Problems with People by David Guterson Page A

and … and … it was in this meteorological and star-gazing context that something had either happened or not happened, no one knew, because the district office, the principal, the vice-principals, anyone with information was only willing to say, officially, that the matter was under investigation, while adding, privately, a tidbit here and there—those informal asides and “you didn’t hear it from me”s that formed the basis of rampant speculation during, indeed it was, the strike of 2005.
    Soon Hamish was no longer in the building. She hadn’t seen him since. But now here he was, in his parka, with his dog, crossing the frozen grass in her direction, smiling, calling out her name, and interrupting, in his jovial way, her exercise regimen. Or, rather, not interrupting it, because she refused to stop, why should she stop, she didn’t want to exchange pleasantries or feign ignorance of his troubles, there were so few opportunities for getting her heart rate up and keeping it there. “Unbelievable!” said Hamish, when their paths converged. “It’s freezing!”
    She saw that he’d aged in a way common to Scotsmen—namely, he’d not only grown dangerously stouter but had distinctlymore broken capillaries in his cheeks so that his face had a blue and dappled tint. His puffy parka, nearly fluorescent, made him look ample and segmented. His dog leash, maroon, had a woven print—stars—and his dog, though tiny, pulled against it, toward her legs, while Hamish, at the other end, resisted. “Pepper!” he snapped, looking delighted and proprietary. “Pepper! No! It’s a friend!” Then he bent, not without difficulty, scooped up Pepper, and pinned him or her beneath his billowy arm. “I’m sorry,” he said, with a gasp.
    “It’s fine,” she said, still walking.
    In the long-winded, unable-to-cut-to-the-chase way she recalled from their era as colleagues, Hamish explained that at Christmas he’d gone for two weeks to Kauai with his mother, two sisters, and six nieces and nephews, leaving Pepper in a dog-boarding facility he couldn’t recommend because Pepper, on his return, seemed unduly anxious, so that now some pieces of her careful training were undone, he was engaged in certain repetitions with Pepper of behavioral steps she’d succeeded with already, meanwhile he apologized again for this episode of lunging, and with that, Hamish put Pepper on the turf once more—delicately—stroked her neck, sighed, and said, pre-emptively, “Pepper, Pepper, Pehhhhhh-prrrrrr?”
    By what unhappy coincidence had she ended up here with dog and man? A circumstance Hamish could have handled—and that she wished he would have handled—by ignoring her, by pretending not to recognize her, which is how most people would have handled it, out of a basic feel for the propriety called for given the elements at hand—late Sunday afternoon, super-cold, a walk, they hardly knew each other.
    What should she say? She wanted him to leave. She wished he hadn’t shown up in the first place, or that, having shown up, he’d been sensitive enough to social norms not to accost her in this sustained way—Just get on with walking your Pepper, she thought, hurry up, Hamish, we’ll greet in passing and go opposite directions, you toward the play area, the footbridge, and the pond, me toward the Park Department mulch and compost heaps and the community-garden patches. “How have you been?” Hamish asked.
    Enough! she decided—more than enough! And didn’t she have an excuse to be brusque? Maybe more than one excuse? “The thing is,” she said, “as slow as I look, and I’m really sorry, but this is an exercise walk for me and I have to keep moving because I time myself, okay? I’m really, really sorry, Hamish.”
    He stopped; she stopped; Pepper, as ineffectually as before, attacked her legs, and Hamish, dragging the dog out of her range by its leash, said, with a knit unibrow, “I get it. Okay. Another