The Dog Who Would Not Eat
“You walked him.”
“I walked him on Saturdays.” He was quiet a while, getting his breath. “You take care of your dog, Colleen.”
That was four days before he died. Nobody heard it but me and Duke. Dennis was a good man who did not like a hard conversation, and he kept his life with me and his life with his children in two separate pockets. He drove to Norfolk alone every Christmas Eve for twelve years. He never made them look, and so they never did.
I do not hold it against him. But it is the reason Brad could stand at my back door with his hand on that collar and believe every word he was saying.
That night the house made sounds I had never noticed.
I put the funeral food away. I changed out of my dress. I went around and turned off the lamps, and I found myself standing in the kitchen at seven o’clock with the measuring cup that was not there in a hand that was reaching for it.
His bed was by the table, where it had always been. His leash was on the hook by the door.
I went to bed at nine and put my feet down on the rug at six without having to feel for a place, and that was when I cried. Not at the church. Not at the cemetery. On the edge of my bed on a Saturday morning with both feet flat on an empty rug.
Then I got up and made coffee, because there was something that had to be done and I was the only one who knew how to do it.
A dog on medicine cannot go by “twice a day, with food.” I had said that much through a truck window to a man who was not listening, and it had bothered me all night. The hip pill can tear up a dog’s stomach if it goes down without a meal. Somebody in that house in Norfolk needed to know his day.
I sat down at the kitchen table in the daylight with a pad of paper. His empty bed was beside my chair. I had taken the leash off its hook, I do not know why, and it lay on the floor next to the bed where I had let it drop.
I wrote it out by the hour.
6:30 in the morning. Out the back door. Let him stand on the step a minute before he takes the stairs. His hips are stiff first thing and he will fall if you hurry him.
7:00. Breakfast. Two level cups, with warm water poured over it. Let it sit five minutes. One white pill (thyroid) and one tan pill (carprofen, for his hips) pushed down into the food. Never give the tan pill on an empty stomach.
Noon. One joint chew from the jar. He will tell you when it is noon.
3:00. A short walk. To the corner and back is plenty. He will want to go farther. Do not let him talk you into it.
7:00 in the evening. Supper, the same as breakfast. Both pills again.
9:30. Out one last time. He sleeps on a rug, not a slick floor. He cannot get up off a slick floor by himself.
It filled a page and part of another. I read it over twice. Then I opened the drawer by the telephone and took out the folder.