I step outside, ushering the PsychoPuppies out ahead of me. We spot the poodle immediately; his owner may have finally gotten a haircut (and so no longer so perfectly resembles his dog), but my girls know their neighbors.
I do too, of course, and I know that this poodle’s owner never wants the slightest thing to do with us. Juliette, much like Jolie, is having a hard time adapting to the idea that people (or dogs) might exist who don’t want a hug from her, so I have my hands full for a minute moving them down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. Feeling the leash snarl (they can’t stop picking on each other even when they’re attached at the neck), I turn around…and see it.
Poop.
Poop immediately in front of our building’s door, in fact. Where there was no poop seconds earlier.
A bit past the door, I see Used-To-Be-Curly; he is dragging his poodle into the street between two parked cars. UTBC’s shoulders have a guilty slouch. “Sir?” I ask tentatively, but of course, he pretends not to hear me.
I start to continue on our walk, but now I’m annoyed. If he didn’t prepare for this possibility, that’s not my fault. And I’m going to have to step over that mess to get home. And I’m trying, but I just can’t come up with some scenario in which I’m wrong and it wasn’t really his dog. And he obviously noticed it, because he’d just hauled the poor thing to the street to finish up.
I wheel the PsychoPuppies around, and head back for the pair. “Excuse me. Sir?” I say loudly when we are almost on top of them, making him jump–he clearly thought that we’d gone. “That’s yours, just in front of my building, yes?”
“Yes, but–” he begins, and then stops, stumped.
I’ve quite simply never seen a Frenchman at a loss for words before. It means he knows that he was wrong, and has no excuse, and it just…doesn’t happen. It makes me want to read him the riot act, to spit out all of the venom I’d polished on the way over. I am right, and he knows it; he won’t even argue back. It feels warm and glowing in my stomach.
* * *
Then I blink and it’s 26 hours earlier, and I’m crouched in the dirt with a hand on each dog’s collar, trying to inch my body further between them and the massive English bulldog with the attitude problem that wants a piece of Jolie. A few feet away, its owner (with an attitude problem of his own) is shouting at full volume at my friends: the three of them are trying to determine whether our current standoff is more the bulldog guy’s fault, or mine.
“Could you just take your dog?” I snap when he happens to glance our way. I’m trying to work the catch on Juliette’s leash with the hand holding her collar, but Jolie shifts and a low growl boils out of the bulldog. From my crouch, he looks to be well into my weight class.
Later, Nick will tell me that a dog of the same description lunged for him while he was running in the same area, but I don’t need to know that to sense that I’m not in the world’s safest place.
The owner turns away contemptuously, and uses my request as further evidence for his argument.
Later, one of my friends will proudly mention that she only yelled at the man to defend me. In the ensuing pause I will see a flicker of…something, when I don’t thank her.
When the man finally pulls his dog away, my other friend snorts. “See that? All that fuss he made; he just didn’t want us to realize that doesn’t even have a leash for that monster.” Doesn’t winning feel good?
* * *
I look at UTBC, with his slumped shoulders in his took-the-dog-out-the-second-he-got-home suit. “I have an extra bag, if you’d like one,” I say, shrugging and reaching into my purse.
“Thanks,” he mumbles, taking it. He passes us again on his way to the trash can, but won’t look our way. He probably never will again.
I have no idea whether I’ve won or lost.