The Last Walk

I realized I hadn't felt young in ten years on a Tuesday, of all days, standing in front of the microwave waiting for my leftover curry to spin hot while the clock on the stove said seven fourteen and the highway outside my window hummed with everybody else's lives going somewhere. I'm Mick, I'm forty-three, I write software for a logistics company, and the last promotion I got was back when I was thirty-three, which is also roughly the last time I remember feeling human instead of a scheduled task. That's a weird way to put it but it's the truest way I've got. Ten years of standups and sprint planning and eating dinner over a keyboard will sand the corners off a man, and I didn't even notice the sanding happening until one night I caught my reflection in the dark window and thought, huh, who's that guy.

So anyway, the dog.

I was walking home from the office, which I'd started doing that month because my doctor used the word "sedentary" at me twice in one appointment and it stung worse than I expected. The route went past a strip mall with a nail place, a closed-down phone repair shop, and a pet salon with big glass front windows and one of those hand-painted signs that said SPAWSOME in letters that curled like they were drunk. This dog came trotting up the sidewalk from the parking lot side, some kind of scruffy terrier mix, gray around the muzzle, no collar, walking about two feet off my left knee like we'd arranged it in advance. I stopped. He stopped. I kept walking. He kept walking. I said, out loud, to a dog, "You lost, buddy?" and he wagged his whole back half like I'd just offered him a job with benefits.

I did not know what to do with a dog. I'd never had one, my apartment doesn't allow them, and my whole adult life has been a series of things I didn't do because there was paperwork involved. But the dog didn't care about any of that, and when I reached the salon door he pushed past my leg and went straight in like he had an appointment.

Inside it smelled like lavender shampoo and wet fur and there was a woman in a green apron at a grooming table with a poodle in it, and she looked up at the both of us and said, "Well, who's this gentleman?"

"That's a good question," I said. "He kind of followed me here."

"From where, your car?"

"From the parking lot, I think. Or the whole rest of my life, hard to say."

She laughed at that, an actual laugh, not the polite kind, and I noticed her hands first, which sounds strange but is just what happened. She had strong brown hands with short nails and a little scar across one knuckle, and she used them without any hurry at all, like she had all the time the world had, which is a thing I hadn't seen from a person in years. Everybody I know moves like they're late. This woman moved like the clock was a suggestion. She wiped off the poodle, set him down, told him he was gorgeous and to go tell his mom, and then turned her whole attention to the terrier and to me.

She said her name was Meena, she was thirty-eight, she ran the place, and no, the dog didn't have a collar or a chip, she checked with the little scanner by the register while the terrier stood there wagging like a metronome set to fast.

"Well, he's got no chip and no tag, so either somebody dumped him or somebody's gonna call around here tonight very upset," she said, scratching under his chin. "Either way, he stays in the back with me tonight. I've got a crate and a couch in the office and he's not the first stray to run a hotel scam on me."

"Can I do anything, like, pay for stuff, or..."

"You can stop worrying about it. He's fine. Dogs are sort of my whole deal, if the sign didn't give that away."

I stood there another minute, which for me was a long time to stand anywhere without a reason, and I noticed other things besides her hands, like that she had gray starting at her temples and didn't seem to be fighting it, and that she talked to animals the same way she talked to me, flat and warm and like nobody was listening in. I said okay then, okay, and left, and the whole walk home I kept thinking about how she hadn't rushed me out the door. Nobody leaves me standing around not being rushed out of somewhere. That's my natural habitat.

* * *

I went back the next day, which I planned to make sound casual in my head and did not manage. The terrier was in the front window on a folded towel like he owned the lease, and when I came in he lost his mind, and Meena looked up from the big gray cat she was brushing and said, "Checking on your dog?"

"He's not my dog."

"He's absolutely your dog, are you kidding, that dog picked you in the parking lot like a lottery ticket. He's been adopted. Legally it hasn't happened yet but spiritually it's done, the paperwork is a formality." The cat wiggled and she adjusted her grip and went on brushing. "I've been calling him Champ, since he acts like one and nobody's claimed him. If you want the actual paperwork I know the shelter forms by heart, I can walk you through it."

"I've got a one bedroom and a no-pet clause and a life that's, you know, scheduled."

"Sure," she said, in a tone that said she had heard a sentence like that before and had watched better ones fall apart. Then she pointed her chin at the little counter by the register. "I've got a coffee machine back there if you want some. Not fancy. It's fine."

So I had a paper cup of coffee that was honestly not great, sitting in a plastic chair in the waiting area between a poster about tick season and a rack of leashes, while she finished the cat, and it was somehow the best forty minutes of my week, which says more about my week than about the coffee. She talked while she worked, mostly to the animals, some to me. Her last serious thing had been a chef, six months, ended around when she was thirty-one, ended fine, they just wanted different schedules and possibly different planets. I told her I'd been at the same company eleven years and she said, "Eleven years, wow, do they at least say thank you," and I said, "They gave me a lanyard once," and she laughed that laugh again and I felt something in my chest unclench that I hadn't known was clenched.

* * *

Over the next two weeks I stopped by three more times, and I want to walk you through the excuses I used, because they got flimsier and we both knew it.

First trip, I bought a four-dollar bag of dog treats, the expensive kind with salmon and something called green-lipped mussel, for a dog that did not live with me and that I saw once a week. Meena rang it up without a word and then said, "He's not allowed many of these, he's watching his figure," and I said, "Right, of course, the figure," and we both stood there for a second while I paid for a purchase that made no sense, and I think that was the moment she decided I was harmless, or possibly just hopeless, and either way she started leaving the coffee machine on when I usually showed up, which I noticed, because I notice everything now, it turns out I was just asleep for a decade.

Second trip, no excuse at all, I just came in and sat in the plastic chair with a paperback I'd been pretending to read for three months, and Champ came and put his chin on my knee, and Meena did a shih tzu two tables away and once, without looking up, said, "Page forty-one, you've been on page forty-one since Christmas." I said, "It's a dense book," and she said, "Sure, it's dense," and kept on with the dog.

Third trip was a Thursday, and it rained, and the strip mall parking lot was all shiny and empty, and I came in with wet shoulders and no book and no treats, just me, and stood there like an idiot while she finished drying a very elderly golden retriever who took forever, bless him, and I was glad he took forever because it meant I had a reason to keep standing there, and she knew it too, and she didn't rush me, and that was starting to feel less like a coincidence and more like a policy.

"You know," she said, halfway through the retriever, "the chair doesn't bite. Neither does the coffee machine. You could just admit you like the quiet in here."

"It's a good quiet," I said. "My place has a different kind of quiet. The kind with a highway in it."

She nodded like that made perfect sense, because to her it probably did, and the dryer hummed, and the old dog leaned against her hip like a man leaning on a bar, and I sat down and did not open anything, and outside the rain kept coming down on the parking lot and I thought, this is the first time in ten years I've gone somewhere on purpose instead of out of routine, and I didn't say any of that out loud, because I'm forty-three and I work in software and I've had exactly one brief fling in my whole life and no practice at all at saying the thing I actually mean.

The golden retriever's owner came at five, paid, cooed at him, left. The shop went still. Meena swept hair off the tile, untied her apron, and looked at me sitting in her waiting area like furniture she'd gotten used to.

"So," she said, "Champ's getting his nails done Saturday morning, ten o'clock, and after that I close early, and there's a coffee place two doors down that actually knows what they're doing."

"That sounds like," I said, and then my mouth, which had been sanding itself down for ten years, actually finished the sentence, "that sounds like a plan, yeah."

Saturday, then. I had a Saturday now. I walked home in the dark with the highway humming and I caught my reflection in the window again and the guy in the glass looked, if not young, at least like somebody who was about to be somewhere.

Saturday morning I shaved with actual care, which for me means I stood there with the razor and thought about it, and I put on the shirt that isn't the gray one, and I got to the salon at eight minutes to ten like a person who has somewhere to be. Meena had Champ on the table already, snipping away at his front paws, and she looked up over the dog's back and said, "Look at you, all pressed and human," and Champ thumped his tail against the table like he'd been telling her the same thing all week.

The coffee place two doors down was the kind with mismatched chairs and a menu on a chalkboard, and we sat by the window and she had something with oat milk in it and I had black coffee, and we talked about nothing for two hours, which is a thing I did not know two people could do. She