Gaits of Heaven

cast that covered most of his right foot and extended up his calf. A pair of crutches lay on the floor beside the couch.
    “Hey, thanks for coming,” he said in the weak, groggy voice I’d heard on the phone. His eyes looked heavy and unfocused. “Wyeth would’ve helped me, but he’s at his mother’s.”
    Caprice and I exchanged a glance. In spite of her cynical and suspicious attitude toward Ted, she had the frightened, bewildered expression of a child forced to confront parental weakness.
    “Ted, you can’t be here by yourself,” I said.
    “It’s the pills,” he said. “You ever broken a bone? It hurts like hell, and this, uh, thing, the cast... I can’t get ice on my ankle, and it hurts like shit. Can you help me get up? I need to go to the bathroom.”
    For building strength, big dogs have it all over health clubs. Ted outweighed my malamutes, but I didn’t have to take his full weight, and I easily helped him off the couch and onto his crutches. At my direction, Caprice leashed Dolfo to prevent him from barging into Ted. Through the big glass doors of the family room, I caught sight of Barbara, who was in her backyard with Portia.
    “Ted, Barbara’s home. She’s in the yard. I’m going to ask her to take Dolfo,” I said. “Don’t argue about it.”
    Ted began to work his way toward the kitchen and presumably toward the powder room where we’d once discovered Dolfo. He managed the crutches surprisingly well. I opened a door to the deck and called out to Barbara, who readily agreed to take Dolfo. “Just bring him over,” she called.
    “Let’s just get Dolfo to Barbara before Ted comes back,” I said to Caprice. “Could you walk Dolfo over there right now? I’ll put the milk and stuff in the refrigerator, and then I’ll be right over. I want to talk to Barbara about Ted. At a minimum, someone should keep checking on him.”
    “He’s stoned,” Caprice said.
    “His judgment is clouded.”
    “Permanently.”
    “Take Dolfo out the front door before Ted has a chance to see him leaving. I don’t want him looking out and seeing you in the yard, or he’ll give us a hard time.”
    “Dolfo, let’s go! Go visit Barbara and Portia? Good boy!” She patted her thigh and led Dolfo toward the front hall with the self-confidence of a dog person. You know those total immersion programs for people who want to learn foreign languages? The ones where you live with a family and have to communicate exclusively in their language? It occurred to me that Steve and I could take in people who needed to become fluent in dog. Converse with native speakers! No boring grammar drills! Rapid mastery guaranteed!
    When I’d finished putting the milk, eggs, and cheddar in the refrigerator, I glanced down the corridor toward the powder room and saw that the door was still closed. Although I felt a duty to see to it that Ted was safe, I had no desire to spend yet more time with him. Consequently, I grabbed the dog food and the Kong toys I’d brought with me and hurried to the front door and out to the porch. Caprice, who was wearing running shoes, must have stopped to tie them. As I was slipping on my own shoes, she and Dolfo were beginning to walk along the sidewalk in front of Ted’s wide driveway, which lay between Ted’s house and Barbara and George’s. This off-street parking area was beautifully paved in cobblestone to create what looked like a patio. The space nearest Ted’s house was occupied by the silver Lexus SUV that Ted and Eumie had driven on the night I’d first met them. Parked next to it was a silver BMW sedan. The third space, the one closest to Barbara and George’s property, was empty, as it had been when we’d arrived. As usual, the neighborhood looked more suburban than urban, and at the moment, it was exceptionally quiet: no lawn mowers, no leaf blowers, not even a passing car.
    As I was starting down the front steps, Dolfo stopped to sniff one of the tires of the BMW. Sounding eerily like Leah, Caprice said, “Not there! No man-made objects! Fire hydrants excepted. And that’s not a fire hydrant. Good boy, Dolfo. This way!”
    As I descended the steps, I looked down to avoid losing my footing. At the precise moment I reached the bottom, when Caprice and Dolfo were on the sidewalk in front of the empty space next to the BMW, a big, shiny black SUV came tearing down the street, slowed abruptly, turned, and headed directly for that same parking space, which is to say, directly at