These long November evenings

The name the collection agency asked about was vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He couldn’t help them. So he didn’t call them back.

Not that he would have anyway. Later, walking the dogs with his wife, he tells her about the call and she remembers the name. It was 30 years ago, but he had known the guy. Enough to say hello to him—enough to maybe have a beer with him.

“I remember him now,” he says. “But he wasn’t an associate. I just saw him at the gym. You knew him better than I did. Maybe it was just a mistake—it’s a common enough name. And I’ve got a common enough name.”

Yeah, she says. But Occam’s razor. They probably were calling about him. You did know him.

“I did. But don’t you think it’s weird? How did they get my number?”

Yeah, it’s weird. But they have ways.

They walk on a little further, as the light fails and the schoolteacher’s house at the top of the hill lights up.

“The Shockleys’ place looks inviting,” he says. “Like you could step up on the porch and they’d offer you some hot apple cider.”

Too sweet, she says. Cider’s only good if you cut it with bourbon. That cheap, scratchy bourbon. The Evan Williams. The Bust Head. Not the sweet, smooth, expensive kind you trade with your buddies.

“That’s why I love you,” he says. “One reason, anyway.”

In some ways these November days are the hardest: nasty, brutish and short. It’s always a shock when the cold first grips your bones. You break out the sweaters and sweatshirts, the base layers and the exothermic hand warmers. Winter’s a month off; it’ll be back in the 60s by the end of the week, but right now it’s cold. And the time change doesn’t help. The dogs look at you funny when you zip them into their jackets; they wonder why they’re being fed an hour later.

November is their big month, full of dates. The big dog would have turned 27 the other day, if dogs lived to be 27. Her father would have been 101 the day after. This is the week of their wedding anniversary. And he has a birthday this month too—one that comes with a zero. They have friends over. They go to Thanksgiving dinner.

Birthdays don’t matter, he thinks. It’s just numbers. Another metric that means nothing at all in isolation. If it’s an occasion for inventory, well, all right. They’re doing well.

Usually they travel somewhere around this time. Facebook reminds them they were in Paris on this date a few years ago. In Ireland. In California or Santa Fe. That’s where they were two years ago when he bought the silver trinket he finally gave her a day or two before. Nothing much, but maybe a memory.

But they’re here this year, for the whole month. Probably, unless something comes up. He doesn’t mind— while he likes being places, the actual travel isn’t so much fun anymore. Both of them are less patient with the airlines than they used to be. A little spoiled, he thinks. It’s odd to consider it, but he has to imagine wanting things. He has all he needs.

Maybe a warmer pair of boots would be nice. Some flannel-lined jeans.

Let’s go to the bike store this weekend, she says. I want to take my bike in and get it serviced, the tires fixed. And we can start to look for a bike for you; that’ll be your birthday present. You can’t tell anything online about a bike. You need to ask Sean about the real differences between mountain bikes and hybrids. And that store is really into fitting out there.

“You’re saying I need to get fit,” he says.

They walk along, cut through the high school parking lot past the gymnasium where a basketball game’s going on.

Why aren’t you playing tonight, Dub? she says to their most independent terrier, around whom he has invented a rich mythology. In his fantasy Dublin is—among other things—a pass-first point guard, an unselfish, hustling playmaker. Her sister Paris is a cheerleader. Together they walk their little sister Audi to her middle school every morning. After school they sometimes stop off at one of the coffee shops on their way home.

They don’t go to the convenience store because only one of them is allowed in at a time, a rule he remembers from a southern California 7-11 that once accused him of shoplifting. (He wasn’t; and his father, who’d sent him into the store to look for something he couldn’t find, watched the whole thing unfold from behind the wheel of his car. Only after he’d been patted down and released him did his father come inside. He told his son to go sit in the car while he had a few chillingly civil words with the store manager.)

“It’s the junior varsity playing tonight,” he says, knowing it makes no sense. Don’t junior varsity games immediately precede varsity games? And anyway, wouldn’t she—if she were really a dog that played basketball for Mount Saint Mary— make it a point to attend the j.v. games anyway?

They wend down the high school’s driveway and come to the sidewalk, and start toward home. The sidewalk narrows and Audi, the littlest and youngest of the three terriers, balks when a city bus idles brusquely in front of her, headlights glowering. She bends down and picks the small dog up, cradling her as they walk the next couple of blocks.

We don’t know what she sees, she says. She’s not used to this darkness, all that glare stabbing at her. Audi’s got a cataract in her left eye, it must be confusing.

It’s the Temple Grandin “neuroscience of empathy” thing he’s noticed before. She imagines what it must be like a foot above the ground, all the noise and two-legged tumult. Big rollers all around with smooth furless skin cold to touch.

“Is she heavy?” he asks, after a moment.

She’s warming my hands, she says. When the sidewalk widens a little, when the glow from streetlights and store windows tempers the rays from oncoming traffic, she sets Audi down. The little dog trots along faithfully.

These long November evenings signal the beginning of the end of the year, the lengthening of shadows. We are starting to rack them up, he thinks, but doesn’t say.

And they start up the hill toward the house, a knot of odd little family, his flashlight reaching out a little ways into the dark. pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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