Mitch Kruger was snoring loudly on the living room couch, his mouth hanging open under his bulbous nose. One arm was flung over the side so that his fingertips trailed the floor. The top row of his thick gray chest hairs peeped out from the edge of the blanket.

Ignoring him as best I could, I crouched next to the sofa, under the shadow of his malodorous socks, and peered around the back to look at Peppy. She was lying on her side in the middle of a heap of newspapers. She’d spent most of the last few days shredding these, building a nest over the stack of blankets Mr. Contreras had folded for her. When she saw me she turned her head away, but thumped her tail once, feebly, to show there were no hard feelings.

I got back to my feet. “I guess she’s okay. I’m going upstairs to make some coffee. I’ll come back in a little while. Remember, though, you’ve got to leave her alone—no going back there and trying to stroke her or anything.”

“You don’t have to tell me how to manage the dog,” the old man huffed. “I guess I heard the vet as good as you; better, since I took her in for a checkup while you was out doing God knows what.”

I grinned at him. “Right. Got it. I don’t know what she makes of your pal’s buzz saw, but it would put me off my feed.”

“She ain’t eating,” he began, then his face cleared. “Oh, I get you. Yeah, I’ll move him into the bedroom. But I don’t want you in here looking on while I do it.”

I made a face. “Me, neither.” I didn’t think I could stomach the sight of what might lie below the fringe of greasy chest hair.

Back in my own place I suddenly felt too tired to cope with making coffee, let alone assuaging Mr. Contreras’s expectant-father anxiety. I pulled the bloodied sheet from the bed, kicked off my running shoes, and lay down.

It was almost nine when I woke again. Except for the twittering of birds anxious to join Peppy in maternity, the world was quiet beyond my walls, one of those rare wells of urban silence that give the city dweller a sense of peace. I basked in it until a squeal of brakes and furious honking broke the spell. Angry shouts—another collision on Racine.

I got up and went into the kitchen to make coffee. When I moved here five years ago this was a quiet blue-collar neighborhood—which meant I could afford it. Now rehab mania had hit. While housing prices trebled the traffic quadrupled as cute shops sprang up to feed the gentry’s delicate appetites. I only hoped it was a BMW that had been hit, not my own beloved Pontiac.