Gail Weller had pictured Patch pulling her across the courtyard. Instead, when Jonah’s wheelchair came through the gate, the dog backed beneath the bench and dragged her hand down with him.
“Well, come on,” she said, giving the leash a little tug. “You know who that is.”
Patch flattened his one folded ear. The chair’s front caster rattled over the threshold, and he retreated farther, his rough brown coat catching a dead leaf beneath the bench. Gail had put her phone against a flowerpot to record the reunion. From where it stood, it would be recording her shoes.
Jonah stopped trying to push the wheels. His hands rested on the rims, fingers spread, and the smile he had brought outside remained on his face a moment longer than it should have. At thirteen he had become skilled at pretending he had meant to do something else.
Beth, his physical therapist, helped position the chair beside the bench and checked the brakes. She asked whether he was comfortable there. Gail answered yes before Jonah could, then pulled Patch’s leash again.
“Let it go slack, Gail,” Beth said. “We’ve got room.”
She meant the leash. Gail loosened her fist, embarrassed by the deep red line across her palm. Patch stayed under the bench, looking past her knees toward the gate.
The courtyard visit had been arranged through Briar Ridge Rehabilitation outside Hickory, North Carolina, where Jonah had spent the last two weeks. Gail had brought the requested veterinary records; the staff had chosen an outside space away from other patients. This morning she had put his softest sweatpants in a bag and driven down from Lenoir early enough to help him change.
Guillain-Barré syndrome had made his legs weak six weeks before. There had been an acute hospital, treatment, nights when the staff watched his breathing closely. Now the conversations concerned transfers, fatigue, equipment, and the arrangements that would let him spend a night at home. Gail wrote those things down. In the margins she worked out when he might manage the stairs again.
His bedroom was upstairs. Downstairs she had her sewing room, where customers stood on a low platform while she pinned their hems. At fifty-two she could usually see an uneven trouser leg before its owner reached the mirror. The pants Jonah wore today needed taking up, but she had left them alone, expecting him to need the length again when he was standing.
One cuff had slipped beneath his heel.
She reached to straighten it, and Jonah moved his hand toward the same place. Gail got there first. By the time she sat back, he had put his hand in his lap.
“He’s never seen one of these before,” she said, touching the chair. “That’s all it is.”
“I know.”
“He was excited in the car. You should have heard him.”
That was true. Patch had whined most of the way from her sister Ruth’s house, where he had been staying while Gail spent her days at the hospitals. She had told him twice that they were going to see his boy. She had even opened a window so he could put his nose into the morning air.
Jonah looked underneath the bench. “Hey, dummy.”
The dog’s tail moved once against a bench leg. Gail bent forward, ready to praise him, but Jonah lifted two fingers without looking at her. Wait. She sat back so abruptly that the bench scraped the concrete.
“Sorry,” she said.
Beth moved to the far end of the courtyard, within sight but out of their conversation. Through the open doorway Gail could hear a cart passing and someone asking for a charger. A delivery truck reversed beyond the fence, its warning beep making Patch turn his head.
Jonah rubbed his thumb against two fingers, the way he did when he had something small for the dog. He had nothing now. Gail started to search her pocket for a treat, then stopped when Jonah said, “Just leave it.”
Patch crawled out far enough to sniff the sole of his shoe. Jonah lowered his hand alongside the chair, and the dog investigated that too, giving the empty fingertips a quick, businesslike lick. Then he found the place where Jonah’s sleeve hung loose and pushed his nose into it.
Jonah laughed through his nose. “Still gross.”
Gail laughed too, too loudly. She could see the tiny hook in the dog’s whiskers where Ruth had missed a burr, and Jonah working it free with his thumbnail. It was the sort of thing he used to do while insisting he wasn’t listening to her instructions about the dishwasher.
Patch leaned a shoulder against the outside of the wheel. Gail kept the leash loose and watched the dog’s feet, the brake, the gap between Jonah’s shoe and the ground. She wanted to be useful without disturbing anything.
For a while, nobody needed her.
Jonah scratched behind the folded ear. Patch’s lower jaw opened, showing one crooked tooth, and his weight settled more fully against the chair. Jonah told him Ruth had been sending pictures of him on her good couch, where he had never been allowed before.
“She’s pretending she hates it,” he said. “Don’t fall for that.”
Gail had missed this voice. In his room Jonah often answered her with the smallest possible words, conserving something she couldn’t help him replace. Here he sounded mildly annoyed with a dog. She glanced toward the phone, grateful that she had remembered to charge it.
“Wait till Friday,” she said. “Your own room, your own food. We’ll get his bed right beside you.”
“Which room?”
“Downstairs at first. Like we discussed.”
They had discussed it with the occupational therapist. Gail had shown photographs of the downstairs bathroom, the doorway into her workroom, the side entrance where a temporary ramp could be fitted. Jonah had watched from his bed while she moved the photographs around on her screen.
“For a little while,” she added. “Till you’re stronger.”
Patch lifted his head when she said stronger, though she knew it was her voice he was responding to. Gail reached for his collar to bring him closer to Jonah’s knee. The tag struck the metal frame, and the dog stepped away.
“See?” Jonah said.
“He’ll get used to it.”
“You keep saying things like they’re already done.”
Gail left her hand suspended between the chair and the dog. She could have explained the ramp, the calls, the hours she had spent learning how to help him safely. Instead she picked a loose thread from her jeans and wound it around her fingertip.
Jonah watched Patch sniff along the fence. There was a little more color in his face than when he had come outside. The sight made what he said next seem so unreasonable that Gail thought she must have heard it wrong.
“He likes it at Ruth’s.”
“She spoils him. You’ll have to straighten him out.”
“He’s got that yard.”
“We’ve got a yard.”
Jonah rubbed at a mark on the chair’s armrest. “I know we do.”
The phone chimed behind them. Gail resisted going over to look at the screen. Patch came back within reach, and Jonah touched the rough hair above his eyes without trying to hold him there.
“I asked Aunt Ruth if she would keep him,” he said. “Even after I come home.”
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