The Neighbor Who Fed My Dog

Bo did not come with me. I noticed that. So did she.

I stood beside her car with my hands in my pockets. I did not lean on the door.

I was not going to make her feel trapped in there, but I was not going to make it easy, either.

“Go ahead,” I said.

She looked straight ahead through the windshield, not at me. Her hands were on the wheel at ten and two, like a kid in driver’s ed.

“I met somebody,” she said. “In July. Mike. He works at the plant with me. In August he asked me to move in with him, and I said yes, and then he said he didn’t want a dog in his apartment.”

“So you left him,” I said. “Bo.”

“I was going to come back for him. I was going to figure something out.” She swallowed. “And then the bank started calling about the car. I was three payments behind. They were going to take it. I need the car to get to work, Ash. I can’t get to the plant without it.”

I looked at the car. It was the car she had bought used two years before, the one I had driven her to the lot to pick out, standing next to her while she haggled the man down three hundred dollars.

“So you kept the money,” I said.

“I kept the money.” She said it to the windshield. “The first month I told myself I’d pay you back before you got home. Then it was easier not to think about it. And Walt had him. I knew Walt had him. He called me.”

“He called you three times.”

“I know.” Her voice broke on it. “I told myself he didn’t mind. I told myself he was lonely over there and he liked having a dog around, and Bo was fine, and nobody was getting hurt. I told myself that every single month.”

I did not say anything for a long time. A truck went by on the road with a load of firewood, and the driver lifted two fingers off the wheel at Walt the way people do out here. Walt lifted two back.

“You sent me pictures,” I said finally. “All winter. Pictures with leaves on the trees.”

She closed her eyes. “I know.”

“I looked at those in my bunk at night, Kayla. I looked at them when I couldn’t sleep. That was my dog in those pictures, and I thought you were with him, and you were in an apartment across town with a man who didn’t want him.”

She was crying now, not loud, just tears coming down with her hands still on the wheel. I did not reach in.

I wanted to. Some old part of me that had been her friend for fifteen years wanted to more than anything.

“I’m not going to yell at you,” I said. “I’m not going to put this on Facebook. I’m not going to call your mother. I don’t want anything from you right now except for you to see something.”

“See what?”

“Call him,” I said. “Call Bo.”

She looked at me then, finally. Her mascara had run.

She looked the way she had looked at fourteen, the day her parents split up and she cried on my shoulder in the back of the bus.