Biscuit looked at him with the patient expression of a creature who understood perfectly well what was being asked and had elected not to do it.
“She respects authority,” I said.
Hartley stared at his sister's dog for a moment with an expression that suggested this was a personal affront. “That's genuinely offensive.”
“Take it up with the dog.”
“I'm taking it up with you. What are you doing here?”
“I run every morning. This is me trying a new route.” I nodded at the street behind him. “What are you doing on it?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. “Leah lives on Palmerston. I'm staying at her place while she's at work because Biscuit apparently can't be left alone for more than four hours without staging a protest that involves the couch cushions.”
I looked at the dog. The dog wagged.
“How's the couch?” I asked.
“One cushion down. Leah's going to kill me.”
The thing about being outside the rink was that it was harder to maintain the appropriate distance. At the rink I had the whistle. I had the practice plan. I had a hundred small mechanisms for keeping the necessary space in place.
But with Hartley in soft sweatpants holding a golden retriever's leash, I apparently had considerably fewer mechanisms.
I looked at the space slightly to the left of his shoulder, which was a location that didn't have sweatpants in it, and said, “You take her out yet this morning?”
Hartley blinked. “What?”
“The dog. Did you take her for a proper run?”
“Oh.” He looked down at Biscuit. “We went around the block twice but she kept stopping to smell everything. It took forty minutes.”
“Dogs need distance, not just time.” I glanced at Biscuit, who was now sitting on both my feet. “She's got energy she hasn't burned. That's why she's climbing strangers.”
“She climbs everyone. That's just her personality.”
“She sat for a stranger on command. That's training. She just needs the run to match it.” I looked back at him, which was a mistake I immediately recognized and continued to make anyway because apparently my self-preservation instincts hadalso taken the morning off. He had a smear of what looked like peanut butter on his left sleeve and I had no idea what to do with that information. “Where are you headed?”
“Back to Leah's eventually. I was going to cut through the park.”
“The park's a good loop.” I said this and then stood there while my brain caught up to the implication of what I'd just said, which was that I knew the park loop, which was only useful information if I was about to suggest running it, which was?—
“You want to come?” Hartley said, with the carefully neutral tone of someone who was also doing the math on this in real time. “I mean. If you're already running. Biscuit would probably behave better if she had someone to—” He stopped. Started again. “It doesn't have to be?—”
“Sure,” I said, because apparently that was what my mouth had decided.
We both looked at Biscuit. Biscuit wagged.
“Great,” Hartley said, in the voice of a man who wasn't sure if this was great or not.
“Great,” I agreed, from the same place.
We started walking.
Not running, as it turned out, because Biscuit had opinions about pace that superseded both of ours, stopping every fifteen feet to investigate a leaf or a crack in the pavement or nothing visible to human eyes, and Hartley kept apologizing for this and I kept saying it was fine, and by the third time we'd both fallen into the rhythm of stopping when Biscuit stopped and moving when she moved, which was either companionable or ridiculous and was probably both.
“She's been doing this all morning,” Hartley said, watching Biscuit examine a section of fence with the intensity of a forensic investigator. “I've had her for three hours and I've aged four years.”
“How long does your sister usually leave her?”
