The Secret My Father Kept In The Garage

What My Mother Wanted

I need to go back further than that Saturday morning to explain what Dean was actually looking at, because my father never once, in six years, tried to explain it to me either, and I think I understand now why.

My mother, Delores, wanted to open an animal shelter for most of the last fifteen years of her life. Not a rescue exactly, not at first, just a place. She used to talk about it the way some people talk about a trip they’re going to take someday, a little wistfully, like she knew the timing was never quite going to be right but she liked having the dream anyway. She’d clipped magazine photos of barn-style shelters for years and kept them in a shoebox in her closet that I found after she died and had no idea what to do with.

She got sick before she ever got the chance. Two years of appointments in Tupelo and then Jackson, a bad spring, and then she was gone, and my father spent most of that first year after barely leaving the house except to go to the feed store and church, and even church he mostly stopped after a while because, in his words, everybody there kept looking at him like he was something fragile that might break in front of them.

What he did instead, starting the spring after she passed, was call the county shelter and ask what happened to the dogs nobody wanted. Not the young ones, not the easy ones people lined up for. The old ones. The ones with bad hips or cloudy eyes or gray muzzles, the ones who’d used up their time on the euthanasia list because nobody was coming for a ten-year-old dog with a heart murmur when there were puppies two kennels down.

Carl, the same animal control officer who stood in our driveway that Saturday with a search warrant, turned out to be the same man my father had been calling every few weeks for six years asking the same question. What have you got that’s about to run out of time.