World and Town by Gish Jen

people; pretty much everyone’s got a vest on, at least. Only Carter Hatch would be traipsing around with no hat and no hair, in just jeans and a flannel shirt, top buttons undone as if to show off his pelican neck. The shirt hangs away from him—no paunch—men his age tending to come in two models as they do, padded and not, Hattie’s noticed, depending on their metabolisms.
    Carter, dropping in like Judy Tell-All.
    Hattie overfills her coffee mug and has to sponge up the mess.
    Is he still running? She doesn’t know, but somehow wouldn’t be surprised to hear he’s still taking home trophies in the occasional senior trot. That seven-league gait, after all, and that drive—that Carter Hatch drive. What with her house up on a knoll, she’s watched people make their way up to her door all sorts of ways—some tackling the driveway with a little umph, some with a marked trudge. No one has ever taken it the way Carter is now, as if simply opposed to gravity. He’s carrying one of those dark green book bags from the days before backpacks—his father’s, if she had to guess—toting the rubberized thing so naturally that he looks not so much like Carter carrying his father’s sack as—eerily—Dr. Hatch carrying his own. Of course, in one way, it’s a surprise, looking back, that Carter didn’t go into marine biology or some such—one of those fields where you battle cold climes and come home with a distant look in your eye. But in another way, where would he have made his expeditions but to the lab? At least as an undergrad he looked different in the summer than in the winter—more like his god-given self, ruddy and hale. Later he just stayed his winter self year-round, too busy examining how people see to actually go out and see much himself; she never did behold him without wanting to offer him a cough drop.
    Now, though, a thump on her front porch, and the start of a rap, but ha!—she’s opened the door before he’s knocked; and seeing as how she has yet to put up her front-door screen, there’s nothing but her in the doorway. Surprise.
    “Miss Confucius.”
    Dr. Hatch!
    But no—it’s Carter, who, if she hadn’t surprised him with the door, or startled a bit herself, might well have relaxed enough to give her a kiss or a hug. Instead, he stands there with his book bag between his feet and his hands in his pockets, gazing at her as if he’s about to have his mug snapped for an I.D. card.
    “It’s good to see you,” he says.
    “Well, and I’ve had worse surprises.” She can still feel how she was about to step through the doorway and give him a hug back—that potential energy. But now she straightens up, too, the dogs gathering around Carter, who—can this be right?—appears to be wearing the very same hiking boots he used to wear back in the lab. That can’t be, she knows. But these do seem an exact replica of his old Swiss boots, with their zigzag red laces and first-class padded collar; they even have the same lovingly beat-up look.
    “Go on,” she tells the dogs. “Out.”
    Eliciting a funny look from Cato, especially—this isn’t their pattern. With a little more prodding, though, they do finally go sprinting down the hill and across the road to the sunny field, Reveille leading but Annie almost keeping up, and Old Cato, too; his hips must not be too bad today. As for whether Reveille will keep clear of that porcupine in the tree at the edge of the field, well, Hattie can only hope—Joe having been the expert quill-puller in the family. She never has gotten as plier-proficient.
    “You’ve become a dog lover.”
    “Fit company for the old dog I’ve become myself,” she says.
    He laughs his old laugh, with a drop of his jaw—as if he just has to make a show of his hearty pink tongue and scattered gold crowns. “That’s my Hattie, ever sweet and obliging. You know what I remember most about Chinese?”
    When he arches his brows, they make little familiar tents, too— pup tents