📦 Part 5: The Porch with Two Chairs
The air had turned colder by the third morning, enough to warrant my thick wool scarf and Murphy’s faded red jacket. Evelyn had sewn it back when he was two—stitched his name into the collar like he was a schoolboy heading off to class.
Nora met us outside her house again, holding two steaming mugs.
“I brought cocoa,” she said. “Thought I’d share.”
I accepted mine with a grateful nod. The heat seeped into my hands like sunlight. Murphy bumped her leg gently, tail sweeping the sidewalk.
“You ever think about what makes a place home?” she asked, staring out toward the end of the block.
“All the time,” I said. “For some, it’s the roof over their head. For others, it’s the faces on their route.”
We started walking.
Today’s path curved north, toward the older part of town—where the sidewalks were buckled with tree roots and mailboxes sat crooked with age. The houses here had stories baked into their bricks.
We reached 11 Harper Lane. A modest blue house with white shutters and a front porch holding two wooden rocking chairs. The paint on one chair had faded to a ghostly gray. The other was still firetruck red.
“Paul and Jenny McCaskill,” I said. “Married sixty-one years. Used to sit here every evening with sweet tea and arguments about baseball.”
Nora smiled. “Who won?”
“Didn’t matter. They just liked the ritual. Like clock hands bickering.”
I pulled a folded note from my satchel—written years ago but never delivered. It was a thank-you card I’d meant to drop off after Jenny gave Evelyn a quilt when she got sick. Life got busy. Evelyn passed. I never found the moment.
Now I did.
I placed it between the two chairs, held in place with a smooth stone.
Murphy sat, looking up at the porch as if waiting for Paul to whistle, the way he always used to.
“They’re gone?” Nora asked.
“Paul passed in ’19. Jenny the year after. Their son keeps the house but doesn’t live here.”
Nora lowered herself to the top step, fingers curled around her mug.
“This town feels like a photo album,” she said. “Except the pictures aren’t on paper.”
“They’re on the sidewalks,” I said. “And in the echoes.”
We sat for a while in the stillness. A pickup passed slowly, its tires crunching gravel. The driver waved. I waved back.
“Funny thing,” I added after a moment, “this was the first house where Murphy got his name.”
“Really?”
“Paul said a nameless dog was bad luck. Told me to call him something with weight. I said I’d think about it. Then Jenny brought out two plates—one for me, one for the pup—and said, ‘Here you go, Murphy.’”
Nora laughed. “And it stuck.”
“Just like the peanut butter in that sandwich.”
Murphy stretched and groaned. His joints didn’t move like they used to. But his eyes still shone with spark.
We walked on.
At Ashford Street, we passed a cluster of garden gnomes huddled near a porch. I paused.
“Mrs. Bell’s army,” I said.
Nora looked confused. “Garden gnomes?”
“She believed they protected her plants. Claimed they whispered warnings during frost.”
“She was serious?”
“Deadly. Swore one of them saved her azaleas in ’02.”
I reached over the picket fence and righted a gnome that had tipped sideways.
“She used to give Murphy ice cubes. Swore dogs liked them more than treats.”
Murphy sniffed the flowerbed, then pawed lightly at the grass.
I pulled a small gnome from my bag—one I’d found in a thrift shop last year. I’d meant to give it to her before she passed.
I placed it gently beside the others.
“She would’ve liked that,” Nora said.
“She was a strange soul,” I said. “But kind.”
At the end of the block, a small child stood on the stoop of a green house. A curly-haired boy, no more than five, holding a red crayon in one hand and a drawing in the other.
He stared at Murphy with wide eyes.
“Is that your dog?” he asked.
Murphy wagged his tail once.
“He’s our friend,” Nora said. “Want to say hi?”
The boy approached slowly, then held out his drawing—a stick figure man, a house, and a brown scribble that might’ve been a dog.
“I drew him,” the boy whispered. “For my grandpa. He used to walk a dog like that.”
I crouched beside him.
“What’s your name, son?”
“Liam,” he said.
I looked at the picture again.
“That’s a fine drawing. Your grandpa must be proud.”
Liam nodded, then handed the paper to me.
“You can have it.”
I hesitated, heart tightening. “Are you sure?”
He nodded.
I took the drawing and folded it carefully.
“Thank you, Liam.”
Then he turned and disappeared back inside, door closing gently behind him.
We walked the rest of the block in silence.
Back at the park, we took the long way through the trail, leaves crunching underfoot. Murphy lagged slightly, but kept going.
At the old bench beneath the ash tree, we stopped. I sat and took out my journal.
“Day three. Two miles. A red chair, a paper dog, a boy with his heart wide open. Murphy still walks.”
Nora touched the page lightly with her finger.
“You write it down every day?”
“Every day we walk,” I said. “So I remember. So he’s remembered.”
She nodded.
And in the hush between words, I could feel it:
The old route wasn’t just a map of where I’d been.
It was a path for others now, too.
📦 Part 6: The Letter That Never Arrived
We took a shorter route that morning. Murphy had trouble rising—his back legs trembling more than usual, his breath slower. But once we were out the door, he seemed to find strength in the routine, as if muscle memory and spirit alone carried him forward.
Nora noticed it too. She didn’t say anything at first, but she stayed closer than usual, her hand occasionally brushing Murphy’s back.
“We can slow it down,” she whispered. “Even more than we already do.”
“He sets the pace,” I replied. “Always has.”
The sky was gray, not stormy but still. The kind of morning where the world feels like it’s holding its breath.
We turned onto Magnolia Street, where the houses stood tall with narrow porches, like rows of watchers. The air smelled faintly of chimney smoke and damp earth.
“There,” I said, pointing at the third house on the left. “That one belonged to Clara Redmond.”
It was painted pale yellow now, freshly done by someone who’d likely just moved in. But the birdhouse on the maple tree remained—hand-painted daisies faded by sun and snow.
“She was a schoolteacher,” I said. “Taught handwriting. Real pen-and-ink letters. Said the soul lived in the curve of the R.”
Nora smiled faintly. “My mother said that too.”
Clara had passed the same week Evelyn was diagnosed. I never found the time to say goodbye.
“She used to write letters to people in town,” I said. “Just because. Encouragement. Gratitude. Sometimes sorrow. And she always signed off the same way—Keep choosing kindness.”
Murphy sat by the tree, head bowed, his eyes fixed on the empty porch as if waiting for her shadow to reappear.
“I saved one of her letters,” I said. “She wrote it for me but never mailed it. I found it tucked into a book donation at the library years later.”
I reached into my satchel and pulled out a creased envelope. The ink was faded, the paper delicate. I didn’t open it. I didn’t need to. I knew every word.
“I think it’s time I let it go.”
I placed it gently inside the birdhouse.
Nora stood with her arms crossed tightly.
“She seems like someone I would’ve liked,” she said.
“You’d have loved her,” I replied.
We continued on.
At the corner of Magnolia and Cypress, Murphy stopped.
He didn’t sniff.
He didn’t wag.
He just sat.
I knelt beside him, gently brushing my fingers over his ears.
“He’s tired,” Nora said.
“He’s old,” I said. “But he still wants to walk.”
We gave him a few minutes. Then he rose again, shaky but stubborn.
A few blocks later, we passed a house with a chipped white fence and a broken tire swing swaying in the breeze.
“That was the Robbins’ house,” I said. “They had twin boys—wild ones. Always chasing each other with squirt guns and roller skates.”
“Sounds like chaos,” Nora said.
“It was beautiful,” I replied.
Murphy stopped by the swing and lay down. Not in protest, not in pain. Just resting in a place where the laughter of children once echoed like music.
I knelt beside him, rubbed his neck, and whispered, “You remember everything, don’t you?”
His tail gave a slow thump against the ground.
We didn’t rush.
Eventually, we made it to the old community bulletin board at Maple Crossroads. The glass was cracked now, the pushpins rusted. But one flyer still hung from the center: Missing Dog—1999.
I smiled.
“That was Daisy. Belonged to Elsie Crayton. Little terrier who got stuck in a storm drain. Whole neighborhood came out looking.”
“Did they find her?” Nora asked.
“We did,” I said. “Covered in mud and tail wagging like nothing happened.”
Murphy gave a little bark, as if in celebration.
I reached into my bag and posted a new note over the old one. It read:
“Found: Hope. Every morning, in the company of memories and a faithful friend.”
Nora leaned against the railing, her hands shoved deep in her coat.
“Harold… when Murphy’s ready to stop walking, will you keep going?”
I looked at her, startled by the question.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. But it’s never really been about me walking.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m just the legs,” I said. “He’s the soul of the journey.”
She reached down and stroked Murphy’s back.
“He’s teaching me more than most people ever have,” she whispered.
“He’s done that for a lot of us,” I said.
We turned toward home.
Murphy walked slower, but his head stayed high.
Back at the house, I helped him onto the porch. He curled up by the door like always, eyes still alert, ears twitching with every breeze.
I sat beside him and wrote in my journal:
“Day four. One and a half miles. A lost letter, a birdhouse memory, a rest beneath a swing. Murphy still walks, but the ground asks him gently to rest. I listen.”
Nora stayed a moment longer. Then she stood and said, “I’ll bring soup tomorrow. And a blanket.”
“Bring yourself,” I said. “That’s all that’s needed.”
She smiled and left.
I looked down at Murphy.
“Tomorrow’s another mile,” I said.
He didn’t move. But his eyes never left mine.
And in them, I saw it:
The road ahead was shorter now.
But no less meaningful.
