The Dog Who Would Not Eat
I keep things. I am my mother’s daughter. In that folder was every bill from Dr. Vasek’s clinic since the towel and the laundry room floor. They were in order. I counted them, because I had never had a reason to before.
Forty-three.
The puppy shots. The neutering. Ten years of heartworm tests. The time he got into a roll of barbed wire behind the county shop and needed nine stitches in his shoulder. The knee surgery when he was six, which was eighteen hundred dollars I paid in three installments out of my own check from the courthouse, because Dennis’s truck had needed a transmission that same month. The blood tests when he got slow and heavy and Dr. Vasek figured out it was his thyroid. Every refill since.
At the top of every one of them, in the same typed line, it said: Client: Colleen Schmidt.
Not Dennis. Not Mr. and Mrs. Mine.
I had not planned that. I was simply the one who took him.
I sat there with that stack in one hand. I will tell you the truth: I started to add them up. I got as far as the knee surgery and I put the pencil down. A total is a thing you throw at somebody. I did not want to throw anything at those two. I wanted them to turn the pages.
Then I got out my checkbook and wrote a check to Brad Schmidt for six hundred dollars and no cents. On the memo line I wrote Duke.
That was the price he had named. He had said it at my back door like a thing that settled the matter, so I settled it. If six hundred dollars was what made a dog somebody’s, then here was six hundred dollars.
I looked at the bills and the check together and wondered if it was a mean thing to do. I prayed over it a minute. I decided it was only the facts, put in an envelope.
I did not write a letter. I thought about one. Every sentence I tried sounded like a woman keeping score.
In the end I added one line at the bottom of the schedule, under the 9:30.
He will not eat until someone sits on the floor with him.
That was all. I did not ask for him back. I did not say whose dog he was. I put the schedule, the forty-three bills and the check in a big brown envelope, and I drove it to the post office and got it across the counter before the window closed, which it does early on a Saturday.
Sunday I went to Mass and sat in the pew where Dennis and I always sat, and people held my hand afterward, and nobody asked where the dog was because nobody knew to.
I set Duke’s bowl out both mornings out of habit and stood looking at it, and put it away again.
Jeff called Monday night. “You heard anything?”
“No.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I don’t either.”
“Sis, there’s a sheriff in this county and you know him by his first name.”
“And he’d tell me it was a family matter, and he’d be right,” I said. “Dennis wrote the check for that dog. Brad is his son. I am not going to have a deputy stand in a driveway in Norfolk and decide it. They’d hate me the rest of their lives, and they’d be telling the truth when they said why.”