The Blind Dog By The Register

But when she passed, the phone that used to ring with her calls just went quiet. The cousins who had visited twice a year while she was alive stopped visiting. The neighbor who used to come by every Sunday, it turned out, had been coming for my mother’s company, not mine. I found out that winter how many of the people I thought were mine had really only been circling her, and how thin the circle got once she was gone. I was thirty-eight years old, and I was living alone in my dead mother’s house, and most days the only voice I heard was my own.

So when that teenage volunteer told me about the old blind dog who cried every time somebody walked past and did not stop, I understood exactly what he was crying about. I filled out the papers that same afternoon. He rode home in my lap with his nose tucked into the crook of my elbow, and he has slept against my side every night since, and the truth is I do not know which one of us saved the other. I have stopped trying to work out the difference.

So that is who walked into that diner. A worn-out woman on her dead mother’s birthday, lightheaded and half sick, with a blind old dog buttoned up inside her cardigan against her chest. I was not looking for trouble. I was looking for a chair and a cup of coffee and five minutes to let the room stop spinning.

There were maybe a dozen people in the place. Older folks mostly, the county-road diner crowd, men in feed caps and a couple of women with their church-bulletin voices, the kind of regulars who have a usual booth and a usual order. A young couple sat near the window with a big golden retriever stretched out asleep under their table, its leash looped loose around a chair leg, nobody paying it any mind. Booths along the wall, a long counter with stools, a chalkboard over the pass listing the pie of the day. A comfortable, ordinary, small-town place.

I went up to the counter. A man in a white apron was working the register, midforties maybe, clean-cut, with the brisk, impatient way about him of somebody who thinks the customers are slowing his day down.

“Just a coffee, please,” I said. “Small is fine.”