I walked Oggie, Starburst, and Palm Tree together without incident. As Buford took a shit on someone’s lawn, a guy in a tank top came flying out the front door and screamed from the top of the stairs. I waved my poop bag at him like a flag, but he was still yelling in Polish, saying something along the lines of “Make that dog shit in the street,” which was impossible.

I smiled and gave him a thumbs-up.

My first summer dog-walking, as Lola the Havanese was kicking up dirt to bury the poop that I had already picked up, a small stone hit a dude’s Mercedes. He had been washing the other side, and poked his head up to give an unbelievable monologue about how he had worked his way up from nothing to buy this car, how it was his baby, having no other family or close relations, and how denting it was analogous to stoning an infant.

Lola’s parents ended up paying him five hundred dollars to stop harassing me, and I realized just how little I could control in the world. Assholes (human and canine) aside, walking dogs helped me to re-create the suburban village I had grown up in. During restless midwestern summers, as my friend Jillian and I would walk past people on the street or, later, drive past their homes or the site of their DUIs, we would create a little map of our town, the divorces and the family secrets and the infamous soup party that went awry, the density of our stories vacillating between gossip and tales of biblical proportions. We never tired of embellishing the story about the high school science teachers who hooked up together in the chemistry closet and developed lung problems. When we were thirsty for the epic, we’d say, “Remember when Mr. Redderick and Mrs. Locke had sex in the chemistry storage closet?”

“And Mrs. Locke’s kid Talon walked in?”

“And then he went to rehab and her husband blamed her?”

“And then she was sent to a sanatorium?”

“And then she fell in love with the janitor, who made mince pies for all the patients?”

“And then Mr. Redderick moved away to Alaska to study salmon hatcheries, but not before carving her name into the big oak tree by the football field, as if they had role-reversed with their students?”

From walking my dogs, I could tell which humans had gotten a raise, or had broken up, or had a detoxing relative on their couch, or had decided to move back from whence they came.

I took Buford home, envying the fact that he had no clue about the screamer’s insults and the general pettiness of human emotion. I walked Harris. Back at his apartment, an airy Bushwick loft with huge vacuumed rugs covering the paint-splattered wood, I sprawled out on the ground and Harris lay down next to me. I checked my phone.

The S-H had come through!