Juno and Hip

Dixon knocked on the door a third time, this time with more force. He had already rung the bell and knocked twice. Inside the house, he could hear the barking of two dogs. The low voice of Juno, a young black Lab mix, and the sharper, higher voice of Hippo, a tiny dog with the ironic name of a much larger animal. The dogs barked in unison at the knocking as he rapped on the door once more. He moved away from the door and considered whether to go around back. He pulled out his phone and checked to make sure the address was correct. It was.

He was in Happy Valley, on the outskirts of Portland, in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The homes were twenty or more years old, but well kept. They had tidy yards and nice cars parked in front of them. The home he was standing in front of was at the end of a cul-de-sac and looked to be in need of some yard care, exuding the hallmark of a busy homeowner, more than a sign of neglect. The home was a green single-story rambler with broad windows looking out to the street. The drapes were shut so he couldn't see inside.

He fiddled with his phone. He started to dial the number of the homeowner, Janet, who he had only spoken to briefly the day before. He was supposed to be starting his first dog-sit and instead found himself standing in the driveway, wondering what to do next.

Then, suddenly, the front door was pulled open wildly. Janet was holding the handle of the door, which now gaped like a yawning mouth. "Oh my God!" she was yelling. "Oh my God!" she yelled again. "I overslept. I was supposed to leave for the airport 30 minutes ago!" She turned and ran back into the house, disappearing into the darkness inside.

Dixon looked through the front door and saw Juno and Hippo sitting together, tails wagging at him. Juno was on a small blue dog bed, which, oddly, was surrounded by a pile of shoes. Hippo was on the couch. Both of them were wiggling expectantly in Dixon's direction, so he walked inside and sat on the floor next to Juno. She immediately repositioned herself onto the floor and laid down with her back against Dixon's leg. Dixon stroked her lightly and said, "hello there girl. I'm Dixon. Please don't call me Dix." Hippo hopped down off the couch, all maybe six pounds of her, crossed the floor to Dixon and climbed into his lap. She looked up at him and he stared back into her eyes. "Hello little one," he said. She wiggled. "Hippo, huh. That is a whole lot of name for such a small dog. How about we just call you Hip?" She wiggled harder, which he chose to take as a sign of agreement. "Hip it is."

From the bedroom, all three of them could hear a commotion. Things were banging, being knocked over. There was a lot of rustling. After three minutes or so, Janet came running past toward the kitchen. "I'm so sorry Dix, I have to go! The house manual is in my TrustedHouseSitters account," she yelled, her voice fading as she ran out to the garage. Dixon could hear the car start and the electric door opener lifting the garage door. "I trust you Dix!" she yelled. That was the last thing he heard Janet say before the door slammed shut and the car drove away. The garage door closed behind her. A quiet descended on Dixon and the two dogs, who looked up at him expectantly.

"Huh," he said to the dogs. He looked around. The dogs continued looking at him.

"Well, I guess we'll just. . . figure this out. You guys hungry?" He assumed that the dogs hadn't eaten, because Janet had just woken up and run out the door. "What do you guys eat?" he asked. Then he picked up Hip and carried her with him to the kitchen.

Dixon looked around at what would be his home for the next three weeks. The furnishings were mostly new and stylish. There were pictures of people on the walls, none of whom he knew. The house looked like it was in the process of being lived in by someone who was not about to run out the door. There were dishes in the sink. There was fruit in a fruit bowl on the kitchen counter. Mail sat unopened on a desk in a small nook in the hall.

He went in search of dog food first. He found a cache of dog stuff in a large pantry space near the laundry machines. There were leashes and harnesses and plenty of toys. And there were multiple kinds of dog food. There was a bag of dry food labeled for large dog breeds. There was another small bag of dry dog food for "toy" sized dogs. There were two cases of canned dog food, one of which said "for sensitive skin" on the label. There were a number of pill containers on a shelf. Dixon read the labels. One appeared to be a drug for sensitive skin. "I guess this goes to the pup with the sensitive skin. Which of you two has sensitive skin?" he asked, looking down at the two of them. The two dogs looked back at him. Juno wagged. "Is it you?" Dixon asked. Juno wagged again. "I'll take that as a yes," he said.

Dixon opened the TrustedHouseSitters app on his phone and scrolled down to the "House Guide.” This would normally be a list of important things to know about the house and the pets. He clicked on the link and what opened was a blank version of the house guide form. A blank form. ‘Great,’ he thought.

He went back into the pantry and read the labels of the dog food containers in more detail. The feeding suggestions were based on weight. He still had Hip in his arms and he guessed she was somewhere under ten pounds. He set her down and lifted Juno up and down a couple of times. She wiggled while he did this. She felt like she weighed maybe 30-40 pounds, but he couldn't be sure. He picked up Hip again and wandered through the house looking for a bathroom scale. He found one in the master bedroom and weighed himself with and without Hip. He did some quick math. He looked down at the dogs. "The good news is that you are six pounds Hip, which is about what I guessed. The bad news is that I have gained ten pounds. I will need to work on that."

He went through the same process with Juno and found her to be 45 pounds. Satisfied with this new information, he walked back to the kitchen, both dogs in tow. He measured out dry and wet food into two dog bowls, which were helpfully labeled in carefully handwritten cursive with the two dogs' names. They both devoured their food in a matter of seconds. "I guess you guys were hungry," Dixon said to them.

"Alright, who needs to go potty?" he asked enthusiastically. The dogs wagged and wiggled again.

He walked to a glass sliding door, slid it open and was not at all prepared for what happened next. Juno sprinted through his legs, out the door, and disappeared into the trees behind the house. Dixon ran outside and scanned around, panicked. There was no fence. Juno was nowhere in sight. "Oh shit!" yelled Dixon. "Juno! Come back here," he yelled out into the distance. He listened and heard nothing. Hip still in hand, he ran out into the trees, yelling Juno's name, frantically looking left and right for her. He wasn't wearing shoes and his feet hurt as he stepped on pinecones and sticks and small stones. Hip yelped as he nearly fell over a fallen log at one point.

He crossed through the thick trees and was now standing at the edge of another neighborhood street. He looked back and forth, still frantic, still yelling Juno's name. And then he saw her. Juno was across the street on the porch of a house, wagging her tail at a dog on the other side of a closed glass door. Relieved, Dixon walked across the street and up the stairs to Juno. "Excuse me, Juno, but you scared the shit out of me. Is this your boyfriend?" he said. Juno wagged.

"Alright troops, back we go." He took Juno by the collar, and with Hip still in his hands, he made his way down the street and around the block back to the house. "We'll make sure you're on a leash next time," he said to Juno kindly as they went back into the house.

Dixon then put both dogs into their harnesses, clipped on their leashes, and took them on a walk through the neighborhood. Despite her tiny legs, Hip led the way. She sniffed here and then led them across the street to sniff there. She was definitely in charge.

After both dogs had fully done their business, Dixon brought them back to the house and let them settle in while he took further stock of his situation. He started by going through the house and closing all of the doors to rooms he didn't plan to enter. He thought this might make it easier to keep track of his things and keep the house clean. He peeked into the master bedroom door and could see that Janet had indeed left in a hurry. Clothes were in piles as if she had scooped some and left others as she raced out. He noticed a tiny set of stairs next to the bed. He assumed these were for Hip. "So you're sleeping with me?" he said to her. He took the stairs to the spare bedroom and then closed off the master bedroom. "I hope you guys will be comfortable in the guest room for the next few weeks," he said. Juno wagged. She had the affect of a dog that was going to be happy wherever a human was.

Dixon went back to the kitchen. He opened the dishwasher. He was going to put the dirty dishes from the sink into it. Instead, he stepped back and considered what he found. It looked as if every dish in the house, excepting those in the sink, was in the dishwasher already. The dishes were clean, but he now had another project in front of him. He needed to put all of the clean dishes away and he had no idea where anything went. He started opening cabinets and drawers, looking for the places for all of these dishes. He did his best to organize everything as he put things away. It occurred to him that he had just re-arranged all the dishes into some new system that made sense to him. The organizing scheme was his, not Janet’s. The glasses were now sorted by size and color, with one shelf specifically for logoed glassware. The glasses now reminded him of his spice-rack back in Atlanta.

After the dishes, he opened the refrigerator and stepped back once again to consider its contents. It was full of food. That wasn’t the issue. It was the age of the food that concerned him. He opened a drawer and found vegetables well into the decomposition process. He found old take-out food containers, expired milk, and condiment containers with expiration dates from the last decade. He pulled out a plastic produce bag from the very back of a shelf and found it filled with a green liquid. He held it at arm's length and showed it to the dogs. "Do either of you know what this was?" Juno wagged. "You don't know either? Nobody here knows." He dragged the trash can over in front of the refrigerator and threw everything away. "Sorry," he told the empty shelves, "but if it ain't good now, it's not going to be any better in three weeks." He wiped down the shelves of the empty refrigerator. When he had the interior gleaming, he closed the door and thought Janet would be so impressed when she came home. Then he had a different thought. Might she be offended that he cleaned out her refrigerator? Could she take it as a criticism that it was dirty and that this reflected somehow on the way she lived? Too late now.

Next he opened the microwave oven and took several large steps back. The inside looked as though food had exploded onto every surface, which was in fact exactly the case. Apparently, food was not covered for cooking in this microwave. Ever. The clean-freak inside him started to quiver slightly.

He picked up the phone and called Brooklyn. She answered right away.

"What's up? How's the dog sit going?" she asked cheerfully.

"Interesting, I guess I would say. I didn't really get a chance to talk to the homeowner at all before she left. I have a lot of questions about things," Dixon said with a concerned voice.

"What do you mean? Didn't she leave you instructions?" Brooklyn asked, now concerned.

"Well, um, not really. The file won't download for some reason. So I'm kind of winging it. The dogs are happy though," he said with a wink at the two dogs, who were still shadowing his every move. "The little one's growing on me fast. Her name's Hippo, but I'm calling her Hip."

There was a pause on the line.

"You shortened her name?" Brooklyn asked. "You. Mister Please Don't Call Me ‘Dix’, shortened her name?" Her tone was not quite mocking, but close.

"That's different," Dixon protested.

"How is it different?" she asked.

"She likes it. She wags when I call her that." He winked at the little dog, which gave him more sustained wiggles in his arms.

"Maybe you'd wag too if you had a tail." He could hear Brooklyn grinning through the phone. "Okay. What else you got?"

"I have a question actually," he said quietly.

"Shoot."

"So. . . it's about the microwave. It's super dirty. What’s the protocol with staying in someone else’s space? Is it ok if I clean it?" he asked haltingly.

"Are you going to use it?" Brooklyn replied without hesitation.

"Yes, I suspect I will," he answered.

"Well, then yes, you can clean it. You must clean it. It’s disgusting. You don't want to get sick do you?" she asked.

"No, of course not, but, I mean, when the homeowner comes home, how's she going to feel about that?"

"She's not making art Dixon. It's just a dirty microwave. Definitely clean it. Or don't, and eat take out for three weeks," Brooklyn told him.

"I know. It's just . . . if it were my house, I might be defensive if I came home and someone had cleaned up after me," he said.

"Yeah, but it wouldn't have been a mess to start with. You're a very clean person. You're not being critical Dix, you're just bringing the house up the cleanliness standards that you're used to. Maybe she'll thank you?" she offered.

"I don't know. I guess. It's just sort of weird living in someone else's space. It's not like I can clean it for while I'm here and then somehow put it back the way it was," said Dixon.

"You're a super human being Dix. You're watching her dogs. They will be alive and happy when she comes home. Now she's going to come back to a clean house too. That should be a good thing."

"I also dumped everything that was in her fridge. Things were liquifying in there. I think Obama was President when some of those things were purchased."

"Oh jeez, I loved it when Barry was President, but you can’t be keeping mementos of those better days in your produce drawer," Brooklyn said, covering her mouth. "I think I'm going to be sick."

"Well, the fridge looks brand new now," he said cheerfully.

"Listen, Dix. Relax and enjoy the time. You've got three weeks to settle in and figure this out. Just chill," Brooklyn said.

"Yes, of course, you're right. I'm going to chill and have a great time with these two great dogs." He scrunched his face at the dogs again.

"Great. Call me if you find anything from the Bush years. I'm a fan of turn-of-the-century snacks," she said with a laugh.

Dixon spent the next hour or so unpacking and setting up his computer. After he got himself settled, he took Juno for a long walk in the neighborhood. He found that she was eager to keep going at every turn. It was a hot afternoon, but they covered at least four miles and she seemed to be ready for more. "We'll run tomorrow," Dixon told her as they came back into the house. She laid down in her bed and panted.

Dixon noticed that there were shoes lying all around her bed, so he scooped them up and put them in the front closet. He didn’t stop to reflect upon why the shoes were there.

He had decided not to leave the dogs alone at all that first day, so he ordered food in and they never left his side. He carried Hip around the house everywhere he went. She was a timid thirteen-year-old who shook at times, but she quickly warmed up to Dixon. Juno was affable and friendly with the personality of a lab mix. She was not the brightest dog, but made up for it with her enthusiastic wagging. Juno had been rescued after living in a dump for over a year and Dixon liked the idea that she was now living a comfortable life with good food and loads of belly rubs.

The second morning he woke at six, because six pounds of dog was standing on his chest staring at him.

Hip did not bark. She just stood there, all four feet gathered in the middle of his chest, looking down at him with the patience of a small creature who had done this every morning of her life and had never once needed to escalate. Her wide ears listened for signs of life below her. Juno waited in the doorway, for some reason wagging at the wall.

First things first were the two morning walks.

Hip’s walk came first, and Hip led. She marched down the driveway with her tail up and took them two houses down and then across the street to a pocket park, a wedge of grass with a bench and a plastic slide faded by years in the sun. She sniffed the leg of the bench for a long time. She sniffed the trash cans. She squatted, delicately, and then she turned around and marched home, and the whole expedition took a total of nine minutes. She spent it entirely in command.

Then it was Juno’s turn. Juno had gone four miles the day before and come back looking like she had been cheated, so this time he took her five miles. They went out past the last cul-de-sac and onto a gravel utility road that ran along a power line easement, then a loop through a subdivision still being framed, plywood and Tyvek and nobody working on Sunday. Juno never slowed. She never pulled and she never lagged, she just walked at the same steady rate for as long as he was willing to keep walking. When they finally got home she dropped onto the kitchen tile and panted for a full hour with her eyes wide open, watching him, ready to leave again the moment he picked up the leash.

Next up he planned to go to the store. He started to leave the house but instead discovered that he did not have a key to lock and unlock the front door.

Janet had backed out of the garage and used the opener clipped to the visor in her car. She hadn’t handed him anything. No keys. No openers. He had spent a night and a morning in a house for which he had no keys.

He set about to see if he could find a spare key somewhere. The junk drawer took all of four seconds to identify. Every house has one. He had had one in Atlanta. This one had batteries loose in the bottom, a rubber band ball, takeout menus, eleven pens, and three unlabeled keys. He carried all three to the front door and tried them like a man cracking a safe. The second one turned.

He stood on the step with it in his hand. Problem solved.

He looked at his key ring. It had five keys on it and he could recite them: Atlanta storage locker, Portland storage locker, Camas mailbox, the rooftop cargo carrier and the bike rack. Storage and mail and hardware. None of his keys opened a home anymore. This one did. He worked it onto the ring with his thumbnail, and it sat there among the others looking exactly like them, and it was the only one on there with a date attached. In less than three weeks he would take it off again and leave it on the counter when he left.

With the house key in place on his key ring, he locked the door and off to the store he went.

The Safeway on Sunnyside Road had the coffee filters at the end of the baking aisle, next to the disposable pie tins, which was insane. It took him eleven minutes and two laps to establish this. Two days later he went to the Fred Meyer instead and this time he spent fifteen minutes finding his favorite protein bars.

The relearning of each space, every time, was tiring. He sat in the car for a second and noticed how this felt.

When he got home, he noticed something else. One of Janet’s shoes had been dragged out of the closet and was lying next to Juno’s bed.

On day four, he visited a pet supply store with the intention of buying one thing and did not come out for an entire hour.

He had stopped in there for some fun new dog treats for the pups. He came out with enough dog care supplies to open a new grooming salon. He now owned a slicker brush, an undercoat rake, a pair of blunt-nosed scissors, a bottle of oatmeal shampoo, a stack of microfiber towels, a collapsible silicone water bowl, a pair of leashes, a box of poop bags with a little holder that would clip them to a leash, and a nail grinder in a box he read four times in the aisle and put in the cart still with real misgivings. Also a small amber bottle of lavender massage oil formulated for dogs, which he found on an endcap and did not entirely believe in, and bought anyway.

The kid at the register scanned it all and looked at the pile and then at him.

"Did you just get a new dog?" he asked.

"I have two dogs," Dixon said. "Well, I have two dogs for another two and a half weeks anyway." He smiled without further elaboration.

The kid nodded slowly and kept scanning, and Dixon carried four bags out to a car that had been deliberately emptied of everything he did not need less than a week earlier.

When he arrived home, Juno wagged and wiggled and inspected the goods. Dixon gave each of the dogs a bone to chew on. A healthy sized one for Juno and a tiny one for Hip. They gladly took them and went off to their respective perches to chew on them. Dixon again noticed that one of Janet’s shoes was lying next to Juno’s bed.

The alarm situation happened on day six, and it happened because he came in through the wrong door.

He had been going in and out the front door, but on day six, for some reason, he decided to take Juno out the side door for a quick walk and when he came back inside he heard a tone he had not heard before, a slow electronic pulse from a panel by the coat closet. His heart started beating faster as he saw an alarm keypad with the letters MAX emblazoned on it was making the noise. There was a sticky note stuck to the panel with blue ballpoint print on it. It said: See house manual for alarm password. His heart stopped.

The house manual, of course, was a blank form in the dog sitting app. He did not have the password.

He decided to try to disarm it the old-fashion way. He knew that most people used common key combos for their passwords. First he tried 1234. The pulse continued. Then he tried the house number. The pulse got faster. He tried 4321. The pulse stopped and instead a horribly loud siren came on, filling the little rambler with a sound that made Hip scramble under the couch and Juno bark at the ceiling. A phone in the office began ringing about eight seconds later. This surprised Dixon for a number of reasons, the least of which at the moment was that Janet apparently had a landline telephone. He walked in the office and picked up the ringing phone.

"This is Max Alarm Monitoring, I have an alarm at the residence, can I get the password please?" said a woman with a strong southern accent in a very professional and menacing tone.

"Um . . . I don't have the password. I'm the house sitter," Dixon replied.

"Sir, I’m going to need the password on the account or I have to call the police," with more force this time.

"OK, yes, I understand that. The homeowner is in Asia for three weeks. I have her two dogs here. Look, the siren is really loud, could you turn that off while we figure this out?" he asked over the din of the alarm.

"Sir, without the password I have to dispatch," she answered undeterred.

Dixon imagined that this looked bad. He had no instructions, no password, nothing really to show that he was supposed to be there in the house. All he had was a black Lab mix leaning against his shin, looking up at him for help.

Just then, the front door opened. A woman in a bathrobe with long red curly hair came in without knocking, she walked over to the alarm, put her hand flat on the alarm panel like she was calming a horse, and said, "Oh, honey, no." She punched in a code and the siren stopped. She walked into the office where Dixon was standing with the phone and smiled at him.

"Juno," she said looking down at Juno. "Juno, sit."

Juno sat.

The woman took the phone out of Dixon's hand with the calm of a surgeon. "Hi, this is Lorna, I'm across the street at 4418. Janet's out of the country and this is her sitter and everything is fine here." Pause. “Yes, but I just entered the code to turn off the alarm, so we’re good then.” Pause. "Well, I've lived here nineteen years and I sit on the HOA board." Pause. “Do you want to get your supervisor on the phone for me honey, because the code has been entered and the alarm is already off. I know you people at Max Alarm hate a false dispatch.” Pause. "Thank you dear, have a nice day." She hung up the phone and took a sip of coffee from an orange mug in her hand that said ‘Death before decaf’ on the side.

She smiled at Dixon. Hip came out from under the couch one inch at a time.

"You're the sitter?" Lorna said.

"Yes. I’m Dixon."

"I’m Lorna." She looked at him over the mug. "Janet didn't give you the code?"

"She didn't give me a key either. I found one in her junk drawer next to a scratch off ticket from 2007," he said somewhat sadly.

Lorna laughed and said, “oh Janet. That girl is a hot mess. The garage keypad and alarm code are 8221 if you need them. That was Janet's mother's birthday. What else do you need to know?” she asked.

They talked for a while and agreed that Janet would probably not like that he cleaned up the house, but they both agreed, she needed it cleaned up.

"They're good dogs," Lorna said on her way out. "The little one's older than she looks."

She waved and disappeared back across the street. Dixon and the pups all felt relieved. They wagged and wiggled collectively, Dixon included.

Juno went down the hall into the spare bedroom and emerged with one of Dixon’s shoes in her mouth. She placed it next to her bed and climbed in to take a nap.

Janet's text arrived that afternoon.

Sorry my phone doesn't work here! I'm sure you're doing great. See you when I get home.

He read it four times. He read it looking for a sentence he had missed, an instruction, an alarm code, a vet's name, a request. There was nothing in it to answer. He typed all good here, dogs are happy and watched it sit there undelivered for the rest of the trip.

Then he put the phone face-down on the counter and looked at the two dogs, who were looking at him, and understood that he continued to be completely and solely responsible for two living things whose entire care instructions were a blank form and a sticky note about a manual that did not exist.

His first work call was Tuesday at ten. He was still on ‘Gardening Leave,’ basically waiting for his next project to start. He had a check-in with the other creative leaders on the team. This call was essentially the digital equivalent of a coffee-break. People swapped stories about horrible clients, design disasters and schedules that didn’t compute. The Chief Creative Officer, a man with a thick Australian accent took a few minutes to congratulate someone for something, which led to a round of chat messages and GIFs of celebration from the team.

A dozen squares of people were arranged in a grid on his screen. Dixon sat there on mute at a stranger's kitchen table with a stranger’s six-pound dog asleep in his lap. The background behind him was a green wall, with somebody else's calendar hanging on it, marking somebody else's dentist appointments and social engagements, plus a magnet shaped like the state of Oregon.

Somewhere near the end of the meeting, having not been addressed at all, the Senior VP of Creative, looking to contribute something helpful for the first time all week chimed in, "Dixon, where are you these days? That doesn't look like Atlanta."

"Um yeah, I haven’t been in Atlanta for a while now. I’m in the Portland area," Dixon said. "I'm dog-sitting for a few weeks."

There was a pause of particular length.

Then somebody laughed, a little too warmly, the way people laugh when they are trying to give something the benefit of the doubt out loud. Someone else said, "Nice, taking some time, that's great." There were no emojis of congratulations. Mr. SVP said, "good for you, man, pitching in for family is a good thing."

Dixon smiled at the camera and did not explain that the house was not his, that the dogs were not his, that he had found the key to the front door in a drawer full of dead pens. He put himself back on mute. Hip shifted in his lap and went back to sleep.

He started grooming the dogs because he had bought the equipment and it seemed rude not to.

Juno went first. She stood on a towel in the middle of the kitchen floor. Dixon worked the undercoat rake down her back and took off enough black fur to build a second, smaller Juno. Then the lavender oil, a few drops warmed between his palms, long slow strokes from her shoulders down her spine and out along her hips. She groaned. She actually groaned, out loud, and then went entirely boneless and slid sideways onto the tile and lay there with one back leg twitching. He did it for twenty minutes. When he stopped she lifted her head and looked at him with an expression of open betrayal until he started again.

Hip took longer, because Hip was a little less eager to be groomed.

Dixon started with a warm washcloth on the rust-colored stains under her eyes, holding her in the crook of his arm, going slowly enough that she could leave. She shook the whole first time. Not from fear exactly, since she stayed, and a dog that is afraid does not stay. She just shook, the way small old dogs shake, and let him do it. He cleaned her eyes and then her ears. He brushed the thin coat over her ribs with the softest brush, and he sat on the floor and clipped the nails of the little thirteen-year-old dog one at a time, talking the entire while about nothing, about the weather, about a man named Earl in a parking lot in Amarillo. Somewhere between the third paw and the fourth she fell asleep in the crook of his arm, and he sat on the laundry room floor for another ten minutes with the clippers in his free hand, because moving would have woken her, and there was nowhere he had to be. That was the thing. There was nowhere he had to be, and for once it did not feel like a hole.

Playing in this sceneIn My HandsThe Sit Boy Soundtrack Collection

►0:00 / 0:00

[verse]
They don't ask you where you're from,
They don't care what you've done,
They just look you in the eye
And read you, one by one.
You can't talk your way in,
There's no story they can't see through...
They just know what your hands are for
The minute they meet you.

[verse]
She was shaking when I held her,
But she stayed right where she was.
And a scared thing doesn't stay
Unless it knows it's loved.
So I held still as Sunday,
Let her settle in my palm...
Funny how a thing that small
Can make a whole house calm.

[chorus]
Now she's sleeping in my hands,
And my hands won't move at all.
She can't be fooled, she can't be bought,
She just knows... that's all.
You wanna know what love feels like?
It ain't hard to understand:
It's something scared that shuts its eyes,
Safe inside your hands.

[verse]
I've been telling everybody I'm fine,
And most of them believe.
But you can't tell her stories,
She reads hearts, not sleeves.
She knew mine in a minute,
Every crack and every scar...
And she climbed up anyway.
That's what hands are for.

[chorus]
Now she's sleeping in my hands,
And my hands won't move at all.
She can't be fooled, she can't be bought,
She just knows... that's all.
You wanna know what love feels like?
It ain't hard to understand:
It's something scared that shuts its eyes,
Safe inside your hands.

[bridge]
I thought love was something earned,
Proved out over years.
Turns out it's something given...
It just shows up, and it's here.
Four small feet at sunrise,
Standing on my chest,
Sayin' you're the one I trust now.
You know what to do next.

[chorus]
Now she's sleeping in my hands,
And my hands won't move at all.
She can't be fooled, she can't be bought,
She just knows... that's all.
You wanna know what love feels like?
It ain't hard to understand:
It's something scared that shuts its eyes,
Safe inside your hands.

[outro]
Nowhere I have to be...
Nothing that can't wait.
Just a heartbeat in my hands,
And for once... that feels great.

By the second week she stopped shaking when he picked up the washcloth. By the third she came and stood in front of the cabinet where he kept it.

He taped the paper calendar to the front of Janet's refrigerator, which was now the cleanest surface in the house.

Then he penciled some things in. The current three weeks got a line straight across them, and under the line he wrote HAPPY VALLEY, J + H. Next to this he wrote “$0” for the cost of the housing. Then he went into his messages and started adding a few new sits to the calendar. Nothing was really confirmed yet, so he wrote everything in pencil.

Next up he had a sit in Seattle with two large dogs and an Axolotl named S’more. Then he had a sit in Phoenix for a few weeks in the fall. He was holding Denver in January, but he hadn’t committed yet, so he wrote ‘DENVER?’ across January and let the question mark do the work.

He then worked backwards from his notes adding all of the places he’d been over the past few months, jotting the costs of every place he stayed in the notes boxes. He totalled up the cost of the housing for each month and it confirmed his suspicion. During his travels he had been spending about as much on short-term rentals and hotels as he would have spent on his mortgage. But now the Happy Valley three weeks confirmed something else. Three weeks with no housing costs. This month was going to be much better. He was on to something here.

He stepped back with his coffee. The white space was still winning on the calendar. But now he felt like he had a path to a cheaper way to live.

On the second Saturday, with the house very quiet, Juno napping after a long run, Dixon set his phone on a stack of books on the kitchen counter and made an attempt to play "Gone by Morning" into it. The guitar was still tripping him up. It was hard for him to play and remember the words at the same time.

He pulled out his computer and spent an hour downloading music creation apps. He nearly replicated the looping guitar and beat that Rusty had used in Reno. He turned on the loop and then clicked the button to start the recorder. The beat and guitar were already going, so he started talking over it in a conversational voice:

“OK, Sloane, this one is going to be for you. This is sort of what the beat sounded like.” He let the music play for a few bars. “And then I just kind of started doing this, thing, like. . .” He paused as the beat continued. Then he started in to the lyrics which began like they had in Reno:

“Drove out of Atlanta on the first day of July

Air so thick I couldn’t tell the asphalt from the sky. . .”

Juno howled in the background, but he kept going.

He went through most of what he had recited in Reno, but then added a new verse that came to him in the midst of the recording session:

“Every town’s a first date

And every sunset’s something new

I’m collecting who I am one highway at a time.”

He liked the imagery of that. Every sunset representing a new place. Every highway being a memory.

He played back the recording a few times.

Then he sent the recording to Sloane with no message attached, and put the phone down, and did the dishes with his back to it.

She did not reply that day. She did not reply the next day either.

The food carts were a fifteen-minute drive, a gravel lot off a very busy street with eight or nine carts around the edges and a covered seating area in the middle strung with cafe lights that were not on yet, because it was a quarter to five and still bright outside. The cart pod was filled with Portland folks, tattooed and pierced, many in flannels, some smoking weed. He brought both dogs. Hip was cradled in his arms as usual and Juno walked along in her harness, smelling of the lavender massage oil. Dixon noted that the Thai cart in the pod had four hundred and six reviews and the burger cart had eleven.

He took a photo of the Thai cart and uploaded it to Google Maps. He took another of the lot with the cart flags going in the wind and uploaded that one too. Then he ordered from the burger cart on principle, because eleven reviews was a crime, and sat down at the end of a picnic table with Juno under it and Hip in his lap.

The woman came out of the side door of the burger cart with a paper plate of food and sat down on an overturned milk crate ten feet away from Dixon.

She was maybe thirty-five, wearing chef whites, her sleeves pushed up over a full left arm of tattoos, dark green ink going up under the cuff. The tattoos included a skull, some chains and imagery that Dixon thought reminded him of something from Dungeons and Dragons that he’d seen in Cash’s room once. Her curly hair was piled up and clipped with what looked like an actual binder clip, half of it copper and half of it silver. She had the look of someone four hours into a long shift. She ate fast and without ceremony. She did not look at Dixon at all.

Hip got down off Dixon’s lap.

Hip, who shook when a washcloth came near her, who had spent six days under the couch every time the ice maker dropped, walked across ten feet of gravel on her tiny legs and stood in front of the milk crate and looked up.

The woman put down her plate.

"Well, hello," she said. She held out one knuckle and Hip pushed her whole face into it. "Hi. Hi. Oh, you're an old lady, aren't you?"

"Aww, that’s cute. She’s been pretty shy mostly. I wouldn’t think she would do that with a stranger," Dixon said.

"She just did it," the woman said plainly back.

"I've had her nineteen whole days and I have not seen her do anything like that before," Dixon said smiling.

The woman looked up at him then, and it was a long, flat, unembarrassed look, the kind that takes inventory. "Had her?"

"I'm dog sitting for her. Her and this sweet girl under the table, who lived for a year in a garbage dump and now loves massages and belly rubs. Their owner's overseas."

"Huh,” she said. Then she added: “So you live in other people's houses?"

"Well, I've done it once. I mean, this is my first time." Dixon said smiling. "I guess you could say I’m a virgin."

Her face relaxed. She didn’t laugh exactly. She made more of an exhale through her nose. She looked back down at the little dog leaning into her hand.

"What's her name?" she asked kindly.

"Hip. Short for Hippo," he said with a grin.

She considered the tiny dog in front of her. "Obviously," she said, and scratched Hip's chest with two fingers and let the silence sit while she decided about him.

"Winter," she said, pointing to herself.

"Dixon," he answered, smiling again.

"Dixon." She said it like she was checking it for weight. "You cook, Dixon?"

"I do."

"Mm." She fed Hip a piece of something off her plate without asking permission, which under any other circumstance he would have had something to say about. "When do you leave town?"

"Friday morning."

"Well then you'd better make me dinner tomorrow night. It's the only night this week I'm not tied up." She stood, brushed off her whites, and picked up her plate. "My place. My knives."

"Tomorrow," Dixon said. "Dinner. I'll cook."

"Good." She smiled for the first time, and it was not a nice smile exactly, it was a smile with a plan behind it. "I like a man who takes control. Especially in the kitchen."

Dixon laughed. It came out about a half-second late and slightly higher than his normal voice, and both of them heard it.

Winter took his hand, turned it over, and wrote a phone number across the back of it in black Sharpie in the enormous blocky numerals of a person used to labeling containers. Then she went back through the side door of the cart, and the fryer noise swallowed the sound of it closing.

Dixon sat there with his hand open on the picnic table.

He looked at the writing on his hand. “OK pups, let’s get home. You need dinner and I need to figure out what I just got myself into.” Juno and Hip both wagged appreciatively.

Published August 1st, 2026 from Bigfork, Montana via Starlink