“Yeah,” Alexander said.
“Most of them aren’t, though. Most dogs go through their whole lives and never bite anyone. And how many therapy dogs are there, right? Seeing-eye dogs. Companion dogs. Most dogs are good.”
“About how many, do you think?”
“I don’t know. Four out of five?”
“So for every ten dogs you see…”
“Yeah. A couple.”
The air conditioner hummed. Someone walked past Alexander’s door, bitching about the copy machine. On the street, a truck lumbered around the corner, its brakes screeching metal against metal. Erin leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. Alexander was afraid she would reach out, touch his shoulder or his knee, but Erin only waited.
“I don’t know how we do it,” Alexander said again, more softly.
The afternoon was the worst. The pain ramped up a little, but more than that, Alexander’s mind seemed to fall into a haze. The documentation he was working on seemed to mean less and less, the price and weight tolerance for one set of hinges started to look the same as the one before. The information didn’t fit the allotted spaces, and Alexander couldn’t remember how to make AutoCAD resize them. He tried to walk to the bathroom without his cane, which turned out to be optimistic. Everything felt too hard, too forced, like something he should have been able to do but couldn’t. By three o’clock, the exhaustion robbed him of anything resembling productivity. He sat at his desk making a list of everything he had to do instead of doing it. Eventually, the hour hand moved far enough that he could go home without it feeling like a rout. He called for a taxi. Next week would have to be different. He’d feel better.
At the apartment, Dickens leapt and bounced, running in a tight circle the way he had since he was a puppy. Alexander collapsed on the couch, closed his eyes. When he heard nails scratching at the front door, he shifted his head, opened his eyes. Dickens looked at him, at the door, at him again. He needed to go for a walk. It was almost more than Alexander could stand. He swallowed his exhaustion and his fear and forced himself back up.
Everything was normal. Everything was fine.
The week passed slowly, old patterns slowly remaking themselves in slightly altered forms. He took himself to the lunch bar at the side of the fancy steak house across from the office. Meetings became more and more comprehensible as he put together what he’d missed during his time in hospital. His still-healing wounds bothered him less; he found ways to move and sit and stretch that worked with the new limitations of his body. Every morning and evening, he allowed himself the luxury of a taxi, swearing that this would be the last, that he’d get back to being responsible with his money next time, and then changing his mind when the next time came.
He hadn’t thought to dread Sunday until Sunday came.
The late morning light spilled in through his bedroom window, making spots of white too bright to look at on the bed. The night before had been a movie streamed off the Internet, a couple rum-and-cokes, and a bag of Cracker Jacks for dinner. Between that and skipping his evening stretches, his body felt tight and cramped, the complex of scars in his belly and down his thigh pulling at his healthy flesh like something jealous. Lolling at the edge of sleep, he smelled the hound’s rank piss, but the illusion faded as he came to, leaving only a bright panic behind it. Dickens lay at the foot of the bed, black eyes focused on Alexander. Even perfectly still and trying not to disturb, the delight and excitement showed in the little dog’s eyebrows and the almost subliminal trembling of his body. Even then, the penny didn’t drop for Alexander until he sat up and Dickens leapt off the bed and ran, nails clicking against the wood, for the front door.
It was Sunday morning, and Sunday morning was the dog park. Alexander rubbed the back of his hand against his eyes as Dickens raced from the front door to the bedroom to the door to the bedroom. Dread spilled in his chest like ink, but he pulled himself up from the mattress and forced a smile.