White Man's Problems by Kevin Morris Page A

he lived in a world where Sondra thought he might be concerned about her workflow plan. He thanked her in Spanish, she thanked him in English, and he beat a retreat back to the technological windmills of the guesthouse.
    With all the confusion over attachments, he was late for lunch. The girls wanted him at Rostion San Vicente at quarter past noon, and he was already more than fifteen minutes late. He closed his eyes in frustration. When would he break through his preoccupation with work? He’d been in New York for a week, hadn’t spoken to his wife or daughter in three days, and was a no-show at yet another event that would never come again. It didn’t matter that yesterday’s party was billed as just another entirely missable school thing; it had turned out to yield a golden moment, a parent’s keepsake to be clutched when looking back, when inevitably he would think, Man, did that go fast . It was a memory, like so many others, that he would now have to access through the prism of his wife. He looked for his BlackBerry. Not wanting to let the girls down again, he texted Rita: I’m coming. I will be there. Sorry.
    Mulligan went to his closet and put on the jeans, the blue T, and sneakers. The brown shirt would have been the perfect thing. No response came from Rita, and he knew that meant she was angry, because she—like everyone everywhere—read all texts within five seconds of receipt. In moments like this, no answer from Rita was bad news, her way of leaving him alone to feel rotten about being absent. He raced to the other side of the house and jumped in the car, hitting the button to open the closest of the doors on the four-door garage. His moves combined the precision that comes with having done something a thousand times with the kind of corner cutting you did only when you were in a rush, like not snapping in your seat belt, which he could get to once he backed out of the Kenter Canyon driveway. The car’s roof narrowly passed underneath the still-upward-moving garage door. He reached for his sunglasses with his right hand and began rolling the wheel counterclockwise with his left.
    Before he could get the glasses to his face, Mulligan heard a muscular and garbled noise, almost like the workings of a trash compactor. He slammed the brakes. The sound had been strange—like something being rolled, very low and dense. He sat silent, hoping the coast was clear. He hoped it might have come from across the street. Maybe the gardeners were mulching something. Or maybe he had run over a branch or Bella’s skateboard or something. He shifted back into drive and started forward.
    The same low noise shot out, this time punctuated by a higher-pitched yelp. He closed his eyes and lifted his hands off the steering wheel as though it were suddenly ten thousand degrees. He had run over something. It was bad—muffled, crunching, and violent. He knew the sound of a body getting hit. He threw open the car door and dove to the ground. There was Henry, wedged under the rear axle, staring at him, a purplish mark on his brindled brow.
    Heartbreak slammed into Mulligan’s chest. He tried to be calm. “Hey, Henry. Hey, buddy,” he said. “C’mon, big boy. Can you come here?” Henry moved his front legs and shoulders, trying to obey, but he got nowhere. Mulligan reached and burned his hand on the exhaust pipe, and when he pulled back in pain, he smashed it against the inside of the wheel housing. He shimmied as far as he could and stretched again but barely touched the hair of the dog’s back. He spun over on his back, and tried to reach with his legs but got the same result. He went to the side to try to get at Henry from a different position, but he could only flex his toe thinly against the dog’s big shoulders, a pitiful drip of pressure—no match for the crush of the axle.
    Sondra was off to the market by now, which left him alone. He felt the sickening