Fall Guy

today. I saved him some of my lunch.“ Edna reached into her pocket and took out a stalk of broccoli. That's when I noticed the grease stain on her pocket, like the one I'd made on the envelope of Maggie O'Fallon's letter, wondering if Edna had made grease stains on things when she was younger, too, the way I did. Did I like hanging out with animals because it didn't matter to them—neat or careless, fat or thin, rich or poor, it was all the same? Then I wondered if I'd end up alone, like Edna, someone visiting me on Tuesdays with a friendly dog, making ten minutes in my endless week bearable.
    I opened my bag and pulled out Dashiell's boar-bristle brush. A short-coated dog, he didn't tangle if he wasn't brushed. And there was no difference in his appearance before and after. But he loved the feel of the brush scratching along his back, and the brushing was part of the ritual with Edna, who'd had a stroke. She'd fished for the broccoli with her right hand. My job was to make sure she did the brushing with her left. Of course Dashiell wasn't her only therapy, but he was her favorite one. It's always easier to inspire someone to pet or brush a dog than to do boring, repetitious exercises while someone counted.
    Marlene could still draw, and for her I'd brought a pad and colored pencils. Her favorite ritual was touching Dashiell as she drew him, feeling the lines of his muscular body and the way they related to each other and then translating them to paper. I felt the touching helped her as much as her pride in the finished drawings, which we'd always tack up on the bulletin board in the dayroom.
    Roger wanted a walk. As usual. I checked with the nurse and was told it was okay. He held Dash's lead and we walked over to Fourteenth Street, where he stopped to say hello to the people eating at a coffee shop with outdoor seating: two men holding hands across the table, a tiny Yorkie on the blond one's lap; a couple talking German who were nonplussed by Roger's greeting; a man with copious tattoos reading the paper, his eggs sitting untouched on the plate before him, one small semicircle missing from a triangle of his buttered toast. On the steps of St. Bernard's Church there was a homeless man talking on a cell phone. He and Roger greeted each other and I thought how odd that was, that someone talking on a cell phone would interrupt his conversation to say hello to a stranger. But when I looked back at him, once again absorbed in his phone call, I noticed that it wasn't a cell phone at all that he was holding to his ear. It was an empty plastic bottle.
    Going up the block holding Dashiell's leash, Roger smiled at everyone. Some people got sweeter when they got old, some angry at the dirty trick life played on us, that we start life in diapers, unable to care for ourselves, and sometimes end up the same way. What kind of a reward was this, I wondered, for a life well-lived, for hard work, devotion to family, a contribution to society? But for all I knew, half the people I visited at the home hadn't lived their lives that way. Half of them may have been self-centered sons of bitches from day one and stayed that way from one set of diapers to the other. Meeting them the way I did, I'd never know. Nor did it matter. Doing pet therapy, what you saw was what you dealt with. Even when snippets of the past were revealed and acknowledged, Dashiell and I worked in the moment, doing whatever was needed at the time we were there.
    I wanted more than that when it came to O'-Fallon. I wanted to know him. There would be no future, but I wanted to understand the past, wishing he had spoken up just once—would it have killed him?—in the group where I met him. I wished I had something more to go on other than rumor, gossip, slanted opinions and the detritus of his life; what, and whom, he'd left behind.
    But how much could I get to know, coming in as I had not late in the game but after it was over—the people all gone, the lights out and the stadium deserted? Without the presence of the living, breathing man, how did I now expect to get to know Timothy O'Fallon, to understand why he did what he did and what may have been going through his mind in the hours before his death? Had it been just grief, or was there more to it?
    As I left the Westside Nursing Home, feeling, as I always did, that I'd gotten far more than I'd given, I wondered if Brody had planned on telling me anything else. He seemed to parcel out the information only when