Heel - § 1: The After

Lorraine had the wash on the line by nine, and the dog came out with her and went back in with her, the screen door clapping twice in the still morning. Buddy went where she went. He had always gone where she went, down the drive to the box and back, out to the line and back, and when she stood at the stove he lay in the kitchen doorway with his chin on his paws and watched her run the percolator, his eyes open the whole time, brown and patient and turned up at her.

A dog followed you. That was what a dog was for.

Denny was at the table with the funny pages and a bowl he had not finished, and she told him to finish it, and he ate three more slow spoonfuls with his eyes on the screen door, waiting for the grass. He was twelve now and long in the wrist, and his sneakers had got too small again over the summer, and she would have to see about that. Buddy left the doorway and went and put his head on the boy's knee, and Denny worked his fingers in the fur behind the dog's ears without looking down, the two of them fitted to each other since Denny was six and the dog had come to them a brown runt of a pup in a peach crate.

The dog had not changed in those years. She knew it and did not hold it up to the light, the same as she did not look square at a good many things now. The boy had gone from six to twelve and worn out three sizes of shoe, and the dog that came in the crate lay in the same doorway now, the same brown, not a gray hair in his muzzle, no stiffness in him on the cold mornings, the same dog exactly. He was a good dog. He was good with the boy. You did not look a thing like that in the mouth.

Out past the clothesline the yards ran down to the Coyles' back fence, and past the fence the ground fell away to the creek and the line of trees, and past the trees the gray stood up where the sky ought to have gone on and did not. It had always stood there. She hung a shirt and did not look at it, no more than you look at the far wall of a room you have lived in all your life.

Across the street the new people were getting their boy off to something, the screen door going, the mother's voice bright over the grass. They had been in the house since spring. They were nice. The husband did something with insurance and kept his lawn cut to the inch, and the wife had brought over a Bundt the first week and said how glad they were to be on such a friendly street. There was a boy about Denny's age and a new pup they had got him, a yellow thing all feet, and the pup had taken to standing at the property line and watching Buddy across the two yards, hours at a stretch, learning him.

The Coyle boy came down off his porch and cut across the grass toward the corner, and Lorraine had a name in her mouth to call after him before she knew it was there, a name that was not his name. Her hand stopped on the line with the pin half-pushed. She did not call it. She did not let it up past her teeth. She pushed the pin home and reached for the next thing in the basket, and the name went back down wherever it had come up from.

Her eye went across to the Coyle house and caught on the new green shutters, and under the green at the foot of one a strip of older wood showed where the brush had not gone, weathered pale, and her mind would not give the strip a shape or a year. She brought her eye down to the basket of pins. Someone had lived there before the Coyles. If she reached for it she might come up with a yellow kitchen and a laugh, a woman's laugh, big and unhandsome and real, that used to come across to her at this hour. She did not reach for it. There was nothing at the end of reaching but the feeling at the top of the cellar stairs in the dark, the foot going down and finding the floor closer than it thought, the small drop and the lurch of it. She kept her feet on the grass and pinned the shirt.

The Coyle woman came over while Lorraine was taking the dry things down. She came across with her arms folded against the morning chill that was not really there, smiling, and she stood at the line and talked about the boys and the start of school and a recipe she wanted, and Lorraine gave it to her, the one with the cream of mushroom, and it was easy, it was the easiest thing in the world, two women at a clothesline in the sun.

Then the Coyle woman said a thing.

She said it lightly, looking off toward the trees and the gray past them, her smile going a little loose at the corners. She said did Lorraine ever get the feeling. She did not finish it. She started it three times and did not finish it any of the times, the feeling that, the feeling like, you know how sometimes it seems like, and each time she got that far she gave a little laugh to set it back down.

Buddy had come out to the line behind Lorraine. She had not heard him come. He lay down in the grass a little off from them with his chin on his paws, and his eyes came up off the ground and went to the Coyle woman and stayed there. Lorraine felt her own eyes pulled after his, the small tug of it, and her hand went still on a pin again, the second time that morning it had stopped without her telling it to. She did not ask herself why.

Something in Lorraine went smooth and quick, ahead of her, before she had decided anything. She heard her own voice come out warm and level and a little amused, saying she got all kinds of feelings before her coffee, saying these old houses settled and made you think things, saying wasn't it a pretty morning though, and she handed the Coyle woman the last of the recipe again as though that had been the only thing wanting, and she smiled, and her face did the smile without her, and she felt none of it on the inside, none of it at all, only the going-smooth, the closing-over, the door drawn quietly shut on the far side of her own face.

The Coyle woman's smile came back up firm. She said of course, these old houses, and laughed, the real laugh this time, relieved, grateful almost, and said she'd best get back, and she went, her arms still folded, back across the street and into the house that had been somebody's and was hers now.

Lorraine took the rest of the wash down. Her hands were steady at it. She had done a thing just now. She had done it like taking a child's hand off a stove, fast, before the burn, and she did not look at it any longer than that.

She gathered the basket up against her hip. Buddy got to his feet and stood waiting on her, his tail going, his eyes up at her, brown and patient, the same eyes out of the same unchanged face, and when she started for the house he came in at her heel where he belonged, and the screen door clapped twice behind the two of them, and across the street the yellow pup stood at the property line and watched them go.

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