Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

next bench both peered at the picture and shook their heads. They went back to their conversation while I was still there, the picture of Herbie extended toward them.
    The Asian guy took his Shiba and left before I got to him. The black guy was hooking up his dog when I showed him the photo. He shrugged, then opened the gate to go, couldn’t care less who the dude in the picture was or why I was so anxious to find him.
    A boy of about ten, without a dog, came in as the black guy went out. One of the women got up and asked him what he wanted. For safety’s sake, kids weren’t supposed to be in the run without their parents. I saw her hand land on his shoulder as she steered him back toward the double gates.
    “That’s good,” she said when he hung over the fence to watch from the outside. “Much safer there.”
    I walked over to the well-groomed man, looking down to see all the dust that now covered his polished shoes.
    “I’m trying to find this guy,” I said, showing him the picture, “and I was told he comes here with his dog.”
    He took the picture and studied it, even pulled a pair of reading glasses out of his inside jacket pocket so that he could get a better look. Then he smiled, shook his head, and handed back the photo.
    At the next bench, I was forced to interrupt a young, pretty blond whose head was tilted back so that she could get some sun. New Yorkers, always trying to do at least two things at a time. I held the picture out, but her cell phone rang. She took the picture from me and slipped the phone out of her pocket.
    “Do you know this man, by any chance?” I asked.
    She answered the phone and almost immediately started laughing. “No, no, I’m not doing anything,” she said. “Saturday? Sure. That sounds great. Me, too.”
    Then she covered the mouthpiece with the hand holding Herbie’s picture. “ Excuse me. This is important.”
    She turned her back to me and continued her conversation. I had to walk around her to get the photo back. She’d never looked at it, and I had no reason to think she ever would.
    That was as close as I got. I went back to sit with Blanche, making sure that Dashiell and Bianca weren’t getting into any trouble. Blanche was whining in her sleep and I picked up my jacket and bent to whisper in her ear. When I looked back up, the blond was gone. So was the saluki that had been playing near the water bowl.
    But something was off. No one else had left. Four new people had come in. One more was coming in the gate while I was looking around. I counted the people again. Then I counted the dogs. That was odd. Not counting myself and the three dogs I’d brought with me, there were fourteen people in the run. And only thirteen dogs.
    On the weekend, couples sometimes came together with their dog. They’d sit together on a bench and watch their offspring socialize. But during the week, that almost never happens. It’s more common to have more dogs than owners. There was always someone here, like myself, who had come with more than one dog. In the afternoon, it was even more out of balance. Then the walkers would come, each with four, five, or even six dogs in tow.
    I tried to figure out which dog was with which human, but it wasn’t possible. The dogs were doing what they came here for, running, digging, and wrestling, not going back to check in with their owners.
    On the way to the drugstore, I remembered two other times the number of people and the number of dogs hadn’t added up properly. In the first instance, like today, there seemed to be an extra person. Not that that’s against the law or anything. There was this weird guy who came every day for a week or two and sat watching the dogs. Sometimes he’d ask about one or the other, saying he wanted to get a dog and was coming to the run to help figure out which kind would be right for him. Once he brought biscuits and none of us would let him feed our dogs. We thought he was a creep and didn’t know what he was really up to. In some places, love is in the air. In New York, it’s paranoia.
    The second time the count was off was one of those cold days where there were so few people brave enough to go to the run that you could count the shivering souls in a glance. There were six of us there, wrapped up so that we were barely recognizable. And there were eight dogs. This didn’t have to mean trouble. Lots and lots of New Yorkers have more than one dog. But after I was there for a while, Dashiell