The Neighbor Who Fed My Dog

I did not want to scream at her. I have never been a screamer.

I wanted to finish the thing I had come home to finish, and if she wanted to see it, she could see it.

I sat back down on Walt’s step, on the cold board, and opened the checkbook on my knee. Walt looked at it and then at me, and his whole face changed.

“No,” he said. “No, ma’am. Put that away.”

“Walt.”

“I said put it away. I didn’t do it for money. You don’t take money for feeding a neighbor’s dog. My father would come up out of the ground.”

“Your father didn’t pay six hundred dollars a month for it,” I said. “I did. And I paid it to the wrong person.”

I started writing. Pay to the order of Walter Henning. The pen skipped a little in the cold, and I had to go back over the W.

Bo lay against Walt’s legs and watched the pen move like it might turn into a treat.

That was when the car pulled in next door.

I did not look up right away. I knew the sound of her engine.

It had a belt squeal on cold mornings that she had been meaning to get fixed since high school.

The car stopped in the drive next to Walt’s yard, not in mine. She must have seen us on the porch. She left the engine running.

I finished the line. Five thousand four hundred and no one hundredths.

I wrote it out in words, careful, the way my grandmother taught me, with a line drawn all the way to the end so nobody could add to it.

When I finally looked up, Kayla was sitting behind the wheel with her dark hair pulled back, watching us through the window.

She had a gift bag on the passenger seat. I could see the tissue paper sticking up.

She did not get out. She just sat there with her hand on the door handle and looked at the porch.

At me in my uniform. At the checkbook on my knee. At Walt in his rocker. At Bo lying against his legs.

I watched her understand it. It took about three seconds. You could see it go across her face like a shadow from a cloud.

She looked at Bo, and then at Walt, and then at the check, and her hand came off the door handle.

I signed the check. I tore it out along the perforation, slow, so it would come clean. Then I held it out to Walt.

He did not take it. He looked at the check, and he looked out at the car, and he looked back at me.

I think he understood exactly what I was doing, and I think he was not sure he wanted any part of it.

“Ashley,” he said quietly. “She’s a young girl. She’s going to have to live with this.”

“I know,” I said. “So am I.”

Her window was already down. The cold air must have reached her, because I saw her pull her coat tighter.

“Ash,” she said. Her voice did not carry well across a cold yard, and she had to say it again. “Ash. Can I tell you why?”

I put the check down on the porch rail and weighed it with my pen, and I walked down Walt’s steps and across the yard to her car.