The Neighbor Who Fed My Dog

There was a little piece of tape on the back of each one, at the top corner, where it had been hung up.

“I went and got your mail every week,” Walt said. “First one came, I didn’t know what to do with it. It said Bo on the front. So I opened it and I read it to him.”

I looked up at him. He was not looking at me. He was looking at the dog.

“Read him every one,” Walt said. “Sat right there at the kitchen table. He knew your name. Every time I said it his ears came up. Then I’d tape it to the refrigerator so he could see it.”

“So he could see it,” I repeated.

“Well,” Walt said. He cleared his throat. “So I could. I don’t get a lot of mail.”

I put my face in my hands then, on Walt Henning’s porch step, in my uniform, with patchy snow on the lawn and my dog’s chin on my boot.

And I cried harder than I had cried at any point in nine months.

Walt let me. He did not pat my back or tell me it was all right. He just rocked a little and let me, the way you let a storm finish.

When I was done he handed me a folded handkerchief from his shirt pocket. It was ironed.

After a while I went back to my house. I left Bo on the porch with Walt.

He looked at me when I stood up, and he looked at Walt, and he stayed. I told myself that was fine, and it was.

I went into my cold kitchen and found my checkbook in the drawer where I had left it in May.

I had not written a paper check in over a year. It took me a minute to find a pen that worked.

I did the math standing at the counter. Kayla had moved out in the first week of August.

We had left for Texas in the middle of June, so she had done the job, more or less, for about two months. Walt had done it for seven, and the house on top of it.

Seven months at six hundred dollars was forty-two hundred. That was the honest number, the number for the job Kayla walked out on.

But Walt had not done the job I had paid Kayla for. He had done more.

He had shoveled and run my taps on below-zero nights and kept my dog company through the death of his own. And he had read my letters out loud.

So I wrote it for fifty-four hundred dollars. The full nine months.

Every dollar I had set aside for somebody to love my dog while I was gone. He was the only person who actually had.

While I was standing there my phone buzzed on the counter. It was Kayla. “Heard you’re home!!! Coming by to say welcome home, be there in ten.” Three hearts. A yellow dog face.

I read it twice. Then I put the phone in my pocket, took the checkbook and the pen, and went back out to Walt’s porch.

I did not answer her. I want to be honest about that. I could have texted her not to come.

I could have called her and had it out over the phone. I did not want to do either of those things.