One morning, an elderly woman named Mrs. Gable, who had ridden the route for a decade, stayed on for an extra stop just to talk to him. “I’ve lived on 5th for forty years,” she told him, her voice trembling slightly. “That dog… he wasn’t always alone. I used to see him walking the neighborhood months ago with a young man. A tall boy, always carrying a large black case on his back. They were quite the pair.”
This scrap of information acted like a spark. José found himself thinking about the “boy with the case” during his lunch breaks. He began to imagine their lives—perhaps they were students, or perhaps they had just moved to the city. The leather collar on the dog suggested a home, yet the dog’s ribcage was beginning to show, and his coat was losing its luster. He was a creature suspended in time, waiting for a life that had clearly stalled.