“The boy is Rembrandt and the girl is Vermeer.”
“Rembrandt like the painter?”
“Actually they’re both painters.”
“Oh,” I said. “Like me.”
“You paint?”
“No,” I said. “No, I didn’t mean that. Just . . . Lucas Painter. That’s me.”
She said nothing, so after a few seconds I glanced over at the side of her face. She did not seem impressed by my small note of coincidence with the dogs. I think she would have liked it better if I had been an artist. But I wasn’t. And I’m still not. And that’s just the way it is.
“Look,” she said. “I know why you’re not leaving.”
“You do?”
“I think I do. I think you think if you leave me alone, I’ll do something stupid.”
“Um . . . ,” I began. And did not finish. Probably wisely.
“I’m not making you any promises about the rest of my life, kid. But if you go home today . . . I’ll still be here when you get here tomorrow for your run.”
“How do I know that for a fact?”
“Because, for all my faults—and if you ask around, you’ll hear they’re legion—I never look somebody in the face and tell them a damn lie. And besides, I already took every pill I had in the house.”
My eyes went immediately to her pickup. Her old blue truck. She must’ve seen them go.
“You think any local doctor’s going to write me a prescription or any local pharmacist’s going to fill it? After what just happened?”
I wasn’t sure, so I continued to sit.
“Look,” she said. “Kid. Believe me or don’t. It’s up to you. But there’s a better reason why you can’t sit here on my porch for the rest of your life. Because you can’t control other people. You can’t be responsible for somebody else. Not if it’s a fully grown adult human, you can’t. Sooner or later you have to go home, and you know it.”
I sighed. Pulled to my feet.
I stood facing her and the dogs. She cut her gaze away from me, and it struck me that she was ashamed. She hadn’t meant for anyone to know as much about what she’d just done as I knew. She hadn’t meant to let anybody in so close, to make so many observations.
“Well,” I said. “Goodbye, Vermeer. Goodbye, Rembrandt. Goodbye, Mrs. Dinsmore.”
She gave me a little wave, her eyes still angled away.
“Here’s a question,” I said, while I continued not to leave. “Your daughter said you saw me running off with the dogs every morning. All along.”
“I did,” she said. Quietly.
“Why didn’t you stop me? Why didn’t you say, ‘Hey kid, those are my dogs—leave ’em alone!’ That’s what most people would’ve done.”
“It was nice for them to have somebody to run with. They’re young dogs. They need that.”
“But you trusted me to bring them back?”
“I trusted them to come back. They know where they live.”
“Right,” I said. “Got it. Well . . . bye.”
I couldn’t think of any more reasons to stall, so I turned to walk away. I got about ten steps, then was seized with a thought. A weirdly disturbing thought.
I stopped. Turned back. The three of them had not moved.
“Wait a minute,” I said, walking closer.
“Now what?”
“You saw me out the window. With the dogs. For a couple of weeks.”
“What about it?”
“And you figured out that I liked them.”
“Yeah. What of it?”
“You figured I would take care of them if you couldn’t.”
This time, no answer from her.
“So here I am thinking I saved your life, but I’m the reason you tried to take it in the first place. If I’d just stayed away, none of the rest of this would have happened.”
We stood there in silence for a painful length of time. Well, I stood. She sat. The dogs lay.
“Listen, kid,” she said at last. “Here’s a lesson for you in the fact that you’re not the center of the universe. You don’t run the world. I make my own choices. You can’t keep me here, and you can’t make me leave. You don’t control as much as you think you do. I’m not trying to be cruel. Just the opposite. You’ll have a much happier life if you get a strong bead on what’s your responsibility and what isn’t. Now go home and have a good summer and stop worrying about me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I went home.
But I did not stop worrying about Zoe Dinsmore.
“I actually do think I heard about that,” Connor said. “Now that you tell me all those details.”
Then he passed me the basketball.
We were playing a game of H-O-R-S-E in his backyard. In the driveway, right where the concrete went wide in front of the two-car garage. His dad had mounted a hoop over the garage doors. Years earlier. Connor couldn’t have cared less about it. He never wanted to use it. I’d had to practically drag him out here.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, and then began to dribble.
He tried to block my drive to the hoop, but I turned my back to him and did a spin move and left him in the dust. My spin moves always left him in the dust. For a compact little guy, he was surprisingly heavy on his feet.
I leapt into the air and dunked the ball with both hands.
“R,” I said.
Connor had no part of the word HORSE. Only I had three letters of it. Only I had any letters at all.
Maybe this was why Connor never wanted to shoot hoops with me. Odd that the thought hadn’t occurred to me sooner.
“Time,” he said. He made the time-out gesture, the T, with his two hands.
I dribbled in place while he leaned on his knees and panted.
“So why didn’t you tell me?” I asked again.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“You just said you heard about it.”
“Now that you tell me all the details, yeah. I’ve heard a couple of the details before. But nobody ever said ‘Zoe Dinsmore’ in front of me, so how was I to even possibly know it had anything to do with your thing?”
“It’s not my thing,” I said, and dribbled over
