The Dog Walker

Camila came to New York from Cali, Colombia, to study nursing. Her classes were expensive and her room in Queens was even more expensive, so she needed a job that she could do between lectures. A friend who worked at a pet store told her about dog walking. Two weeks later, Camila had four clients, all on the Upper West Side, and a bunch of keys that was heavier than her schoolbag.

Every morning she took the subway into Manhattan and picked up the dogs one by one. There was Biscuit, a fat little beagle who lived in a brownstone on West 82nd Street. There was Duke, a huge Great Dane whose owner was a retired judge. There were two white poodles that belonged to a woman who never opened her door more than a few inches. And there was Pepper, a nervous terrier from the building with the green awning on Amsterdam Avenue.

Camila soon discovered that walking dogs is a good way to learn people's secrets. Dogs pull you toward the places that they know. Biscuit, for example, always stopped outside a small bakery on Columbus Avenue and refused to move. One day the baker came out with a cookie for the dog and a message: "Tell Mr. Feldman that the lady who bakes his bread says hello." Mr. Feldman, a widower of seventy-five, went red when Camila gave him the message.

Duke's secret was even stranger. The judge who owned him was famous for being serious, but every Tuesday Duke dragged Camila to a comedy club near Broadway. The man who worked at the door knew the dog by name. "The judge performs here on Friday nights," he whispered. "Under a different name. He's actually pretty funny."

The woman with the poodles was the hardest to understand. Then one rainy afternoon Camila came back early and saw paintbrushes and huge canvases through the half-open door. The woman sighed and let her in. Her apartment was full of paintings of dogs, hundreds of them, in every color. She sold them online under a false name to collectors who had no idea who she was. "Please don't tell anyone," she said. Camila promised.

Only Pepper's owner had no secret, or so Camila thought. He was a young man who worked from home and always looked tired. One morning, she found a note on the kitchen table: "Pepper is the only friend that I have in this city. Thank you for being kind to her." The next day Camila left a note of her own, inviting him to a free concert in Central Park that her classmates were organizing. He came, and he brought Pepper.

Camila now works at a hospital, but she still walks dogs on weekends. She never tells anyone the secrets that she knows. But if you see a young woman with five dogs and a big smile on Amsterdam Avenue, you can be sure that she knows more about the neighborhood than most of the people who live there.