A Dog for Lorraine

It’s going to be her birthday, we’re out on the deck chairs, the “chaise longues,” as Lorraine calls them, on the balcony overlooking the parkway, she has just told me what she wants, a little dog, not a big dog that slobbers all over you, takes up too much space in a city apartment, frightens old ladies, but small, really tiny, something that will fit in her purse “in case something happens,” her precise words, spoken loudly, distinctly so that I’ll hear over the Sunday afternoon traffic that is starting—stopping—starting at the intersection seventeen floors below.

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