The Man with the Lapdog

[Fiction] Almost every morning, as Lyle was getting ready to take the dog for a walk along the bay, his wife would ask, “Are ye down the prom, then?” They had met and married thirty years before, in Vermont, when she was Mary Curtin and he’d thought her a happy combination of exotic and domestic. At sixty, after their life in the States, she still called herself a Galway girl; at sixty-seven, after two years of retirement in Galway, Lyle still considered a prom a high school dance, not two miles of sidewalk beside the water.