The Dog Park Regular Remembered My Name, My Dog's, and My Divorce novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Leash
The morning after her divorce is final, Tara's beagle tangles Beau's Lab around her ankles, he unwinds the leash with his hand on her calf, and he knows her name, her dog's name and her divorce. She kisses him at her car door while both dogs watch.
"Tara," the man behind my bench said, "your leash is about to take Waffles through my dog."
I had never told him my name.
I turned around with a coffee in one hand and a tennis ball in the other.
Waffles had gone twice around Tank, a chocolate Lab the size of a coffee table.
She was starting a third lap with her nose in the gravel.
Every circle pulled the leash tighter around my ankles.
"Waffles, no," I said, and she ignored me, because she is a beagle and I am her second favorite person after anyone holding cheese.
Tank lay down in the middle of the tangle and sighed.
The man stepped over the bench, set his own coffee on the slat, and knelt in front of me in the gravel.
He wore a faded ball cap, and sandy curls stuck out of it at the back.
He had been on the bench behind mine at 6:40 for as long as I'd been coming here.
In all that time he had nodded at me maybe twice.
"Hold still," he said.
"I'm holding still."
"You're swaying."
He put one hand flat on the back of my calf to steady me.
His palm was warm and dry, and it was the first time a man had touched me on purpose in six months.
He worked the loops off one at a time, left ankle first, with big careful fingers and a green-eyed frown at the knots.
There was a cardinal tattooed on his left forearm, red against the freckles, and it moved every time he pulled.
"There," he said.
The leash was free.
His hand was still on my calf, and I was still standing there letting it be.
He looked up.
"Congratulations or sorry?" he said. "I couldn't tell which you wanted yesterday."
I went cold all over.
"What?"
"The divorce. It was yesterday, right? You had the envelope on your lap."
Nobody at this park knew about the envelope.
I had walked in on Friday with my lawyer's final papers in my purse.
I sat on this bench and told my sister "It's done" in a voice I'd thought was private.
I had been the woman on the second bench from the fountain for six months.
People here knew Waffles by name and me by "Waffles's mom."
"Who told you that?" I said.
"Nobody had to. You say everything to Waffles."
"I do not," I said.
"You do. Yesterday you told her you'd get her a sausage biscuit if she'd stop looking sad on your behalf."
That was true. I had said that.
His hand left my calf at last, and I felt where it had been.
His ears had gone red, all the way up to the cap line.
"You're cold," I said.
"It's sixty degrees."
"You're getting a sunburn on your ears at six forty in the morning."
"It's the cold," he agreed, and looked at the gravel and grinned.
He stood up, and he was a lot taller than he'd looked from the bench behind me.
"I'm Beau," he said. "That's four good mornings I've said to you since March, by the way. You've answered one."
"I'm not good at mornings."
"I noticed."
I had spent four years in a house where nobody noticed anything about me.
In marriage counseling, with a box of tissues between us, Boyd had said, "Honestly, I stopped noticing her around year two."
The counselor had written it down.
Now a strange man knew about my sausage biscuit promise.
I should have been scared.
What I felt was hungry, and I hadn't been that in a long time.
"I have to go," I said.
"Okay."
I put Waffles on a short lead, gathered my coffee, and walked to the gravel lot with my back very straight.
I got as far as my car.
I had my key in my hand and my other hand on the door, and I stopped.
He had followed me.
He was ten feet behind with Tank, hands in his pockets, waiting to see what I'd do.
He was twenty-three, maybe twenty-four, and he looked ready to wait there all morning.
I turned around.
"You don't get to know my business and then walk off," I said.
"I'm not walking anywhere."
"Good."
I took the three steps back, grabbed his shirt in my fist, and kissed him against my driver door with both dogs watching.
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