4. Quinn
QUINN
PASS AUF, NOT PISS OFF
The hot dog cart on the corner of Eighth and Twenty-Third was one of the few places in Manhattan where I felt both known and entirely unjudged, which was a powerful combination and, frankly, should’ve cost more than four dollars.
Max and I stopped there every couple of weeks. The cart itself was chrome in theory and grease-seasoned in practice, the umbrella sun-faded, and the smell rising off it was all grilled onions, hot metal, mustard, steam, a faint halo of pretzel salt. New York in edible form.
“Afternoon, Mr. Alvarez,” I called as we approached.
Mr. Alvarez looked up from the grill, a broad smile breaking over his face when he spotted Max, who was, in his opinion, the superior customer. “Ah. Queen.”
I grinned. In his defense, Quinn wasn’t the easiest name to catch over traffic and a cart that hissed like a small industrial machine.
“One loaded dog for me, one plain for His Majesty,” I said with a smile.
Max, hearing the tone if not the words, straightened slightly at my side like a decorated veteran arriving at a state dinner.
Mr. Alvarez had company today. A woman around my age sat on a folding stool beside the cooler, textbook open on her lap, highlighter clipped to the spiral binding.
She had thick dark hair pulled up in a claw clip and that specific exhausted-pretty look of a college student between semesters who hadn’t wanted to spend the afternoon selling hot dogs but knew family businesses didn’t care about your major.
Mr. Alvarez jerked his chin toward her. “My niece, Elena,” he said. “Home from school and already judging my business practices.”
Elena looked up from her textbook. When she saw Max, she made the exact face every sane person made the first time they noticed him. Not fear and not even awe, exactly. More a kind of startled respect, as though she’d accidentally encountered a very handsome lieutenant colonel in the produce aisle.
“Oh my god,” she said. “Can I pet him?”
“Of course.” I shifted the paper napkins and soda in one hand and looked down at Max. “Fuss.”
He moved instantly into heel position at my left knee, body aligned with mine in that precise, almost elegant way that still made something in me warm with pride every time I saw it.
Belgian Malinois were all lines and angles and intent, and Max, even retired, still had that look of being assembled for competence first and beauty only incidentally.
Elena frowned. “What was that?”
“German. It’s his command language.”
Her brows shot up as she crouched carefully in front of him. “He’s bilingual?”
“Multilingual,” I said.
Mr. Alvarez barked out a laugh from behind the cart. “Dog smarter than law girl?”
“Infuriatingly so.”
Elena let Max sniff her hand before scratching under his chin, exactly where he liked it. He accepted the attention with polite dignity, ears half-forward, tail giving a restrained thump against my calf.
“He’s so calm,” she said.
“That’s because he’s in public. At home he has stronger opinions.”
Mr. Alvarez passed me my hot dog in its paper cradle, then Max’s bun-less one in a separate tray. “For soldier,” he said solemnly.
“Thank you.”
Max’s service file had called him a United States Military Working Dog. Avery called him a “retired federal employee with boundaries.” To me, he was somewhere in between.
He’d been stationed at Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, worked joint training with partner K-9 units in East Africa, had run a handful of missions in Somalia and across the Sahel, then retired after shielding his handler from an IED that had taken a piece of his hearing in the right ear and, according to Avery, absolutely none of his self-respect.
After I’d broken Max’s hot dog into bite-sized pieces, I asked Elena if she would like to help me give him a treat. She nodded and took a piece. “Sit. Sitz,” Elena corrected herself immediately, grinning up at me.
I pointed at her. “You’re picking this up unreasonably fast.”
“I took two years of German and retained just enough to order beer and apologize.”
“That’s honestly more than most tourists.”
Max dropped neatly into a sit. A man on one of those three-wheeled electric things shot past us, trailing club music and his own deep personal commitment to endangering pedestrians.
At the exact same moment, one of the giant inflatable rat costumes from whatever union demonstration was happening down the block lurched sideways in the wind like a cursed parade balloon.
Max turned his head, his ears perking. If I fed him now, while his attention was elsewhere, half his hot dog would be lost to the sidewalk.
Before I could redirect him, Mr. Alvarez came around the side of the cart and held out another bun-less hot dog in a paper tray.
“More for Max,” he said. “I burn little. This one free.”
“Oh, you absolutely don’t have to?—”
“Take,” he said, already pressing it into my hand.
At that exact moment, Max took one purposeful step toward the sound of the scooter and the giant rat.
“Pass auf,” I said quickly.
Mr. Alvarez froze. Very slowly, he looked up at me. I looked back at him, one hand full of surprise bonus hot dog, the other still wrapped around Max’s leash.
His eyes narrowed. “Excuse me?”
Oh no.
“No,” I said at once. “Not you.”
Unfortunately, that didn’t improve the situation.
Mr. Alvarez drew himself up, offended by what he perceived as profanity.
Then he launched into a stream of rapid Spanish that even the three semesters I’d spent trying to become the kind of New Yorker who could function in multiple languages didn’t save me.
I caught perro, respeto, and what I was fairly sure was a deeply moving defense of his professional character.
Elena looked from him to me to the second hot dog, then burst out laughing so hard, I briefly considered taking offense on principle.
“No,” I said again, because apparently my strategy today was to die on the hill of repetition. “I was talking to the dog.”
Mr. Alvarez stabbed a finger toward his own chest. “You tell me piss off?”
“I didn’t tell you to piss off.”
Elena doubled over in her seat, one hand flat against the side of the cart. “Oh my god.”
“It means pay attention,” I told her, as if she were now acting as interpreter in a diplomatic dispute. “In German. For him.”
I pointed to Max, who had obeyed beautifully and was once again focused on me, sitting patiently as if nothing had happened at all.
Mr. Alvarez crossed his arms. “I give free hot dog to Max. And then you say piss off.”
“Pass auf,” I said automatically.
That didn’t help. His eyes widened, nostrils flaring.
Elena made a strangled sound and covered her mouth with both hands.
“Uncle,” she said, trying and failing to compose herself. “She’s serious. It was German. It just sounds similar.”
Mr. Alvarez looked down at Max with new suspicion. “Why German?”
“That is honestly a great question,” I said. “Military training. It’s what he’s used to.”
Mr. Alvarez squinted at Max, who returned the look with composed gravity.
Then, because we had apparently all committed to the bit, Mr. Alvarez said something sternly in Spanish directly to the dog.
Max blinked slowly, which only made Elena laugh harder.
I shrugged one shoulder. “He doesn’t speak everything.”
“He should,” Mr. Alvarez said darkly. “He live in New York.” Mr. Alvarez swung back to me. “You no tell me piss off?”
“I swear on my student loans.”
That gave him pause. Elena translated, and his expression shifted from outrage to evaluation.
Looking at Max, he sighed in resignation and jerked his chin. “Tell him sorry.”
I put a hand to my chest. “Me?”
“I scare him.”
I laughed and looked down at Max, who was still sitting in perfect expectation and had experienced zero emotional damage beyond an unacceptable delay in sausage distribution.
“Max,” I said solemnly, “Mr. Alvarez would like to apologize for the diplomatic incident.”
Max held my gaze.
Elena wiped tears from under her eyes. “Please tell me he has a military title.”
“He does, but he mostly just answers to Max unless he’s in trouble.”
“And then?”
“Then he’s Maximus Decimus Aurelius Bradley and he knows exactly what he did.”
Military dogs traditionally outranked their handlers, and Max had made that a lifestyle. In his mind, I handled transportation, meals, and paperwork. He handled command.
Mr. Alvarez nodded in approval, as if the use of a full ceremonial name confirmed all his best instincts about us. At last, he lifted a hand in a grudging, theatrical blessing over my hot dog. “Fine. You keep buying. I forgive.”
“That’s very generous.”
He pointed the tongs at me. “Next time, no German.”
“Noted.”
Then he muttered something else in Spanish, shaking his head, and Elena translated with wicked delight. “He says if you ever actually want to tell somebody to piss off, he can teach you properly.”
“I would appreciate that.”
Even Mr. Alvarez laughed.
The crisis, such as it was, resolved, I finally handed Max a piece of hot dog. He took it with exquisite care, lips barely brushing my fingers, then chewed delicately.
“Good?” I asked him. His ears tipped forward. “I know. Fine dining.”
Elena crouched again to pet him, still smiling. “Was he really in the military?”
“Yeah.” I fed him another bite. “Retired now. He used to work out of Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, doing joint training and detection, some missions farther out. He’s much more into city walks and emotional oversight these days.”
“Emotional oversight?”
“He believes very strongly in my routines and not enough in my boundaries.”
At that, Max nudged my wrist because I’d paused too long between pieces.
“See?” I said. “Critic.”
Mr. Alvarez shook his head. “Dog got better table manners than half my customers.”
“That’s because he’s seen war.”
“I’ve seen war,” said Mr. Alvarez. “It’s called Midtown lunch rush.”
I had no rebuttal. A few minutes later, when Max and I had finished our food, I thanked them both and gathered our things.
As I slipped the little tray into the trash and adjusted my grip on Max’s leash, Elena grinned at me. “See you next week, maybe.”