1 The Green Ball
The first time I saw Dario, he was kneeling in the grass with his hand inside my dog’s mouth.
I’d been in Florence for nine days. Until then, my longest conversation with a man had been with the neighbor down the hall, who spent twenty minutes explaining how to take out the trash. We’d needed a translation app, two different-colored plastic bags, and his wife, who eventually gave up on us both, took the bags from my hands, and walked me down three flights of stone stairs to the courtyard bins herself.
Dario and I got started when he heard me yell across the enclosed off-leash area for Walter to drop the fucking thing.
“It’s a ball,” he said, looking up from where he’d managed to pin Walter between his knees. His English was fluent, marked only by the warm, clipped cadence of the local accent.
“It used to be a ball,” I said, rushing over and stopping a foot short of them. “Now it’s a jagged piece of hard rubber, and it’s exactly the right size for him to swallow and turn into a four-thousand-euro veterinary bill.”
Dario didn’t flinch at my tone. With practiced ease, he pried Walter’s jaws apart, hooked two fingers inside, and pulled the object free. He held it up for my inspection once he stood. It had split cleanly down the seam, white foam interior exposed like an open tooth.
The other dog—a sleek, short-haired black creature with enormous bat-like ears—sat at his knee, tail thumping against the dry dirt in the desperate hope that the inspection would end in a throw. Walter, a fifteen-pound terrier mutt who went through life convinced he could take down a wild boar, shook himself, trotted off with supreme unconcern, and began lapping water from a muddy puddle near the bench.
“Nina brought a spare,” the man said. He wiped his slime-covered hand on the thigh of his faded jeans and reached deep into his jacket pocket, pulling out a bright lime-green tennis ball. He held it out on his open palm, looking at me. “Do you mind? Or is he on a strict no-rubber diet now?”
“He’s on an anti-choking diet,” I said, but the tension in my shoulders gave way. “Go ahead.”
He tossed it low across the enclosure. The dogs raced for it in a blur of black and scruffy brown. Nina got there first, seized it on the bounce, and then deliberately slowed her pace on the turn back, letting Walter overtake her in a show of heroic fake effort. She nipped it back off him three feet before he could reach me, prancing in a circle with her head held high.
Nina ran him through the same play three times.
Between throws, I got a good look at him. He had light brown eyes and a white scar on his chin. He bent over to bargain with Nina for the ball, one hand on his knee, and I decided my first nine days in Florence had been worth it.
“I’m Dario,” he said, turning back to me.
“Nora.”
“Nora,” he repeated, testing the length of it. “Are you staying nearby, Nora?”
“On the other side of the river,” I said. “Near Santo Spirito.”
It was the kind of vague information you give somebody when you like them enough to talk, but still want to feel like they’d have to make an effort to find you again.
“A long walk for a dog with short legs,” he noted, gesturing toward Walter.
“He lives on spite and stolen carbohydrates,” I replied. “He handles the bridge fine.”
“Did you move here for work?”
“I brought it with me. I write novels.” I watched Nina skillfully confiscate the ball from Walter for a fourth time. “Though saying I ‘write novels’ makes it sound like I actually get things done. In reality, I’ve been rewriting the exact same chapter since I was in Baltimore.”
Dario chuckled, a low, quiet sound. “Can you do it with him around?”
“He gives up after lunch,” I said. “I save the parts of my life that require genuine concentration for when he’s passed out on the rug.”
Walter came back and flopped against my boots, a strip of dry grass stuck across his muzzle.
Dario crouched down without hesitation, reaching out to gently pinch the grass between two fingers and pull it away. Walter didn’t even growl; he just closed his eyes and leaned into the touch. I watched the movement of Dario’s fingers against my dog’s scruff, thinking that I could have used even a fraction of that instinctual patience back when Walter was a four-month-old rescue and I used to sit on my kitchen floor crying from sheer exhaustion at two in the morning while another soiled blanket washed.
“Nina comes almost every day,” Dario said, standing up and brushing off his knees. “When I’m in town and not working late, I bring her myself.”
“Maybe we’ll see each other again,” I said.
I sounded remarkably formal for a woman who’d just yelled a four-letter word across a public lawn. From the look on Dario’s face, he’d heard it, too.
“Maybe,” he said softly. He reached out, called Nina to heel, and slid the green ball back into his pocket. “Have a good afternoon, Nora. Keep him off the broken rubber.”
At home, I scrubbed Walter clean in the narrow, tiled shower stall while he stood there looking like a drowned rat, then ate lunch standing up by the open kitchen window.
The apartment was small, high-ceilinged, and smelled faintly of old stone and the yeasty heat rising from the bakery directly below my floor. My lease ran through the middle of September. After that, I had a short-term place booked in Lisbon for the autumn.
I’d been living in these three-month stretches ever since the divorce was finalized eighteen months ago—a winter in a quiet village in southern France, two months in my sister’s spare room in Baltimore, now this. At thirty, my life fit into two heavy suitcases and a dog crate. I had two published contemporary novels that made enough in royalties to keep me fed, a third manuscript that was officially two months past its delivery deadline, and the terrifying ability to pack up my entire existence in twenty minutes while Walter took his afternoon nap.
“Someday,” my sister had warned me over FaceTime while I was taping up boxes in Maryland, “you’re going to get attached to a chair, Nora. Or a view. And you’re not going to know what to do with yourself when it’s time to check out.”
I sat down at the small wooden table that doubled as my desk and opened my laptop. Below, the bakery bell chimed every few minutes as neighbors came in for afternoon bread. I typed two sentences, deleted three, and watched the cursor blink against the white screen until the sun began to drop behind the terracotta roofs and the bakery finally closed its shutters for the evening.
When I clipped Walter’s leash on for his final walk of the night, the air had cooled, carrying the scent of damp pavement and woodsmoke. I turned left out of the building doorway instead of right—taking the long, circuitous route that led back toward the park, even though I knew perfectly well the tall iron gates would be locked for the night.
