The Neighbor Who Fed My Dog

She leaned toward the open window. “Bo,” she called. “Bo! Come here, buddy. Come here, Bo-Bo.”

That was what she called him. Bo-Bo. She had called him that since he was a puppy, since the day I brought him home and she came over with a squeaky toy shaped like a hot dog.

On the porch, Bo’s ears came up. He lifted his head off Walt’s boot and looked across the yard at the car. His tail moved once, slow, against the porch boards.

Then he put his head back down on Walt’s foot and closed his eyes.

Kayla made a sound I will not forget. It was not a sob. It was smaller than that.

It was the sound of someone finding out the size of what she had done.

She called him one more time. He did not lift his head at all. Walt reached down and rested his hand on the dog’s neck, not holding him, just there.

I did not say anything. I did not need to. I am not proud of how much I wanted her to feel that, but I was not sorry, either.

Some things you cannot tell a person. A dog has to tell them.

“I’ll pay you back,” she said. Her voice was barely there. “All of it. I swear, Ash. I don’t know how yet. But I’ll pay you back.”

“It’s forty-two hundred,” I said. “The seven months. You did the first two.”

She nodded. She did not argue. She did not say it should be less, or that she had kept the house warm, or that Walt had volunteered.

She just nodded, and wiped her face with her sleeve.

“I can do two hundred a month,” she said. “Maybe. If I don’t eat out. If Mike.” She stopped. “I can do two hundred.”

“Then do two hundred,” I said. “That’s twenty-one months. I’ll be here.”

I stepped back from the car. She looked at me a long moment, and then past me at the porch, at Walt and the dog and the check weighed down on the rail.

Then she rolled up the window and backed out slow.

The gift bag was still on the passenger seat when she left. I found out later it was a new collar for Bo.

Red, with his name stitched on it in yellow thread. She had ordered it in February.

When I got back to the porch, Walt had picked up the check.

He was holding it in both hands, looking at the numbers like they were written in a language he could not read.

“I can’t take this,” he said. He did not look up. “Ashley, I’m telling you. I can’t.”

I sat down on the step again. Bo shifted over without opening his eyes so that one of his front paws rested on the toe of my boot.

“I know what Sadie’s last month cost,” I said. “I work for Doc Hansen. I’ve seen how those bills go. I’m guessing you’ve still got a balance.”

Walt did not say anything. He did not have to. His face said it. I had made the guess because I knew how the clinic worked.

Doc Hansen lets old folks pay on a schedule, fifty dollars a month, and never puts it out of his mind or theirs.

“How much?” I asked.