I didn’t know it was him padding up the mutual driveway yesterday. I was sitting outside here on my porch behind the honeysuckle I had coaxed up the side of the house and hung with pink lights and beads I got from New Orleans. I could see neat black trousers and the bottom of a white shirt, but there was no reason to move from my chair. We get flyers, sometimes two or three times a day: first my neighbour’s mailbox swooshes and then there’s a rattle at mine. For a while, there weren’t so many of them, just the local so-called community newspaper, the boy scout drive, that kind of junk, but then the phone company caved after so many of us got mad about getting those phone calls at supper telling us we had won a Caribbean cruise. That damn hahnking of the boat horn. After you could choose to block those calls, the flyers and those who delivered them returned.

The ones who are better spoken probably sit in phone banks, going phone number to phone number instead of door to door— like beggars back in Victorian times thrown out of work by machines. They all went door to door, trying to sell junk. The ones who go door to door now don’t try to sell anything. They carry those heavy canvas bags and crash through the bushes, wild-eyed and filthy dirty. That presumption of intimacy they have, looking directly at you, into your eyes, while they ask questions that are none of their business. There are some who aren’t like that. They are silent, like they have a need for simple movement and order, like they are saying a rosary by means of strong calves, sturdy boots, and notices for real estate agents. Their quiet lets me feel more sympathetic towards them. I’m not afraid of them. Those damn flyers, however, every single one of them go from in my mailbox, to in the recycle bin, directly, like that. I don’t look at them.

Yesterday, when I heard the door to the basement apartment being rattled, or at least the handle of the door being rattled, twice, I thought, Who does that? If it’s locked, it’s locked. So I pushed the vines away like you would a cotton curtain and there was no one there. No one had come back down the driveway, either. I knew that. I knew I hadn’t missed hearing anyone come back. I have ears like a fox. The basement apartment was rented to the plumber and I had heard that click and tug on the door this morning, so I knew that door was locked. Then I heard someone talking to the dog, and I knew who it was. I had bought the dog because his old one had died, and because I thought if he had a dog, he would have to take it for a walk and wouldn’t just sit here on this porch calling out to passersby. I had to tell him he couldn’t call out to the little school children on their way to the school two doors down. He could get arrested and it wouldn’t be the first time.

I don’t know when his first time was, but shortly after I started sleeping with him there was a knock at the outside door, and he returned with two policeman standing in the bedroom doorway, with flashlights held the way they do, so if they have to hit you they don’t have to turn the handle around, they can just hit you. It was three in the morning. He was arrested for stalking his ex-wife. He had been funny-mean about it. She’d take off in her car, and he would follow her to the restaurant where she met his best friend. If he was his best friend—that detail may have been temporarily added for the garnering-sympathy effect. Then he’d move her car from where she parked it and leave it way at the back of the parking lot. That kind of thing. I made sure I was the only one with keys to my car before he left.

I don’t know what else he did, but he scared his ex enough—her skinny model friends said he waited in his car for her outside her work—who knows if that’s true, that whole bunch are all liars— he scared her enough she called the cops and laid a charge and since they had lived in the same neighborhood as Paul Bernardo and his poor rubber-boot wearing mother, and someone else had been killed by a stalker, the prosecutor really wanted his middle-class arse in jail, as an example to other middle-class arses, and as a way to make sure she was in the paper: to look like she was relentless, but high-minded. She was ambitious, but she might have been genuine. You can be bad and good at the same time. When I asked him to leave, he refused to take the dog. He said she was too much work, to get dressed in the early morning winter dark to take her outside for a pee, instead of just opening the back door for her like he did here.

So I still had the dog, or most of her. I share her with my next-door neighbour who had her heart broken. A breeder had let her put a down payment on a Portuguese Water dog, and then told her she wasn’t suited to being a dog owner. Probably someone offered a bribe. Everyone wants a dog that doesn’t shed. They are all over the neighbourhood, amiably walking alongside a human carrying those little plastic bags of dog shit. Now, whenever I go south in the winter, the dog lives with my neighbour. We both get the easy fitness benefits from walking Bejos. That’s what she gives, sweet kisses. What a good dog. His kisses had become fewer and fewer until he stopped kissing. Then no hugs. Then no sex, and then, worst of all, he stopped saying my name. I could go a month without hearing my name said in my own house. When I discovered he’d been siphoning money into his backdebt credit cards, I asked him to leave. Plus I had just re-kindled a romance with a plumber, who read books like The Flood Next Time.

So yesterday, when I heard the dog bark and then his gravelly voice, I looked to see if what I had on could handle the gaze of someone I used to love. I didn’t love or hate him now, I just couldn’t be bothered. On the other hand, I didn’t want to give him anything to gossip about. Nothing to report.

—No one home, he said to Bejos as he came back down the driveway with the dog on her leash.

—I’m home.

—Oh, there you are.

Man, he is smooth. It’s pretty hard to rattle him.

—Bejos was telling me you were here, Marguerite, but I didn’t see you. I just thought I would take her for a walk around the block. If that’s alright. I have twenty minutes to kill before I see the dentist.

The dentist was at the top of the street, and the block was a little triangle, not a square, so that all sounded reasonable. And Bejos was already tugging at her leash.

—Okay.

He was back in ten minutes and brought Kisses up on the porch. I sometimes call her by her English name.

—Thanks for letting me take her for a walk.

—Don’t do it again. Stay away from here. You’re still on probation from stalking your ex. You don’t need me calling the cops.

I watched him leave, walk up the street, that good posture, even with all his medical problems, the clean white shirt, the pressed black trousers, the neat shoulder satchel. Get away from me, I thought, like he was fine-legged house insect, a little repulsive, but harmless. Not someone you want in your house.

The last time I told him to stay away from the house, he had come to ask for money. I said no. “I’m really screwed,” he said. I still said no, and told him to never ask me for another penny. The next morning, I had a flat in my rear passenger side tire. The service showed me the screw that had been pushed into a groove. He had tried to come around at Christmas, to ask about my children. I said everyone was fine and I had repaired the tire with the screw in it. He jerked back and his eyebrows went up but he didn’t say a thing. Only rattled him a little. I half-admire how he can stay calm. If I believed it was right to call the cops on people, I would, but I don’t. Just change the locks, and keep locking the car in the garage. Maybe I’ll ask the plumber for some old work boots to put by the back door. I just got back from taking Kisses for a walk. I slipped off the leash and hung it on the hook by my chair. That good little dog hopped up onto the other porch chair and went to sleep without any a care. Her head thrown back, like that. Without any care at all.

Originally published in White Wall Review 41 (2017)