mother’s couch.

So we sat at my kitchen table one night in May and worked it out in about ten minutes.

She would live in my house rent free. She would feed Bo, walk him, let him out, keep the heat on, get the mail.

I would pay her six hundred dollars a month for the trouble, because a dog is a real job and I wanted it to be fair.

We shook on it across the table. She laughed and said, “You’re paying me to live in a house with my favorite dog. This is the best deal I’ve ever had.” Then she hugged me so hard my chair tipped.

We never wrote anything down. Why would you? It was Kayla. You do not draw up papers with the girl who knew your locker combination.

I set up an automatic transfer from my credit union for the first of every month. Six hundred dollars, nine times.

Fifty-four hundred dollars. I did the math once, at the kitchen table, and I never thought about it again.