I am walking my blind dog in a public park. We are on one of those community tracks. There are people exercising everywhere.

Joggers. Walkers. A few cyclists. One woman is power walking, wearing earbuds, having an animated phone conversation, talking to an invisible person. She looks like she is hallucinating.

My dog, Marigold, and I have been working on walking a lot lately. It’s not easy, walking. We have very few “good walks” inasmuch as walking in a straight line is nigh impossible when you can’t see.

So mainly, we walk in zig-zags until both of us are dizzy and one of us needs a carbonated malt beverage.

When I near the tennis courts, I meet a woman with a little girl. They are sitting on a bench. The girl sees my dog and she is ecstatic.

“Look at the pretty dog!” the kid says.

So I introduce the child to Marigold. Immediately the child senses there is something different about this animal.

“What’s wrong with your dog?” the kid asks.

“She is blind,” I say.

The child squats until she is eye level with Marigold.

“How did this happen?” the girl asks.

I’m not sure what I should say here. So I keep it brief.

“Someone wasn’t nice to her,” I say.

The kid is on the verge of tears. “What do you mean?”

This is where things get tricky. I don’t know how much of Marigold’s biography I should reveal. Because the truth is, Marigold was struck with a length of rebar, by a man in Mississippi who purchased her as a hunting hound.

“She was abused,” I say.

The little girl’s face breaks open. The girl presses her nose against Marigold’s dead eyes. She feels the dog’s fractured skull with her hands.

“Oh, sweet baby,” the child says.

That’s when I notice the mottled scars on the child’s neck. They look like major burns. I say nothing about this, but the wounds are hard not to see.

“Can I play with her?” the kid asks.

“Sure,” I say. So I turn Marigold off leash. The child and the dog are now loose in a grassy area. They are chasing each other.

The girl runs, haphazardly. Marigold uses her prodigious nose to find the girl. Marigold is a coonhound with a powerful sense of smell. Marigold could smell flatulence from three houses down the street.

“She’s my foster daughter,” the woman tells me privately. “I’ve raised four kids of my own already, but I’m trying to adopt her.”

The girl and dog are now rolling on the grass. Marigold is licking the child.

The woman went on. “Her biological mom burned her with boiling water when she was a toddler. That’s why the scars. Her mom got mad one night, while she was making spaghetti, she poured boiling water down her neck.”

Now it was my turn to try not to cry.

“When she came to live with us, she was afraid of us, always trying to please us. She told me she was afraid that I’d hurt her if she upset me. It’s taken forever to get her to trust me.”

I overhear the child and the dog talking. The little girl is whispering into the dog’s ear. I hear her words.

“I’m sorry someone hurt you,” says the child. “But it had nothing to do with you, because you’re a sweet girl. You need to understand, sweetie, when people hurt other people, they don’t always know what they’re doing. You can’t blame them. It doesn’t mean that nobody loves you. People still love you. Everyone loves you. I love you.”

So anyway, we had a good walk.