“Mister,” she said. “Not Abraham. Like he’s the principal.”
I laughed. I had not meant to.
That night I went out to the garage and stood looking at the other chair for some time.
It was only a chair. It had hung there since a warm evening the September before, when Dale sat in it in the driveway and listened to the ball game on the truck radio with a blanket over his legs. The stove bolt in the arm had a little rust on it. I had not touched it since. I had not been able to see what I would ever take it down for.
I took it down. I wiped the webbing with a damp rag, both sides.
Saturday morning there were two lawn chairs at the end of the rose bed.
Vicki came down her step and across her yard and stopped. She looked at the second chair for quite a while.
“I’m not going to bite you,” I said. “And you can’t keep standing. You’ll get those veins.”
She sat. She sat on the front three inches of it, like a girl in a principal’s office. Biscuit turned around twice in the grass between us and lay down with his chin on my slipper.
“This arm’s been fixed,” she said, feeling the bolt.
“My husband fixed everything. He’d have fixed a paper cup.”
“This was his?”
“Yes.”
She took her hand off the arm and put it in her lap. Then, after a minute, she put it back.
It was the fifteenth morning, a Monday, when she told me.
She had not been sleeping. I could see it. She sat down without being asked and held her cup with both hands and watched the dog, who was asleep already.
“He was my dad’s,” she said.
I waited.
“Biscuit. He was Dad’s dog. Dad lived over at Vandalia, in the house I grew up in. He got him as a pup the year after Mom passed, and for fourteen years the two of them walked to the end of the block every morning at half past six, rain or shine, and Biscuit did his business in the empty lot by the water tower, and they walked home and had breakfast. Fourteen years. That dog has never in his life gone anyplace but at the end of a walk.” She turned the cup around in her hands. “Dad died in February. My brother didn’t want a dog. So.”
“So you took him.”
“I’d been divorced since November. Twenty-nine years, and then one afternoon he told me he’d been done for a while, he just hadn’t gotten around to saying. I was in a one-bedroom apartment in Columbia that didn’t take pets. I found this house because it was the only thing I could afford that would let me have him.” She laughed, and it was not a happy sound. “And then I get here, and he can’t make it to the corner. He sits down halfway and looks at me. Like I’ve moved the corner on him.”
Biscuit sighed in his sleep.
“I know what he’s doing to your roses,” she said. “I’ve known it since the first week. I saw that bush going brown. I’m not blind.”
“Then why on earth did you say it was fertilizer?”
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.