My dog met me at the door. He had no choice. That was where I had left him. His name is Trigo and he has but one leg. He is a stout, squat bulldog, even squatter given his missing legs. Trigo refers to his three missing limbs as his nothings. I rescued him, that was the language of the shelter, “rescued,” though I prefer “befriended.” The workers at the shelter were about to “put him down,” their euphemism for murder. I asked if they would kill a person with no legs and they of course said no. I took the dog and his one remaining leg away from that place. Twice a day, when he decides, he does his business and I clean him postwaste. He has a wheelie-cart that he doesn’t much like but does pull around for about fifteen minutes in the morning for a bit of exercise. When I take him out for air, he rides on my chest in a baby carrier called a Björn. He is an extremely friendly, if discerning, very jowly, very vocal dog. He speaks to everyone.

Trigo and I walked down the hill to the center of Providence and to the Bank of America, where I stood in line to deposit the check from John Sill.

The stunned teller stared at the face of the check for a full minute. “This looks real,” he said.

“I suppose that’s because it is,” I said.

“Wait here,” he said.

“Is there a problem?”

“I have to get this okayed by my supervisor.”

“Sounds reasonable,” I said.

His name was Theodore, I learned this from his nameplate, black with brass letters. He stepped away some feet and spoke to a smarter-looking young woman. He showed her the check. She looked past him at me, then again at the paper, held it to the light. They both walked back to me.

“Is there a problem?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” the woman said.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Stephanie Mayer,” she said.

“My name is Wala Kitu. It’s printed right there on the face of the check. It’s also printed here on my government-issued passport and again here on my faculty ID and also here above my address on the deposit slip ripped cleanly from my Bank of America checkbook. This is Trigo. He has no ID.”

Trigo barked.

People in the adjacent lanes were staring now. The lanky custodian had stopped dusting the floor and looked on as well. Stephanie Mayer initialed the check and gave Theodore the go-ahead. I took my deposit receipt and gave it a close inspection, counting the zeros, and nodded, contemplated seeking out Stephanie Mayer’s permission to leave, but didn’t.

Outside I stumbled into one of my colleagues, a very young mathematician named Eigen Vector. Her specialty was topology, what else? Like most mathematicians, including me, she fit somewhere on the spectrum and was likely to say nearly anything and so she did.

“My shoes match today,” she said as a greeting.