Part 5
At six-thirty, four weeks later, June lifted the gate and let herself into Lena’s yard. Otis was already making his low, impatient sound behind the door. She put down the new bag of food so she could greet him with both hands when Lena opened it.
He pushed between her knees, turned, and pushed through again. June scratched him where his collar flattened the hair and let him investigate the cuffs of her work pants. She had come from cleaning a dentist’s office, and he seemed to find the smells worth several careful passes.
“Coffee’s on,” Lena said. “But I need you to go after his walk today.”
June looked up. Lena was in sweatpants, with the marks of a pillow on one cheek. She had a towel folded over her arm and the expression June used to see when a passenger insisted he could get down the steps alone.
“I don’t stay that long.”
“Yesterday it was two hours.”
“He hadn’t settled.”
“He settles after you go.”
June picked up the food bag. She wanted to argue about what she had seen, the dog’s pacing between them, the way his head lifted whenever she moved her chair. Instead, she asked where Lena wanted the new bag, and waited for her to make room beside the refrigerator.
Their arrangement had grown beyond the morning and afternoon walks on June’s sheet. June returned if she forgot a treat, stayed to wash a bowl that was already clean, found reasons to bring over a towel or an old toy. She kept her mug on Lena’s kitchen shelf, at the front where it was easy to reach.
Lena poured two cups of coffee. “I love having him. I just need to take a shower without calling out answers to you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Okay.”
The ordinary answer left June without anything to explain. She took her coffee and sat, keeping her coat on. Otis lay across the threshold with his chin on her shoe.
June brought out the envelope that had arrived the day before. The board’s letter withdrew the allegation that she failed to check her van. It confirmed that Walter boarded later and acknowledged the agency’s informal waiting arrangement, including June’s part in teaching it. A copy had gone to the newspaper, which had agreed to run a correction.
“They still haven’t answered about the money,” June said.
Lena took the letter. June watched her find the paragraph about the practice all of them had treated as routine, then read back to the beginning. Lena didn’t ask for her old job or say that this made them even.
“Can I have a copy?”
“That one’s yours.”
Lena folded it along the existing crease. June had wanted to be there when she read it, and now that she had, she couldn’t think what else she’d expected to happen. The coffee was too hot, Otis needed his walk, and she had promised Ruth she would be home before Ruth left for an appointment.
Diana had answered June’s full account with a short note. She wanted the agency to pay for help her father needed at home, and she thanked June for putting the waiting arrangement in writing. Walter didn’t want anyone asking him to remember that afternoon again. June had written back once, to say she understood.
She fastened Otis’s harness. Lena had moved the clothespin to the fed side of the bag. June checked the buckle, feeling the dog lean against her as he waited.
“He ate?”
“All of it. He licked the floor afterward.”
June nodded. She picked up the leash and told Lena they’d be back in half an hour. Lena set both empty cups beside the sink and closed the door behind them.
The street was quiet enough for June to hear Otis’s nails on the sidewalk. They passed the barber shop’s striped pole, a delivery driver carrying bread trays, a row of tied garbage bags he wanted to investigate. She let him sniff the pole and kept him moving past the bags.
At the school fence he stopped to watch a plastic bag caught in a bare hedge. June waited while he considered it. She had once hurried this walk to make the first pickup; lately she had been stretching it until she could return to Lena’s apartment with a reason to sit down.
Otis turned away from the hedge and sneezed. June checked her watch. She had time to go around the playing field, but he was favoring his stiff leg, and she turned them toward the shorter block instead.
On the way back, a woman in a wool hat asked whether he was friendly. June said he usually was, and the woman waited for him to approach before offering her hand. He sniffed it, accepted two strokes, then lost interest in her and put his nose beneath a fallen leaf.
June thanked the woman and walked on. At the gate she saw that Lena had finished her shower. The window over the sink was fogged at the bottom, and a towel hung from the back of a chair.
“Good walk?” Lena asked when they came in.
“His leg’s a little stiff. We took the short way.”
“I’ll keep the afternoon one short, too.”
June unfastened the harness and hung it on its hook. There was a wet patch beneath Otis’s water bowl, and she reached for the towel on the chair before she saw the clothes waiting under it. She took a paper towel from the counter instead.
Lena put bread into the toaster. Otis stationed himself near her feet, watching the package of sliced turkey she had set beside it. June knew the look; he could hold it for twenty minutes without moving anything except his eyebrows.
“I won’t give him the whole package,” Lena said.
“I didn’t say anything.”
Lena glanced at her, and June laughed before she could stop herself. She wiped the floor, threw the paper towel away, and rinsed her mug. Then she put the mug in her work bag, wrapping it in the clean socks she had brought to change into.
“I’ll come at four tomorrow,” she said. “For the long walk, if his leg’s up to it.”
“Text me when you’re done tonight. We can work out the morning.”
June put on her gloves. Otis looked away from the turkey when she reached the door, and she bent to rub his chest once. He stood under her hand until she straightened, then turned back toward the kitchen.
She went through the yard and lifted the gate into its latch. She was still holding it when Lena said, through the open kitchen window, “You can have a corner. Back up.” Otis’s tags clicked against the cabinet, and June let go.