“What’s your name?”

“Tyler. Tyler Schmidt.” This boy still has that adolescent gawk about him that will diminish as age thickens his neck and bulks up his skinny chest.

“Justine Meade.”

We don’t shake hands. “You said Schmidt?” Artie is Schmidt.

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m trying to find a guy named Schmidt. I guess it’s a common-enough name.”

“Millions of us. Some related, most not. Where’s your guy from?”

“I have no idea. I met him in Washington State, but he’s got relatives in Massachusetts, I think.” This is a silly conversation, like asking if all the Smiths in the world are related. “Arthur Schmidt.”

“Doesn’t ring a bell. Why are you looking for him? You a bounty hunter?”

I catch the look in his eye; this entry-level boy has a sense of humor. “Something like that. He’s got my dog and I want him back.”

“Isn’t dognapping against the law? Can you get him arrested?”

“I’d like to try.”

The bus station is nothing more than a convenience store. Tyler pulls up into a bus lane and hops out as if he’s my taxi driver and is going to repeat his chivalry of a few minutes ago, but I swing the door open and we end up facing each other on the cracked sidewalk. He is just the height of my son, and I resist the urge to give him a quick hug good-bye, if only for the feeling of holding a son, in my arms again, even if not my particular son. It has been a very long time since I’ve had that privilege.

“Thank you, Tyler.” I try to give him a couple of bucks.

He quickly forces the folded-up dollars back into my hand. “It’s part of the service.”

I feel the chill sweat of embarrassment dampen my shirt. This boy has me pegged. He knows I need every penny I have on me. “Do you have a card?”

Tyler fishes a company card out of his wallet, hands it to me as if he, too, believes that I might rent a car from him someday. I’m just thinking that I’ll send him a nice note he can have put in his personnel folder—service above and beyond, rescuing maidens. Then I wonder if he’ll get in trouble for being my taxi. Then I do hug him. And, strangely enough, he hugs me back.

“I hope you find your dog.”

“Me, too.”

He drives off, leaving me standing on the filthy sidewalk, thinking about my son.

* * *

I was so young when he was born. Not unreasonably so—plenty of girls have babies at twenty. But then choosing to raise him alone, without help, comes back to me now as the sort of reckless hubris of the very young. I named him Anthony, like his father and grandfather, but called him “Tony” from the moment he was born. Every mother thinks her baby is the most beautiful, but Tony really was: curly dark hair still wet against his tiny skull, murky dark eyes that would become chocolate brown in a few weeks. Starfish hands reaching out for me.