The Secret My Father Kept In The Garage

Adoption Day At The VFW Hall

The VFW parking lot fills up for a fish fry maybe twice a year. It has never, in the history of that building, filled up the way it did for the first Delores’s Extra Room adoption day, three weeks after the deputies came.

Somebody strung up a banner between two flagpoles with the dog rescue’s name misspelled on it, which my father refused to let anybody fix because, he said, it was the thought that mattered and he wasn’t going to hurt somebody’s feelings over a missing letter. Folding tables went up along the edge of the gravel lot, church ladies from three different congregations set out sheet cakes and a coffee urn the size of a fire hydrant, and six dogs my father had been fostering that month sat in borrowed pens waiting to meet people who’d heard about them by word of mouth over the preceding two weeks and driven in from as far as Amory and Booneville.

Carl came on his own time, not on the clock, and spent most of the afternoon fielding questions from people who wanted to know how they, too, might start pulling a dog or two off the county’s list. A reporter from the Tupelo paper showed up because somebody’s cousin worked there, and my father, who has never once in his life sought out attention for anything, stood in front of a camera for almost four full minutes before he found a reason to excuse himself and go check on a water bowl.

Lois worked the check-in table the whole afternoon, writing down names and phone numbers in handwriting a lot like the kind my father uses on his whiteboard, careful, block letters, like she wanted to get it exactly right. I watched her spend twenty minutes crouched next to an old beagle mix that hadn’t found anybody yet by three o’clock, scratching behind its ears and not saying much of anything, and I didn’t need her to tell me what she was thinking about.

By the end of that day, five of the six dogs had gone home with somebody. My father stood at the edge of the lot as the last truck pulled out, and for the first time since I can remember, since before my mother got sick even, I watched him look like a man who had absolutely nowhere else he needed to be.