If you enjoy stories being read aloud, enjoy this one – and it’s read by the author.
A tired rectangle of hazy, late afternoon sunlight wavers on the wall behind him as Walt Klingman tugs on the laces of his new left shoe. He pauses briefly to let his knuckles rest, adds another knot for good measure, and then sits slumped over his lap for a minute. Eventually he heaves himself off the couch and shifts his weight from one foot to the other and back again. “Eh,” he mutters, glancing down at his feet. They look absurd.
He sighs. Takes a few exploratory steps, to get the feel of them, then stops and ticks the time off on his fingers. She’s been dead four months, Rosie has. He looks down at his feet once more and then counts again to see if he’s really got the calculations right. No, he realizes. Not quite four months. Three months and thirteen days. Walt thinks about her every day, all the time. Probably too much. He was alone before Rosie and he knows with certainty, standing now in the waning light of his living room, that he’ll be alone the rest of his life. His stomach seizes a little as the truth of it moves through him like one of the tumbleweeds he used to see flitting across the fields when he was a kid. He picks at a piece of lint on the sleeve of his sweatshirt. Kicks the toe of his foot against the base of the couch. The sound of it, the rhythmic thunk, thunk, thunk, offers a small reassurance. He inhales again.
Doc Mckendry’s the one who suggested Walt check out the new shoe store by the Grocery Mart. Find something more suitable for his low arches and aching joints. But Walt hadn’t gone in this morning to talk about his feet. He’d gone to talk about his lungs. Because Walt can’t get a proper breath, or thinks he can’t, so he’d made the appointment for Mike McKendry to listen to his lungs, take his vitals, give him a once over. He’d envisioned it all ahead of time. The doctor’s eyes would narrow beneath his wiry gray eyebrows. He’d listen with, perhaps, grave concern, as Walt explained about the big dragging inhales, the inexplicable inability to pull in enough oxygen to sate him, the exhaustion.
Doc McKendry did in fact narrow his eyes and he did listen with concern, but when Walt finished explaining and the doctor finished nodding and checking him over, he leaned forward, clapped Walt on the shoulder, and said, “Well. I don’t know, Walt. Everything checks out. S’probably anxiety. Get out walking again. Find a new hobby. It’ll settle.” Then he fussed and carried on for what seemed an overly long time about Walt’s worn-out shoes, insisting he visit Run Right Over straight away for a better fitting pair. “Pshhh,” Walt said.
Now, at home with the first pair he’d pointed to – bright blue ones with red stripes streaking down the sides – Walt looks down at his feet again. He sticks out one foot, then the other. Ridiculous. He hasn’t been out walking since Rosie and he doesn’t have a mind to start now. He certainly doesn’t care for Doc McKendry telling him what to do. Walt can’t deny the shoes feel good on his knuckly feet, though. Maybe he ought to have picked up some new socks while he was at it.
He walks into the kitchen and takes a wedge of cheese from the fridge. Then he opens a box of crackers, gritting his teeth as he pulls on the plastic sleeve. He takes a plate from the cupboard and notices a chip the size of his thumbnail on the rim. Walt frowns at it. He cuts several slices of cheese and drapes them over the crackers, then returns to the fridge. His new right shoe squeaks on the linoleum. Gripping a small bottle of French’s Classic Yellow Mustard – none of that grainy stuff some people go in for – Walt squeezes a small strip onto each piece of cheese, then he washes an apple, slices it, and arranges the wedges around the edge of the plate, hiding the chipped spot. Then he stops and looks around.
“Ah,” he jabs a finger in the air and turns once more to the fridge. There he pours himself a glass of milk and then carefully places it inside the freezer between the carton of ice cream and a bag of corn. He should have remembered to put the glass in the freezer when he got home, but he’d been too preoccupied with his new shoes. The box had orange starbursts on the side and Walt had made such a production of lifting the shoes out of the tissue paper and getting them situated on his feet that he’d forgotten all about his milk. He grunts, disgusted with himself. It takes at least half an hour for milk to chill properly.
He lifts his chin and takes a breath. He has that feeling again. Like he can’t get enough air. He thumps a fisted hand on his chest and wonders if Mike McKendry missed something at his appointment. Doctors missed things. Sure they did. He thrusts out his chest and takes another big shuddering breath. Then he walks over to the couch. Rosie’s yellow blanket is balled in the corner. He ignores it, grabs the remote off the coffee table with a grunt and clicks on the TV. It’s the evening news. Walt jabs the button with a hooked finger. More news. He clicks it again. Football. Click. Infomercial. Click. Jeopardy. Here Walt pauses. He never knows the answers but he likes the show. He squints at the small screen. That’s not the right host. It’s some woman he doesn’t recognize and Walt feels momentarily disoriented, almost dizzy, staring at the stranger in front of all that familiar fluorescent blue. Then he recalls with a pang that the host, what was his name, died last year. Or maybe it was the year before last, he can’t remember. He clicks off the television and the screen blinks back to black. Walt doesn’t like change. Doesn’t go in for it.
He hauls himself off the couch and trudges back to the kitchen. Takes his moderately cold milk from the freezer and returns to his plate of cheese, crackers and apple wedges. He eats them standing up at the counter in his new blue shoes. The sound of his own teeth working the crackers is loud inside his head and a small sort of loneliness assails him as he eats. He looks, unseeing, out the kitchen window toward the western hemlocks and heaves an unsatisfying breath. Damn it, Mike McKendry, he can’t breathe! He crunches another cracker, louder this time, anger flickering under his breastbone.
When he finishes eating, Walt washes and dries his dishes. Puts each thing back in its place. Wipes the counters, straightens the dish towels, checks the trash to see if it needs taking out. It doesn’t. Walt straightens and glances, as he always does after finishing his evening routine, at the hook by the door where Rosie’s red leash hangs. As though any minute now he might lift it off the nail he hammered into the wall twelve years ago. The color of the faded canvas makes Walt think of his new shoes and he looks down at his feet. The red stripe is ostentatious, almost aggressive, compared to the leash. He inhales audibly, lifting his chest and his chin with it. Then he flicks off the light, shuffles down the hall to the bathroom, and twists the knob for the shower.
—
The next morning Walt sits on the edge of his bed for several long minutes staring at nothing in particular. He massages his knuckles. When his eyes alight on the new pair of shoes sitting just outside the closet, he feels his lips pinch together. He dresses and then sits in the chair that was his mother’s. Pulls on his socks. Then the shoes.
For breakfast Walt eats the same thing every day. A bowl of Cheerios with a sliced banana and a generous sprinkle of light brown sugar. He keeps the sugar soft by putting a small bit of bread in the dish, a trick he learned years ago from his friend, Mort. He eats his cereal and skims the paper, then washes the dishes, straightens the towels and pushes in his stool. As he does so, he catches sight of the red leash on the wall again and he lets his eyes linger on it a moment, moving from the top, with the worn leather handle, down the full length of faded red canvas. His breath hitches in his chest and he turns, swallowing, and pulls the dish towel from the oven door. Wipes the counters one more time.
Rosie arrived on Walt’s fifty-ninth birthday, as though she’d been sent to escort him through his retirement from the firm and on to old age. He didn’t feel old with her, though, not once. Now he did. She’d actually belonged to his former next-door neighbor, Sara Kate, a no-nonsense lawyer type with what seemed to Walt a lot of ambition and very little imagination. He spied her coming home one evening a few weeks before his birthday with a wire crate, a red-checked, fleece-lined bed, two silver bowls, and the leash that still hangs on his wall.
He watched, impassive, from the kitchen window as Sara Kate gathered all this loot from the back of her silver Subaru Outback and scurried up her front walk. She was inside her house just long enough to dump it all in the entryway and then she reappeared, clicking back down the walkway to the silver car in her high black heels, her straight arms pumping like stiff pendulums. She leaned into the passenger side and emerged cradling a small brown lump of a thing that looked, to Walt, like a dachshund. His mouth had opened in a small ‘o.’
For reasons still unknown to him, Walt was on high alert whenever he was at home after this. With a clear view of the backyard next door, he stationed himself with his bowl of Cheerios each morning so he could watch Sara Kate tote the dog outside before leaving for work. She carried Rosie like a baby and she seemed happy enough, Sara Kate did. There was no doubt the dog was happy, bounding around in the grass like a tiny gazelle, letting out little yawps at who knows what.
Walt watched as they repeated the procession every day and the dog always jounced around the yard with the same enthusiasm. But by the fourth day, Walt noticed Sara Kate’s warmth toward the little dog was waning and when he took up his post near the window on the evening of the sixth day, he watched in a bemused, detached sort of way as Sara Kate stormed out of the house with flared nostrils and tight lips, holding what looked like a towel and two blankets. She stuffed them down into her trash bin and then stood, panting, hands on her hips. She kept up the charade for another week but her spirit flagged with each passing day, until, on the morning of Walt’s fifty-ninth birthday, she rapped on his door.
“Want a dog?” she asked without preamble.
“Beg pardon?” Walt stared at her.
“Do you want a dog?” Sara Kate repeated, slower this time. She blew out with her lower lip and her bangs fluttered in the air before coming to rest again on her forehead. “I’ve got one and I don’t want her anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Too much work.”
“I, well, I don’t know,” Walt stammered. He’d never considered such a thing in all his life.
“Well, think about it,” Sara Kate said and then turned and walked away without further detail.
Her long black pea coat swished back and forth with great purpose as she marched to the next house to repeat her inquiry. A small, almost undetectable, stream of panic sluiced through him as she approached the next house. He watched, almost breathless, as Samir Johnson opened his front door and greeted Sara Kate with a smile. Then Samir had cocked his head to one side, listening. He said something Walt couldn’t hear but Walt could tell from the body language that the Johnson’s wouldn’t be taking the dog and he continued to stand very still in his doorway as Sara Kate’s black heels drilled back down the sidewalk. As she moved back past Walt’s walkway, he let out a croak.
“I’ll take her.”
Sara Kate didn’t hear him and she made it all the way to the end of the Kim’s driveway before Walt worked up the nerve to speak again.
“Sara Kate.”
She stopped mid step and turned to Walt, eyebrows arched.
“I’ll take her,” he repeated.
Sara Kate looked momentarily confused and she only stared at him.
“I’ll take her,” Walt was practically shouting now. “I’ll take the dog.”
Sara Kate seemed to have gone temporarily mute. Walt rolled his eyes. “For chrissakes,” he muttered.
She recovered then with a few rapid blinks. “Have you ever had a dog before?” she asked.
Walt grunted. “No,” he admitted.
“Do you know how to take care of a puppy?” Her eyebrows were halfway up her forehead now. “It’s a lot of work,” she added, sounding dubious.
The nerve of this woman! “Do you want me to take her or don’t you?” he demanded.
Sara Kate stared at him for so long that Walt wanted to spit on her fancy shoes. Finally she said, “Fine. I’ll bring her over in half an hour.”
“Fine,” Walt said and slammed his door.
And that was how Rosie came to stay. The two of them were inseparable within the month. He never did know what possessed him to take her that day and Sara Kate moved out not long after, but he found he could barely remember his life before she came. She was not a dachshund, it turned out. The vet told Walt that Rosie was a “mixed breed,” but Walt never called her that. He called her a mutt. He didn’t go in for new-fangled terms.
She slept in his bed every night, after some half-hearted negotiations on Walt’s part to keep her on the floor, and she woke him up every morning by pressing her small nose against his cheek with gently increasing urgency until he batted her away and rolled onto his side with a groan. He didn’t mind, though. Not really. He’d push himself up, shove his feet into his tatty gray slippers, pull on his robe and take her out to go to the bathroom. Every morning he tossed her purple ball around the yard for a few minutes and then they’d have breakfast together, standing side by side in the kitchen.
Walt was still working at the small accounting firm then, and he would settle her in the crate that took up more than half his mudroom before he left in the morning, leaving her with a bowl of water and a bone. At work he started skipping lunch, eating at his desk, so he could come home early, and when he returned to the house in the late afternoon, they’d spend an hour, sometimes more, in the backyard. Walt sat in the old rocking chair on the porch in all weather while Rosie sniffed and scoured the yard, smelling each flower, bush, tree and pebble as though it was her bounden duty to do so; as though their very lives depended on it. And who knew, Walt used to muse, watching her work her way around the small yard. Maybe it did.
After dinner they took their walk. Four loops around the lake. Walt had never walked before, hadn’t seen the point, but with Rosie it became the best part of his day. He liked his job as an accountant well enough. Sure he did. Numbers pleased him. But there was something that happened during his walks with Rosie, something that took him a long time to sort out. When they were out walking, the two of them, they became part of the neighborhood, in a way. He’d never experienced anything like it and it had never occurred to him as something he might actually want. When he and Rosie were walking, he could see his neighbors and they could see him. He didn’t speak to any of them. God, no. But he saw them and they saw him and that was enough. Watching kids whiz by on bikes and exhausted parents pushing strollers and teenagers smoking on the bench under the spruce trees softened something inside Walt that had calcified over the years. Plus it just felt good, to walk off his supper, loosen his joints. After his retirement, he and Rosie took to walking in the morning as well, just after breakfast, and this only increased his pleasure in the activity.
Now, having finished his breakfast and the ensuing cleanup, Walt trundles over to the door and lifts the leash off the hook. Clenches it in his fist, considering. He’ll take it with him, he decides, wrapping it once, then twice, around his hand as he always did. It feels exactly the same. He loops it two more times so it won’t drag on the ground and then steps out onto the front stoop. Gusty air greets him, colder than he expected for this time of year, and he grunts. Clears his throat. He commits, in his mind, to one lap around the lake. That’s it. One loop.
He makes his way down the walk and turns right. So far so good. As he passes the first bench, Walt feels his hand grip the leash out of instinct as he catches sight of the neighbor’s skeletal orange cat in his peripheral vision. It moves in an unhurried sort of way, slinking along beside him. Walt doesn’t like it. He doesn’t go in for cats. Never has. He watches as it saunters across the path and ducks furtively into the profusion of Oregon grape plants. Lets his hand go slack, reminding himself there’s no dog to take issue with the cat, and he keeps walking.
He feels a sudden bolt of self-consciousness when he thinks what he must look like, trudging around the little lake in his preposterous shoes, holding onto a leash with no dog. His eyes dart back and forth, scanning the perimeter of the pond, but for once there’s no one in sight. He hears the sound of geese honking overhead before he sees them and he stops to watch as they skim out over the water and land in formation on the far side of the water. How do they do it, he wonders. Land at the same time like that. He shakes his head.
Walt keeps walking. He finishes the one lap sooner than expected and he figures he may as well do another. There’s a spot on his left heel that’s beginning to chafe and he wonders if it might be the beginning of a blister. He grunts. On his second lap, when he reaches the dilapidated wooden dock that bends out over the water like a comma, he stops to catch his breath. The small trees ringing the side of the pond near the street are just beginning to squeak open tiny white petals. He thinks of Rosie again, has been thinking about her the whole time, really, and remembers how they noticed the buds last year at this time. How they stopped to look, how he’d pointed to the trees and said to her, “See those? Those are my favorites.”
Before Rosie, Walt hadn’t wandered much. He stuck to home, mostly. But with her, he started to venture out a little. Day trips into the Cascades so they could amble down old railway lines or out to the coast to see the sea. Walt liked the way the sand stretched on for ages before it reached the water, how Rosie darted into the surf and then dashed away, yelping when the waves crashed too close. He laughed, watching her. They took several overnight trips out past Aberdeen over the years, always staying in the same small motel a few blocks from the ocean and eating in the same red vinyl booth at a diner known for its Hawaiian-Alabaman fusion BBQ, of all things.
At home Rosie divided her waking hours between her yellow blanket on the couch – which Walt removed only to run through the wash on Sunday afternoons – and the armchair with the green pillow next to the living room window, where she liked to watch the world go by. She kept a keen eye on the neighborhood and liked to alert Walt whenever she saw the postal worker or a delivery driver or, her particular favorite, George Callahan from the house across the street. Every morning at nine o’clock on the nose, George Callahan strolled the perimeter of his property with a cup of coffee in one hand and his cane in the other, like he was a feudal lord surveying the territory bequeathed him by the king, when really he was just a middle-aged man with a bum ankle and a small house on a corner lot.
She rode in the car with Walt to visit Mort at the assisted living place every Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the late morning. It was down by the waterfront, a place called The Commons. Several of the residents tucked little bits of bacon and tiny heels of bread in their pockets and tossed them to Rosie when they thought Walt wasn’t looking. She’d sit at Walt’s feet while he and Mort ate roast beef sandwiches in “The Café,” which, when you think about it, Walt told her as they drove home one afternoon, was really just a lunch room with sagging potted plants and cracked, faux-leather sofas but somehow adding a counter where the residents could buy overpriced coffee and stale pastries turned it into “a café.” Rosie had nursed Walt through a terrible flu a few years ago and Walt had likewise sat with her through the long watches of the night when she’d gotten into the cocoa Mort had given him for Christmas. They watched movies and the news and figured out how to stream Netflix instead of waiting for the flimsy red envelopes to arrive in the mail.
At one point in his life – a long, long time ago, it seems now to Walt – there’d been a girl. He grunts now, remembering, as he stands on the dock looking out over the water towards the marsh grass where a heron takes slow, stalking steps. Walt had thought they might get married one day, he and this girl, but he’d said something unkind, he can’t remember what, and she wouldn’t forgive him when he asked. Said he was too rigid, too exacting, too stuck in his ways. He’d been disappointed, Walt had, but only briefly. It was better to be alone, he decided. Better to be on his own, do things his own way. Earlier in his life, every now and then, not often, but sometimes in deep winter when the sun set before five o’clock and the rains came in earnest, Walt would stand at the kitchen window and think about her and wonder what might have been; what his life would be like if they’d been able to sort things out. But then Rosie came to stay and Walt knew everything worked out just as it should.
He definitely has a blister. He can feel it forming on his left heel. A sudden desperation to be home grips him. He turns around and is startled to see a boy standing on the other side of the dock. The kid looks to be about ten or eleven, with disheveled brown hair and mismatched clothes. He stares at Walt. Walt stares back. The boy speaks first.
“Where’s your dog?” he asks. His voice is softer than Walt expected.
“My dog?” his own voice is a growl.
“Yeah, you . . .” the boy gestures to the leash. “You used to walk with your dog.”
Walt grunts. “What of it?”
The boy shrugs, eyes still on the leash. “I just wondered.”
“Yeah, well,” Walt squints at the kid’s hair. It’s something else. Poking out in every direction. Tufted at the back like he fell asleep on it. “She’s dead,” he says finally. “Died on Thanksgiving.”
“Oh,” the boy looks stricken. Walt can see the boy’s Adam’s apple working and it alarms him. He wonders if the kid’s going to cry. Walt clears his throat and remembers the morning three months and thirteen, no, fourteen days ago, when Rosie hadn’t lifted her head from the pillow, simple as that. How he’d laid back down beside her, the morning light pale yellow on the sheets. How he hadn’t moved for hours, maybe days. His hand had cupped her small soft chest until his own chest started to shake and with it the bed and the blankets and the whole entire world.
“Well,” Walt says, moving to step around the kid. “I gotta go.”
“I like your shoes,” the boy says.
Walt stops, turns back. “They’re giving me a blister,” he points at his heel with his free hand.
“I hate blisters,” the boy says, picking at something on his arm.
“Me, too.”
“How come you still have her leash?”
“What?”
“The leash,” the boy says again, pointing. “How come you still got her leash?”
Walt looks down at Rosie’s leash, looped four times around his lumpy palm. He shrugs. “Just wanted to hold it, I guess.”
The kid pinches his eyebrows together and he seems to be considering this. “Yeah,” he says finally. Then he nods and says it again. “Yeah.” He bends down and picks up a rock. He turns it over in his hand a couple times and then pulls his arm back and launches it. It sails over Walt’s head in a perfect arc and lands in the lake behind him with a soft ploink.
“Well, see ya,” the boy says, wiping his hand on his pants. He gives a little wave and darts off down the path.
Walt turns his head and watches him go. The boy skips around the pond, skids to a stop under the trees Walt likes so much and looks both ways. Then he jets across the street and lopes off down the hill and out of sight.
“I’ll be damned,” Walt mutters. He could swear he’s never seen that kid a day in his life. Yet somehow, incredibly, the wild-haired boy with ill-fitting clothes and an open, inquisitive face knew Rosie. Remembers Rosie. That’s something.
Walt looks out over the lake. The geese on the other side labor in unison to hoist themselves out of the water and into the air. They whoosh over Walt’s head, honking and calling to each other in their strange way. He sighs and squeezes the leash in his fist, once, twice. He lets his eyes drift back to the spot where the boy disappeared down the hill. “I’ll be damned,” he says again. Shakes his head. Inhales. Then Walt turns and keeps walking.