Goings On: Cardio walk

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Goines’ wife asked him whether he had had a good cardio walk. He said he had. “I walked at a pace of 16 minutes and 20 seconds a mile.”
    He hadn’t felt like walking fast when he left the house. And he almost forgot to start Runkeeper before starting out leftward to follow their street around the neighborhood. About a hundred yards ahead of him, a woman in black shorts was walking her dog. No longer accompanied by Ziggy, Goines decided to fall in behind the pair, and sped up a bit.
    He soon halved the distance between himself and them, and moderated his pace. The woman’s hair was black, piled in a huge coil on top of her head. It was as dark black as her shorts, and as dark as her legs were white – maybe she had been waiting for this warmer weather to start wearing shorts. She had a nice figure.
    Within about 60 feet of them, Goines became aware of the sharp tapping of his cane and realized that they would soon be able to hear it, if they hadn’t already. In fact, the dog just then started looking back at Goines, barking and pulling at the leash. The woman, though, didn’t look back, signaling no interest in who it might be behind her. Goines had seen her turn her head to the left once, but he hadn’t thought she had turned it far enough to actually see who might be back there, unless she had much better peripheral vision than he did.
    At the next corner, she led her dog to the right, still not looking directly back at Goines, which puzzled him, suggesting that she might be removing herself from her follower’s path but attempting to appear as though she had intended to turn right all along. Goines continued on, a little disappointed by this development but glad for the motivation to do a true cardio walk, his heart beating at a good pace now, and sweat dampening his T-shirt. He went on straight, twice looking back to see whether the woman had simply delayed in order to get behind him. But there was no one back there.
    He walked on alone, continuing a cardio pace, thinking of other things mostly, of who lived here, of who used to live there, of Ziggy, who used to walk with him along here...The appearance of a squirrel under someone’s tree reminded Goines – perhaps by its jerky motions – of the National Geographic television special he and Mrs. Goines had finished watching the night before, about the arrival of an Ebola virus in the United States in 1989. He pictured the scene where they were euthanizing all of the research monkeys – some jerking about to elude the sedating needle – because some of them were infected, and they didn’t have time to identify which ones, so as to spare the others….
    A few blocks farther along, Goines passed the house where a nurse lived with her young daughter. She was probably already off to work and her daughter to daycare. A block and a half beyond that he approached the house of a family who had just moved. The woman who used to live there had long black hair too.…
    He rounded the sharp corner at that family’s now vacant house, and there, about a hundred yards farther along, was the woman and her dog he had started out behind. Goines again sped up to shorten the distance. But soon they left the sidewalk and headed diagonally across the street, apparently having reached home.
    As Goines passed their house, the dog was waiting patiently for his mistress to unlock the front door. Goines recognized the house as that of a man he had spoken with a few times out pushing his daughter’s stroller. Could this woman be the man’s wife, the little girl’s mother? He guessed so.
    Goines continued his cardio pace home, not that many houses farther on. “It was a good walk,” he told his wife. “Good cardio. Sixteen minutes and 20 seconds per mile.”

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