The Neighbor Who Fed My Dog

That was the whole agreement. A handshake between best friends, nothing on paper, and a soldier six thousand miles away with no way to check on any of it.

Poland was cold and long and mostly boring, which is what you want from a deployment.

We were at a training area in the western part of the country, working alongside a lot of other units, and the days ran together.

Phone calls were hard with the time difference. I would get off a shift at eleven at night, which was four in the afternoon at home, and Kayla would be at work.

She was a shift lead at the plant by then.

I asked for pictures of Bo all the time. She sent them. Bo on the couch. Bo in the backyard.

Bo asleep with his head on her fleece blanket. I saved every one of them on my phone and looked at them in my bunk.

I asked for video calls a few times. She always had a reason. The internet at the house was acting up.

She was in the car. She’d call me Sunday. Sunday would come and she’d send another picture instead.

I did not think anything of it. I was tired all the time and she was busy, and the pictures kept coming, and the money kept going out on the first, and Bo looked fine.

Sitting on Walt’s step in the March cold, I pulled out my phone and looked at those pictures again.

I had looked at them a hundred times. I had never really looked.

There was sunshine coming through my living room window in every single one. Green leaves on the maple out back.

Bo with his summer coat. Not one of them had snow in it. Not one of them was taken after the first week of August.

She had taken a few dozen pictures in June and July, and then she had moved out and doled them out to me one at a time, all fall and all winter, while a seventy-eight-year-old man fed my dog.

I put the phone face down on my knee. I did not cry about that part.

I was past crying about that part. I just sat there and felt something in me get very quiet and very cold.

“Walt,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me? You could have found me. You could have called the armory.”

He was quiet for a long minute. He rocked a little.

Bo thumped his tail once against my boot when he heard Walt’s voice, the way he does when somebody he likes is about to talk.

“You were downrange,” Walt said finally. “You had your own job over there. You don’t put something like that on a soldier who can’t do a thing about it. You just handle it at home.”

“It wasn’t your job to handle.”

“Wasn’t anybody else’s either,” he said. “Somebody had to.”

He told me the rest in pieces over the next hour, because he did not tell things all at once.

He told it the way old men tell things, a little at a time, with long spaces in between for the weather.

He had walked Bo twice a day, morning and supper, down to the end of the road and back.

He had kept him at his place because it seemed wrong to leave a dog alone in a dark house every night.