She hugged me before I could establish a defensive perimeter. I stood rigid for approximately one point five seconds, then patted her on the back twice, because I understood that hugs required reciprocationand I was willing to make the effort even if the execution was, by any objective measure, mechanical.
“The pizzas smellincredible,” she said. “Did Benji make all of these?”
“Apparently.”
“He learned the dough from Rod. Did he tell you? Rod’s been teaching him.”
I looked at Benji.
He was back at the stove, managing the popcorn with the focused intensity of a man trying to appear casual about the fact that he’d spent an entire day preparing food for an event in my apartment that I hadn’t known about, using techniques he’d learned from someone he worked with because he’d wanted it to be good.
Not adequate.
Not functional.
Good.
The kind of good that required rising dough and fig-and-prosciutto combinations and experimental peach situations.
I filed this away.
I filed most things about Benji away these days.
His drawer was getting very full.
Finn and Chase arrived next because Finn was constitutionally incapable of being late to anything and Chase was constitutionally incapable of lettingFinn go anywhere without him. Chase was carrying two bottles of wine and wearing the easy, unhurried smile of a man whose primary function in his relationship was to offset Finn’s particular brand of responsible anxiety, a role he performed so naturally that it was easy to miss how deliberate it was. He shook my hand, said, “Great apartment,” and settled onto the couch beside Potato.
Potato shifted two inches to accommodate Chase and resumed his standard operating posture.
“He’s magnificent,” Chase said, resting a hand on Potato’s back.
“So I’m told,” I said.
Then Rod arrived with Ruthie and a container of something he described as “a topping for the peach pizza that Benji is going to ruin if he doesn’t let me handle the honey.” Within thirty seconds, he had displaced Benji from the stove and taken command of the kitchen.
He also moved my cutting board to the wrong side of the sink.
I noticed.
I chose not to say anything, because Rod was finishing Benji’s pizzas with a quiet expertise that turned an ambitious experiment into something that actually worked. The wrongness of the cutting board was a small price.
Ruthie padded into the apartment with the dignity of a senior dog who had learned that new rooms eventually yielded comfortable surfaces. She sniffed Hiro. Hiro sniffed her. They reached a mutual agreement to coexist without further interaction, which in dog language constituted a successful evening.
General Tso, from the refrigerator, tracked Ruthie’s arrival but remained atop his throne.
Then Dante arrived with Dostoyevsky, and the apartment’s fragile equilibrium underwent its final recalibration.
Dostoyevsky was a retired racing greyhound, the color of ash. He was built like a comma with legs that seemed to belong to a considerably larger animal, and a face that conveyed the permanent low-grade melancholy of the Russian novelist he was named for. He entered the apartment in the strange, gliding way that greyhounds moved, as if his legs were theoretical rather than structural. He surveyed the room with enormous dark eyes that absorbed every detail and found it all mildly insufficient.
Hiro froze against my leg.
He’d met many dogs through the foster rotation, but he had not encountered a dog who was taller than the coffee table and moved like a specter with a metabolism.
I put my hand on Hiro’s back, ready to move him to the bedroom if his anxiety escalated.
Dostoyevsky, with a social intelligence that distinguished greyhounds from most other breeds, looked at Hiro, assessed the situation, and folded his impossible legs beneath him to lie down on the floor, making himself as small as his frame allowed. His message, in dog body language, was unmistakable: “I am not a threat. I am furniture. You may proceed.”
Hiro approached.
