The Blind Dog By The Register

I did not stay much longer that day. Dot made me eat a plate of eggs and toast and would not hear otherwise, and I felt human again by the time I finished it, and the whole room fussed over Biscuit and slipped him little bits of bacon that he was probably not supposed to have. Hollis paid for my meal over my protests and told me his own mother had had a little dog just like Biscuit, at the end, and that she used to say you could tell everything you needed to know about a person by how they treated an animal that could do nothing for them. Then he shook my hand, and he shook Biscuit’s little paw, and he had a route to make, and he went.

Here is how it settled out, because I know you will want to know.

Marcus did not throw us out. Marcus, that afternoon, in front of that room, wiped the new prices off the board and started to cry, and Dot put her arm around him, this woman he had let sit off shift a year earlier so she could not stop him, and she forgave him faster than he deserved too. I do not know everything that has happened inside that family since, and it is not mine to tell. But I can tell you what I have seen with my own eyes, because I go back now.

The chalkboard out front still says DOGS WELCOME, and it is not going to get wiped down. There is a bowl of water by the door again, and a jar of biscuits on the counter, and a coffee can by the register with Pearl’s name written on it in Dot’s handwriting, for anybody who comes through hungry and short. The old regulars kept coming, which they might not have, and some folks who had quit coming after Pearl passed have drifted back in.

And on the shelf under the register, in that little worn spot, there is a fresh folded towel.

Biscuit sleeps at home with me every night, because he is my dog now and I am not giving him up, and I would fight the whole county for him. But two or three afternoons a week I carry him into that diner and I set him up on that towel by the register while I have my coffee, and he sleeps there in the sun the way he did for ten years, and the regulars scratch his ears when they come in, and Dot calls him Pearl’s Biscuit, and Marcus, who once called him ugly and half dead, lifts him up onto that shelf himself now, careful, with both hands, the way his mother used to.