The Neighbor Who Fed My Dog

He was quiet a long time. “Twenty-three hundred and some,” he said. “I was paying on it. It’s not a problem. I was paying on it.”

“Then that’s what this is for,” I said. “You pay off Sadie. And the rest is dog food for whatever dog walks up on this porch next. Because one will, Walt. You’re the kind of man dogs find.”

He laughed, a short one, and then it turned into something else and he put his hand over his eyes.

I looked away to give him that. I watched a pair of crows walking around in the patchy snow on his lawn.

When he took his hand down, he folded the check once, carefully, along the middle, and put it in the pocket of his flannel shirt. He buttoned the pocket.

“For Sadie,” he said.

“For Sadie,” I said.

He came into the clinic the next Tuesday. I was working the front desk.

He stood at the counter with his ball cap in his hand and asked to pay off the Henning account, and he paid it in full, and he did not say a word to me about it.

When the receipt printed, he asked if he could have a copy of it. I gave it to him. He folded it and put it in the same shirt pocket.

Dr. Hansen came out from the back while Walt was leaving and watched him go across the parking lot. Then he looked at me. “Was that you?” he asked.

“It was Bo,” I said. Which was true.

Bo lived in two houses after that. I would let him out in the morning before work, and he would go straight across the yard to Walt’s porch, and Walt would be in his rocker with his coffee, waiting.

When I got home at night I would whistle, and Bo would come home. Most nights.

Some nights he looked at me from Walt’s porch and did not get up, and I went over and sat with them instead.

I did not mind. I want to be clear about that. I have had people ask me if it hurt, the dog loving somebody else.

It did not hurt. It was the best thing that came out of the whole year.

On the first of April there was an envelope in my mailbox with no stamp. Somebody had driven it over.

Inside was a money order for two hundred dollars and a piece of notebook paper folded in quarters.

The note said: “Payment 1 of 21. I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t do anything. K.” Nothing else.

I did not answer it. I cashed the money order and put the note in my kitchen drawer with my checkbook. I was not ready.

On the first of May there was another one. Payment 2 of 21. This time the note was longer.

She said she had moved out of Mike’s apartment. She was back on her mother’s couch. She said she was okay.

She said she kept thinking about the sound Bo’s tail made on the porch.

She said she would hear it for the rest of her life. She said she was not asking me for anything.

The envelopes kept coming. First of every month, the same as my transfers used to go out. She never missed. Some months the money order was for two hundred and ten, and she wrote at the bottom, “for interest, don’t argue.”