The lights in the library had dimmed. The stores in the foyer had closed their doors for the night. Aria was confused, having been suddenly jarred into a reality where it seemed that she had missed so much. After exiting the building into the congregation of other homeless people who, along with her, had suddenly been ejected from their sanctuary, she looked back through the windows to see if she could find Taylor still inside. She felt her stomach sink. Not knowing what else to do, she sat down on the grass. Did he fucking abandon me here? she thought to herself.
Aria had been wrong about people before. But this just seemed so drastically out of character, especially given that they both seemed to be each other’s lifeline. She felt sick. Her world was spinning. Her mind was flailing to reach for ideas about what had happened and what to do now, as if those ideas were buoys in the middle of a deep ocean full of sharks. After about half an hour, that all-too-familiar feeling of bad luck got the better of Aria. She was doing her best to stay in the light from the street lamps and blend in with the crowd, which was largely ignoring her. Since she was a child, it had dawned on her that some people are lucky. They see themselves in the faces staring back at them. They are not strangers in the world. Some people feel the warmth of connection; they are not worn thin by wariness. But to Aria, her own voice sounded like a wolf’s cry in a chorus of bleating. She was a stranger in this world. She had no one and she had nothing to belong to.
Aria had resigned herself to accepting that as if things could not get any worse, now she was alone, when Taylor’s voice rattled across the distance from nearly a block away. “Aria!” he was yelling again and again. He walked toward her rapidly.
The relief of hearing his voice was ineffable. But the closer he got, the more that relief turned into resentment. She would have confronted him about simply leaving her there to think she had been abandoned without saying a word, but she saw that Taylor was walking toward her with someone else in tow. The rupture between them, known only to Aria, was left unmended because it was suddenly less important than the approach of a total stranger – and his dog.
“This is Luke,” Taylor said, before he had even reached her. And once he did, “This is Aria,” he said, waiting for the pair to shake hands. Luke took the initiative in a way that suggested that he respected the necessary distance that Aria’s body language implied she required from him.
Aria looked down at his dog, who was held close to him with a striped, dirt-stained bungee cord. “This is Palin,” Luke said, with a chuckle. Aria later learned he had named his dog after Sarah Palin, the politician who had run for vice-president. It made him laugh to have displayed his disdain for her as a person and for her policies by “keeping her on a leash like the politician’s pet that she was.” He also considered it to be a brilliant way of advertising his liberal political persuasions to anyone who he happened to meet on the road. It was a great way to sort out potential foes from potential friends.
It was obvious that Luke adored her. Unlike so many of the dogs Taylor and Aria had seen who lived with their owners out on the street, Palin was in perfect condition. She looked a bit like a border collie, simply taller. Most of the long hair on her body and ears was black. But the tip of her tail, her legs, underbelly, shoulders, neck and face were white with black freckles of all different sizes. White eyelashes accented amber brown eyes, which looked far too human to be dog eyes. In fact, everything about her seemed more human than dog, especially her facial expressions. Her intelligence was palpable, making for an equal personality mix of sweet and sassy. Aria reached down to pet her and she closed her eyes with pleasure under the touch.
“We met at the temp office, he has somewhere we can stay.” Taylor’s voice cut through the moment of connection.
“Yep,” said Luke. “Are you hungry?”
Aria nodded, still hesitant to fully let him in. Luke took off his tall, metal-framed camping backpack and rifled through the compartments. He shoveled her out a few handfuls of bulk trail mix from a plastic bag. Aria almost laughed out loud, but, afraid to be rude, she smiled instead and said, “Thank you.”
“No problem, man, don’t worry about it,” Luke responded, pleased with his capacity to help where help was needed. Everything about Luke seemed stereotypical to Aria – and the trail mix was the epitome of cliché.
Luke was a “Crusty.” That was the not-so-affectionate term given to people who were homeless not through circumstance, but by choice. He had abandoned the 9-to-5 lifestyle in favor of train-hopping, hitchhiking and panhandling. Luke’s homelessness was a statement against “the man.” He despised the government and he was not afraid
