The Neighbor Who Fed My Dog

He had used the spare key under the flowerpot by my back door. He had gone over once a week to get the mail and check the furnace.

When it got bitter in January, he went over every night it went below zero and ran the kitchen tap so my pipes would not freeze.

He had shoveled my walk. Not the steps, he said, because his back would not let him do steps anymore, but the walk and the end of the drive, so the plow would not bury my mailbox.

“That’s why my thermostat says fifty-five,” I said.

“Fifty-five keeps the pipes. No sense heating an empty house.” He glanced at me sideways. “I figured you’d want the bill low. Nobody gets rich in the Guard.”

I laughed then, for the first time since I’d pulled in. It came out wet and strange.

Walt smiled a little under the brim of his cap, and Bo got up and leaned all his weight into the old man’s legs.

That was the moment I understood something I had missed. Bo was not just staying with Walt.

Bo belonged to Walt now, a little bit. The way a dog does when somebody sees him through a hard winter.

“Where’s Sadie?” I asked. Walt had an old beagle mix named Sadie, gray in the face, who had been fourteen when I left. I had not heard her bark once since I got home.

Walt stopped rocking. He looked out at the patchy snow on the lawn for a long time.

“October,” he said. “Her heart. Doc Hansen did what he could. She went quiet, in the end. Bo laid down next to her bed the last three nights and wouldn’t leave.”

I knew Dr. Hansen. He was my boss. I had worked for him for six years.

I knew exactly what it cost to treat an old dog with heart failure, and I knew Walt lived on his pension and his Social Security and nothing else.

“Walt,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

“She had a good long run,” he said. “And I had Bo after. That helped more than I’d have figured. You don’t sit in a quiet house so much with a dog wanting his supper.”

He got up then, slow, and said there was something I ought to see, and went inside.

Bo went with him without being called. I sat on the step alone and listened to the screen door bang shut.

When he came back he had a stack of envelopes in his hand, held together with a rubber band.

He handed them to me without a word and sat back down in the rocker.

They were my letters. My letters to Bo.

I had started writing them in Poland as a joke, the second week. “Dear Bo, the food here is terrible and nobody throws the ball right.” I mailed them to my own address, care of Kayla, so she could read them to him.

I wrote one every week. Sometimes twice. I wrote him about the cold and the mud and the guys in my squad, and about the stray cat that lived behind the motor pool, and about how I missed his breath in my face in the morning.

They had all been opened. Carefully, with a knife along the top, the way older people open mail.