Manhattan is more than a backdrop to the narrator’s life with Apollo: its small apartment, dog-restricted lease, crowded streets, and building management make caring for him a daily negotiation between attachment and the threat of losing a home. The city also makes their bond conspicuous, as the narrator walks a dog too large to keep out of view through the neighborhood and across five flights of stairs.

Home and Tenancy

The narrator’s apartment is barely five hundred square feet, divided into two nearly equal rooms, a kitchenette, and a bathroom so narrow that Apollo has to enter and back out like a stall. An air mattress in the bedroom closet, bought years earlier for a visit from the narrator’s sister, belongs to the apartment’s former arrangements; now the space must accommodate a massive dog as well. The lease prohibits dogs. When the narrator signed it, she was moving in with two cats and did not imagine getting a puppy. She has held on to the rent-stabilized Manhattan apartment for more than thirty years, including periods when she lived out of town, and fears risking it. The landlord lives in Florida and has never met her. The superintendent, Hector, lives in the neighboring building owned by the same landlord.

The Dog in Public

Apollo’s presence cannot be concealed. The narrator walks him several times a day, and he becomes a neighborhood spectacle: some residents are startled or back away, while one woman declines to share the small elevator. The narrator decides they should take the stairs instead, where Apollo’s galumphing descent of five flights is comical and, in her account, the one time he looks ungraceful. The streets bring a more immediate risk. Apollo sometimes squats dangerously close to the curb, and the narrator positions herself between him and oncoming traffic, hoping drivers will take greater care to avoid a person. Some Manhattan drivers curse her for the delay; others slow down to stare. She is also watched while cleaning up after him, using a child’s sand pail lined with a plastic bag and a small garden trowel. These walks frustrate the narrator’s wish for privacy and unhurried thought, but they also establish the routine through which she cares for Apollo.

Lease Conflict and a Rule

When the narrator brings Apollo home, Hector is away in Mexico for his brother’s wedding. On the day he returns, he encounters her and the dog as they are going out for a walk. She explains that Apollo’s owner died suddenly, that nobody else could take him, and that his stay is temporary. Hector tells her that the animal cannot remain in the building, even temporarily. A friend has told the narrator about New York City’s three-month rule for keeping a dog in an apartment: if a tenant keeps a dog for three months without the landlord taking action to evict, the tenant may keep the dog and cannot be evicted for doing so. The narrator doubts the claim, then reports that it is in fact the law. A condition is that the dog’s presence be open rather than hidden—an impossible condition to evade when Apollo is walked several times a day and has become a neighborhood wonder.

Management’s Decision

The dispute escalates when a letter from the building’s management office says that the narrator is violating her lease and that the dog must be removed immediately. Later, after the narrator obtains a certificate identifying Apollo as a support animal, she sends a copy to the management agent but keeps the certificate and badge from the National Service Animal Registry at home. She is aware of concerns that people falsely present ordinary or exotic pets as service animals, and promises not to take Apollo places where he would not normally be allowed. Hector eventually brings the news that the management agent has advised the landlord it is not worth contesting the request to keep Apollo as a support animal, particularly because no other tenants have complained about him. The narrator is damp-eyed with relief, while Hector grins. The resolution secures Apollo’s place in the apartment, but the narrator refuses to treat the certificate as a trick to preserve the right to keep a dog after Apollo is gone: she cannot bear the thought of Apollo being passed and replaced.