I told myself I wasn’t going to fall apart today.
It was just a trip to the farmers market, nothing worth marking on a calendar. The morning was mild, overcast but not rainy, and my son had insisted on wearing his dinosaur hoodie “because Daddy always said it was his favorite.” That almost broke me right there in the parking lot.
He’s only six. He still asks where his dad went sometimes. I usually tell him Daddy had to go somewhere far away and couldn’t come back, which gives me enough time to pull it together before he gets distracted by the kettle corn stand or a dog on a leash.
But today was different.
My coworker
The Part I Didn’t Plan For
His name is Dennis. Dennis Pruitt. He works two desks down from me in the claims department at the insurance company where I’ve spent the last four years pretending to care about deductibles. He’s maybe fifty-five, divorced himself, has a grown daughter he talks about too much and a thermos he refills with bad coffee approximately six times a day. We’re friendly in the way coworkers are friendly when they’ve survived the same bad manager for three years. We eat lunch near each other sometimes. That’s it.
I did not expect to see Dennis Pruitt at the farmers market on a Saturday.
But there he was, standing in front of the honey table with a paper bag under one arm, squinting at a jar like it had personally offended him. He looked up, saw me, and did that thing where you can’t pretend you didn’t see someone. The wave. The small lift of the chin.
I waved back. Kept moving.
My son, Caleb, had already spotted the dog two stalls down. Big yellow lab on a long leash, sitting very patiently while its owner bought bread. Caleb made a noise that I can only describe as a sound a small animal makes when it sees another small animal. He grabbed my hand and pulled.
“Can I pet him? Can I?”
“Ask the owner first.”
He did. He always does. I taught him that. His father taught him that before his father left, and I’ve kept it going because I’m not going to let every good thing Marcus did disappear just because Marcus did.
The dog’s name was Biscuit. Of course it was.
What Dennis Did
I was watching Caleb crouch down and let Biscuit lick his whole face with the kind of joy that only exists when you’re six and a large dog has decided you’re worth licking, when Dennis appeared beside me.
“That your boy?”
“Yeah. Caleb.”
“Good-looking kid.”
“He’s got a good face,” I said. Which is a weird thing to say but it’s what came out.
We stood there watching Caleb and Biscuit conduct their relationship. Dennis didn’t try to fill the silence with anything. I appreciated that more than I could have explained.
Then Caleb looked up at me, cheeks red, hair a mess, and said, “Mama, can we get a dog?”
“We’ve talked about this.”
“But Biscuit – “
“Biscuit belongs to someone else.”
Caleb stood up, looked at Dennis like he’d just noticed him, and said, “Do you have a dog?”
Dennis laughed. Actual laugh, not a polite one. “No, buddy. I’ve got a fish. His name is Carl.”
Caleb thought about this very seriously. “Fish aren’t as good as dogs.”
“You’re not wrong.”
And then Caleb, who has no filter and never has, looked up at Dennis and said, “Do you want to walk with us?”
I started to say something. Some version of he’s being polite, you don’t have to, we’re fine. But Dennis was already nodding, shifting his paper bag to his other arm, and saying sure, he wasn’t in any hurry.
The Thing That Got Me
We walked the whole market. All of it. The vegetable tables and the candle booth and the woman selling handmade jam with labels that had little watercolor strawberries on them. Caleb talked the entire time. About Biscuit. About Carl the fish. About how his teacher Mrs. Kolowski had a hamster but it died and now she just had a picture of it on her desk which Caleb found deeply confusing.
Dennis listened. Not in the way adults listen to kids, which is usually a performance of listening while you’re actually thinking about something else. He actually listened. He asked Caleb what the hamster’s name was. He asked whether the picture was a good picture. He crouched down at one point to look at something Caleb was pointing at, some weird little carved wooden thing at a craft table, and they had a whole conversation about whether it was a bear or a beaver that I wasn’t even part of.
I walked a half-step behind them.
At some point they’d gotten to the kettle corn stand, and Dennis bought three bags without asking, just handed one to Caleb and one to me, and Caleb said thank you without being prompted, which almost never happens.
I was watching them standing there, Dennis with his paper bag and his bad-coffee thermos clipped to his belt loop for some reason, Caleb in the dinosaur hoodie, both of them eating kettle corn and looking at a booth that sold wind chimes, and something in my chest did something I wasn’t ready for.
Not romantic. That’s not what this is. I want to be clear about that because I know how this sounds.
It was something else. Something more like grief wearing a different mask. Because Caleb was doing this thing he does, this leaning thing, where he sort of drifts toward whoever he’s standing next to until he’s almost against them, and he’d drifted into Dennis’s side without either of them noticing.
And Dennis didn’t move away.
He just kept eating his kettle corn and talking about wind chimes.
The Parking Lot Again
I excused myself to look at the jam. The watercolor strawberry jam I didn’t need and couldn’t really afford. I stood there with the jar in my hand and I just breathed for a minute.
The woman behind the table asked if I was okay.
“Allergies,” I said.
She nodded like she’d heard that before.
I bought two jars. Raspberry and fig. Thirteen dollars I didn’t have.
When I got back, Caleb was telling Dennis about dinosaurs. Specifically about which dinosaurs could beat which other dinosaurs in a fight, which is a topic he can sustain for forty-five minutes minimum. Dennis was nodding along, making the right noises, asking clarifying questions.
“Could a T-rex beat a triceratops?”
“Depends,” Caleb said. “If the triceratops got the first hit, probably yes. But if the T-rex was sneaky…”
We walked back toward the parking lot slowly. Caleb held my hand on one side. At some point he reached up and grabbed Dennis’s hand on the other side, the way kids do, without ceremony, just because he needed a hand to hold and there was one there.
Dennis looked over at me. Just for a second.
I looked away.
What I Said When We Got to the Cars
“Thank you,” I said. “For walking with us.”
Dennis shrugged. “I was just walking.”
“Still.”
Caleb had already spotted another dog across the lot and was straining toward it. I had a good grip on his hood.
“He’s a great kid,” Dennis said.
“He is.”
“You doing okay?” He asked it the way you ask when you actually want to know. Not the hallway version, not the fine-and-you version.
I thought about lying. I’m good at the lie by now. Eleven months of practice.
“Some days,” I said.
He nodded. That was it. No advice. No it gets better or you’re so strong or any of the things people say when they don’t know what else to do. Just a nod, like some days was a complete and reasonable answer.
He said goodbye to Caleb, who told him to tell Carl the fish hello, and then we went to our separate cars.
The Drive Home
Caleb fell asleep before we hit the highway. He does that. Farmers market wipes him out completely, all that stimulation, and then he’s gone like someone pulled a plug.
I drove in the quiet for a while.
I thought about Marcus. I do that less than I used to, which I think is supposed to feel like progress. It mostly just feels like forgetting, and I can’t always tell the difference. He left in October. Said he wasn’t happy, hadn’t been for a while, didn’t know how to explain it better than that. He wasn’t cruel about it. He just left. Which is its own kind of cruelty, the clean kind.
Caleb still asks sometimes. The far-away thing, the couldn’t-come-back thing. He’s going to stop believing that soon. Six-year-olds aren’t stupid. They’re just slow to stop hoping.
I thought about Caleb reaching for Dennis’s hand. The ease of it. The way he just assumed there was someone there to hold onto.
I thought about Dennis not moving away.
I pulled into our driveway. Sat in the car for a minute while Caleb breathed steadily in the back seat, the dinosaur hoodie bunched up around his chin.
I didn’t cry.
I’d told myself I wasn’t going to.
But I sat there for maybe four minutes, which is longer than I usually let myself sit.
Then I got out, unbuckled my kid, and carried him inside.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it along to someone who might need it today.
For more heartfelt tales, you might enjoy reading about My Boss Messaged Me After I Sold My Car to Save My Dog or even the wild story of My Mom Threw a 90-Person Party in My Apartment, Kicked Me Out, Then Handed Me the Bill. You also won’t want to miss when The Captain Couldn’t Finish His Sentence at Ranger’s Retirement Party.
