“Is that lady blind, Mom?” The child’s voice was piercing, but the tall, solid, middle-aged woman showed no reaction. She stood motionless beside a dog wearing a red service-dog vest over his salt-and-pepper fur. “I think she’s deaf, honey,” the mother said, pulling the child along the sidewalk. In fact, Kay was so absorbed in the art gallery’s window that, although her ears took in all the sounds, her brain failed to process any of them into meaningful language. She looked down at her dog. Leo looked up at his person. “Yes?” his eyes said. “I’m ready. Where to now?” “It’s the same picture, Leo, definitely the same.” That meant going inside. She took a deep breath, and her grasp on his leash telegraphed to Leo that they were about to move. As he stood, she again gave silent thanks to the friends who had brought the dog into her life; without him, going into a new place like this would not be possible. The air inside the gallery was cooler than the outside air of mid-July. Traces of fragrance snaked up Kay’s nose, and a babble of human sound lapped at her ears. With luck, she thought, she could remain unnoticed by the crowd that milled in the back of the room. Her goal was a closer look at the painting she had seen through the window, and she would be out of the crowd’s sight as long as she stayed in the two feet of space that separated the picture from the pane of glass. On the canvas lived a section of the bluffs at Discovery Park, seen across a field of tall grass. The edge of each blade shone with light, as did the powdery cliff face that drew the eye to the middle distance. Immersed in the painting, Kay enjoyed the memory of coming across it for the first time, when the painter was still at work on it and Kay had been walking with a different dog, with Cee’s dog Osita. Kay and the painter had talked about time: the time he was painting into the picture, the way time changes speed, the end of shared time that comes with death. “Somebody dies, that’s time torn apart,” he had said; “Some of it stops. Most of it goes right on. Hurts like hell. But on the other hand, there’s memory.” A different texture of time. Kay smiled, glad to have come across that day again. She and the dog stepped back toward the door, away from the screen that had sheltered them from the rest of the room. “Hey,” said a voice. It belonged to a man standing several feet away, smiling. “Different dog,” he commented after a pause. His voice sounded familiar, but of course she couldn’t recognize his face. Now that she knew about faceblindness, her inability to identify people who seemed to know her no longer caused panic. Her brain lacked the software for face recognition, that was all. Seeking useful clues, she canvassed the man’s size, shape, hair, and coloring. It helped when he shifted slightly on his feet: the way someone moved could be a good identifier, and the picture started coming together in her mind. When she realized she was looking for a streak of orange paint on his brown cheek, she knew she had figured him out. “Hello,” she said, and smiled again. “I saw the picture from outside.” “And recognized it,” he said, pleased. Their previous contact had been brief and almost abstract, but Kay had impressed him as a person both unusual and interesting. “This is the opening of my first one-man show. That’s why the crowd.” Kay glanced around the room but found it hard to focus on the pictures while so many people were in motion nearby. Even hearing the man’s words might have been difficult against the background noise, except that his voice was so direct and unhurried. He plucked a card off the small table set against the partition on which the window painting had been hung. “This gives the gallery hours,” he said, “in case you’d like to come back sometime when it’s not so crowded.” He started to hand her the card but changed his mind. Taking a pen from the table, he wrote on the back of the card and then completed the gesture. “I wrote down the address of the studio I share. It’s in West Seattle. Maybe you’d like to stop by some weekend, you and the dog. Bella would be glad to see you. We’re usually there from noon or so on Saturday. Good weather, we have a little potluck lunch, just two or four of us. You’d be welcome.” Kay took the card and looked at it. On the front was a picture of a paining, not the painting, but clearly by the same hand. She was glad to have it to take home where she would get to know it better. On the back of the card, along with the printed gallery information, was an address and a name: Joseph Ortiz. “Okay,” she said. “Thank you.” The man smiled. He could sense someone approaching him from behind, no doubt intent on returning him to the party. “Thanks for stopping by,” he said. No point asking her to stay when she clearly wasn’t comfortable here, but he took her brief presence as a good omen. He so rarely encountered anyone, much less a white adult, who came across as that uncomplicated, and he found her both restful and intriguing. If she and her dog did end up at the studio one of these weekends, he knew Bella–his own dog–really would be glad to see them. “And me, too,” he thought as he turned away from the door through which woman and dog were disappearing from his sight.
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