The boy shrugged, shaking his leg. The bottom of his red shorts and his leg seemed to take the hit. “I didn’t like these shorts anyway.”
“He owns you!” the older guy was yelling. “He peed on you, now he owns you!”
And I was like, No, please stop talking.
—
I avoided the park the next morning, for obvious reasons. Instead I headed down to Pinchot, which is pronounced Pin-Chot rather than Pin-Cho, because America. Pinchot is the best street in all of Phoenix for walking a dog. Back in the day it was part of the New Deal. They subdivided land into one-acre properties and encouraged industrial workers to farm part time. Apparently, Eleanor Roosevelt planted some trees on it. That was like the 1930s version of Beyoncé planting trees today, so it was kind of a big deal. And now, nearly a hundred years later, there’s this incredible canopy of eighty-foot-tall Aleppo pines and Washington palms on Pinchot between 26th and 27th Streets. The whole street smells like pine and fresh-cut grass.
We lived a block north, where things smelled decidedly less lovely and trees were sparse and mostly small palms. Which was why I always walked on Pinchot.
And as if the world were punking me, there they were, the same dog-walking brigade, or at least three of them, heading toward me. The woman and the man were up front and about five feet apart, and when I craned my head, I saw Griffin’s pee victim and his black doodle.
I thought about running, and this time I almost did, but then the woman waved to me again, and I sighed and realized running away would make it worse. So I kept walking, like a man toward his executioners. And while I walked, I thought about funny things I could say about the fact that yesterday Griffin had used the boy like a fence post. I came up with, I’ve stopped allowing Griffin to drink water, so you should be safe.
But when I approached them and opened my mouth, it burst out as “Drinking water, I’ve stopped…,” which didn’t make any sense at all.
“Hydration is important,” the woman with the librarian glasses said, nodding, as if what I’d said was somehow a normal greeting to near strangers. I thought about fixing it, but the moment was gone, so instead I just stood there and held Griffin’s leash tightly, lest he do it again. Maybe the kid was some sort of pee magnet? Who was to say?
Then Griffin did one of his Griffin things. Out of nowhere he barked, turned his head both ways, and, as if he were suddenly sure he was being stalked by a zombie, he jumped a full one-eighty, his head leading the way. And then he jumped back, and just as quickly, he returned to normal, as if whatever had just possessed him had flown away. It used to scare me when Griffin acted nuts. Now I just understood it was Griffin being Griffin.
“What the heck?” the older guy said.
“Yeah,” I mumbled, and a thing came to me as a coherent sentence, which was unusual but welcome in this case. “Griffin is basically that kid in school who sits in the back, eating chalk.”
The boy laughed and when he did so, his eyes lit up. I couldn’t see his mouth, but I imagined him with a smile where his lips pull up so high you can see his glistening gums.
This led to some laughter and the other people saying various things, none of which I heard because I was playing back in my head the moment where I successfully said something funny, and in that way, maybe Normal, almost. And who was to say what Normal really was? And then I came to, and they were all looking at me, and I realized: Me. I was to say. And as previously noted, saying is not my strongest skill. Especially in front of a (potentially) good-looking boy (stupid masks). I am especially tongue-tied in the presence of (hypothetical) long-faced beauty.
So I opened my mouth, and my brain was suddenly extraordinarily empty, as if my one joke had cored me out, and the stupidest thing was that I knew as soon as I walked away, all the good things to say would come, because of course, the English language consists of many, many words, and they can be arranged in all sorts of order to make meaning. But there I was, standing like a statue, with my mouth open like an idiot, and it wasn’t getting better, the longer I stayed that way.
So I said, “Bye.”
And they each said, “Bye.”
And I walked on, knowing for the entire month of May, and for however long this pandemic thing was going on, my only goal would be to never see those people again.
—
From that point on, I stayed on the west side of 26th Street, which was decidedly less beautiful, less canopied with huge trees, and therefore less shady, which definitely mattered in Phoenix between May and September, when the flaming sun was only six or seven feet above the city at all times. Which was why I had to wake up at five-something every day to walk. Because walking dogs once the sidewalk had started to sizzle was evil and abusive, and I’d never ever do that to poor Griffin.
And maybe it was three days later, as I turned the corner from 25th Place onto Pinchot, that I saw, again, coming toward me like an unstoppable force, the masked brigade and their canines. And I thought, God, why are you doing this to me? Isn’t COVID-19 enough?
But it wasn’t, and as I walked toward them, Griffin pulling me forward the whole time, I had nothing. Nothing in my brain to say. So as I approached, I pasted on a smile they couldn’t see beneath my mask, and
