“Okay, up there, between 54 and 63 Palmetto, old Polish women in headscarves and sturdy wooden shoes sprinkle lye and baking soda on the grass patches in front of their building, which burns the dogs’ feet. Even when I cross to the other side of the street, they still chase me with old-school brooms made up of bundled branches.”

At one point, I would have said, Of course they want to protect their two-foot by three-foot square, they’ve lived here all their lives, they have no suburban pool to lounge in. What do you expect? But I no longer apologized for strangers. I spent less time occupying their hypothetical insides. I didn’t care to imagine how they saw me: as a girlish boy or a boyish girl, a blossomed fantasy of freedom, someone trying to muddle God’s perfect creation, a phallocentric lesbian.

We crossed Linden. In thirty-eight days, the lines of trees on each side of the street would blossom, suffusing the air in the sweetness of another era.

“And if you keep going all the way down Linden, Latinx families have woven a covering. Suspended from the trees, it hangs down to the sidewalk, and we are not allowed in. And around that corner”—I gestured toward Madison—“the Scorpion Café. Don’t ever go in there thinking you are going to find cheap well drinks and smoke-stained air. In fact, I would cross the street instead of walking by,” I warned. “If you need coffee, go to Chronos two blocks from here, but to get in the door, you have to be able to pronounce the names Hegel, Kant, and Goethe.”

By that point, we were almost to Louise’s. Trash blew by. I had a rule that I could only pick up dog shit in plastic bags that I’d taken off the street. On windy days, I collected at least fifteen and took them home to sterilize. Sid had chosen this neighborhood in which to start The Dog Walkers because there were enough affluent people around to pay us, but they were not so affluent that they would install grass-sensors to ticket you when a dog peed on a patch of lawn.

“The neighborhood weed is bought and sold on the rooftop of the old button factory over there. You simply yell Tawanda as loud as you can, and a Black lesbian named Block will throw down some keys. She sends her girlfriend Persephone to our house when the S-H texts that his dread is higher than a fourteen on the Crisis Chart and he can’t leave his room.”

Since Blithe and Aiden arrived, we had only seen the S-H poke his head out a few times.

I wanted to show Blithe how being a dog walker could mean many things. Who else got to travel in and out of homes, like a thief in the night, and roam the streets all day? Who else could take stock of the faces carved into nineteenth-century façades on fried-chicken shops and cell phone accessory stores, of wind-eaten plastic bags, and of a never-open window where a vine had split through the vinyl shades and was spreading across the glass, asking for help?