There were eleven again. Red at both ends.
Vicki looked at the dog. “That still leaves him.”
“I’ve been thinking about him,” I said. “What’s the second bag of mulch for?”
She went a little pink. “I thought, if you’d let me. There’s that strip on my side, by the corner of the back fence, where your hedge quits. It’s four feet of the landlord’s rock. I thought I’d rake the rock back and put down mulch, the same kind as yours, so it would feel right to him. Mr. Pruett said a dog goes by his feet and his nose.”
“Then he’ll want more than new mulch,” I said.
I got the bucket. I filled it from the old end of the rose bed, the mulch he had been using for two months. I will leave it there, and only say that a dog knows his own.
She raked the white rock back by hand. It took her the better part of an hour. We laid down both bags, and I shook the bucket out over the top, and we stood back like two women who had just hung a picture.
Biscuit got up. He walked over, slow, on those stiff legs. He put his nose down. He walked all the way around that patch once, like a man reading the fine print.
Then he stepped up onto it, and he did his business, right there by the fence, on his own ground, twelve steps from his own door.
Vicki cried harder over that than she had over anything else. I put my arm around her. She smelled like dirt and propane and hazelnut coffee.
“Good boy,” she kept saying. “Good boy. Oh, you good old boy.”
She paid for the rose and the shovel and the dirt and the mulch out of her own pocket, and she dug the hole with her own hands, and she watered that bush every single evening for two weeks, and for a good while after that when she did not have to. When Amy called that Friday and asked if I had phoned the city yet, I told her no, I had been busy gardening.
“With who?” she said.
“With the neighbor.”
There was a long quiet on the line. “The dog neighbor?”
“Her name is Vicki,” I said. “She’s coming to supper Sunday. I’m making ham loaf. I’m about two months late with it.”
The new Mister Lincoln took. It bloomed three times before frost.
I still carry my chair out at half past six. I don’t need to. Nobody is coming for the roses. But there are two chairs at the end of the walk now, mine and the one with the stove bolt in the arm, and at half past six the door of the Hayes house opens, and an old beagle comes down the step one stair at a time and goes to his own patch by the fence, and then he comes over and lies down on my slipper.
“Good morning, Vicki,” I say. “Good morning, Biscuit.”
And on Sundays, coming home from church by myself, I slow down at the end of the walk, three feet shy of the sidewalk, right where he measured.
I smell it before I get to the door.
Specialty: Quiet Comebacks & Personal Justice
David Reynolds focuses on stories where underestimated individuals regain control of their lives. His writing centers on measured decisions rather than dramatic outbursts — emphasizing preparation, patience, and the long game. His characters don’t shout; they act.