“I’m not saying anything to her,” I said. “I’m only saying good morning.”
“That’s worse,” said Brenda, with great satisfaction, and she went on down the walk.
I want to be fair. I was enjoying myself, and I knew it, and I was a little ashamed. So I started watching the dog instead of the woman, and that took some of the fun out of it.
He could not make it to the corner. That was the whole of it. The corner is maybe two hundred feet from her door, and there is a vacant lot there where every dog on the street has always gone. By the time Biscuit got halfway he would stop and sit down on the concrete with his back legs out to one side, and he would not get up. She did not pull him. I will say that for her from the start. She would stand there with the leash slack and wait, sometimes five minutes, and then she would bend down and pick up all thirty pounds of him and carry him back in her arms like a sack of feed, in her work clothes.
And her own yard was no good to him. The landlord had put down white river rock from the foundation to the sidewalk so he would never have to mow, and that dog would not so much as set a foot on it. He would stand at the edge and look at it the way I look at a gravel parking lot in good shoes.
My rose bed was the first soft ground past her front door. He had not picked it to spite me. He had picked it because it was as far as he could get.
I did not move the chair. But on the ninth morning, which was a Tuesday, I put a crust of toast in my housecoat pocket.
“Good morning, Vicki. Good morning, Biscuit.”
“Good morning,” she said. It was the first time she had said it back. She said it the way you would pay a toll.
And she was carrying a cup.
It was a tall green one with a lid. She stopped on the sidewalk, on her side of the last rose bush, and she stood there and drank from it and looked down the street as if she had always taken her coffee standing on a public sidewalk at dawn. Biscuit sat down on her shoe.
“Can he have toast?” I said.
She looked at me a long moment. “A little.”
I held it out. He took it more gently than some people take communion.
“He likes you,” she said. She sounded put out about it.
“He likes toast.”
We drank our coffee. Neither of us said another word for ten minutes. Then she said, “I’ve got to get to work,” and she picked him up and carried him home.
She stood there Wednesday too, and Thursday. Thursday she said the propane company was getting a new computer system and nobody could find anything. I said the license office got one in 1998 and I never found anything again. Friday she asked what the pink ones were called.
“Queen Elizabeth.”
“And the red?”
“Mister Lincoln.”
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.