A few houses down, a pregnant corgi ran down the lawn to yap at Ed and Dee. Its owner, a middle-aged woman in rollers, followed her down, shouting, “Bessie! Don’t go in the road!”
“Go back to your mommy, honey,” Dee drawled to the dog, which immediately stopped in her tracks, mesmerized, tail poised to wag.
The woman in rollers stared at Ed. “Get over here now!” she screamed, presumably to the dog, but her gaze still on the gentleman with three passports. As the dog turned around and waddled back, her stomach scraping the grass, her owner turned to Dee and said, “Sorry ’bout the bother.”
“No worries at all,” Dee said. “She’s a cutie pie. Looks about ready to burst.”
The owner’s face looked burned by the morning’s brief guest appearance by the sun, or maybe she was an alcoholic. She continued to glance back and forth between the members of the unlikely couple, perhaps trying to figure out what the man was wearing （a sleek black tailored piece known as the City Hunter jacket）。 “Well, if you want puppies,” she said to Dee. Then she turned around and stomped off toward the house, the corgi lapping at her feet with love, unaware of the fact that her own children were just offered to a stranger.
“Conclusions?” Ed said as they walked away.
“She said ‘Don’t go in the road,’ to the dog,” Dee said. “Not ‘on the road.’ The road is something you enter. Alien to your own property.”
Ed nodded. “Your anthropology is sound,” he said. “You should have seen the look she gave me.”
“Your people aren’t getting a lot of love from the state media these days.”
“My people? I’m Anglo-Swiss-Canadian.” They both laughed. Dee noticed an American flag done up in black, blue, and white, which also connoted a far-right disposition, fluttering from the back of a stationary black pickup truck. Maybe Masha wasn’t entirely wrong about the content of this particular neighborhood, though these people, she reckoned, would never do her family harm. The calculus of a small northern town like this wouldn’t allow it to happen, at least not to a nominally white couple. On the other hand, the state of the nation was changing rapidly.
“Let’s maybe turn around,” she said.
A towheaded child jumped on a trampoline and did a spectacular somersault as if he were on television. He smiled and waved at Dee upon completion. “Real nice!” she shouted his way. Ed tugged at the sleeves of his City Hunter jacket.
They walked back in silence until she asked him for another cigarette. “You’re going to get me addicted again,” she said, and Ed thought he heard honey in her voice. As the cigarette slipped between her lips, as her eyes narrowed to accept the hit of nicotine, as his vintage lighter bathed the cigarette’s tip in flames, Ed put his other hand around her and pressed her bony shoulder in a way he assumed was friendly, once, twice. You could do this—in other words, light a cigarette for a person, and tap their shoulder while doing so. Almost as a way of steadying oneself while wielding the lighter. On the other hand, many years ago at a rural train station in Slovakia, a handsome man had propositioned Ed over a cigarette in a similar fashion—lighter, shoulder press, shoulder press—and, hungry for experience, he had given it some thought.
What the hell was he doing now? His emotions were a pregnant corgi escaping into the street. Maybe it was the tenor of the times. Single people were scared of dying alone. He remembered the anxiety of entering the Big Island Bungalow, of seeing just how little awaited him. Maybe there was nothing to lose anymore. （Although this morning, upon waking, upon thinking of her, he had righted the photograph of the Kīlauea volcano above his bed, in case Dee ever paid him an extended visit.） Two dogs were snarling at them from behind an electric fence. Only Ed flinched; Dee just kept smoking. Next time they saw something beautiful, he would ask her.
The sun returned as soon as they entered the liberal estates section of the road, where hate had “no home.” They walked past a babbling brook that may have been spring asserting itself in full or a broken pipe up the road. Cattails ran along its length, bowing in the wind, shimmering like grain. The time seemed right now. “So I wanted to try that Tr?? Emotions app with you,” Ed said. She looked up, startled, and Ed thought she was about to say something polite, so he continued: “Just for scientific reasons to be sure. I’m exactly like you. I don’t fall in love. Not for two decades, at least. And it clearly doesn’t work on you either.” He was babbling like the brook.