The Dog Who Would Not Eat

“So you’re just going to wait.”

“I’m going to wait.”

“On what?”

“On them reading it,” I said.

Tuesday morning, at twenty past eight, the phone rang.

“Colleen. Ed Vasek.”

“Morning, Doctor.”

“I have just had a call from a young lady in Norfolk who says she is Dennis’s daughter and that she has Duke.” He said it mildly, the way he says everything. He has been doctoring cattle and dogs in Holt County a long time and I have never heard him in a hurry. “She found my number at the top of a stack of my own bills. Now, yours is the name on his file, and yours is the number, and has been since he was the size of a boot. So you are who I call. I need his pill times, exactly, and I need to know when he last had the carprofen with a meal in him.”

“Seven o’clock Friday morning,” I said. “Two cups, both pills. Ed, why?”

“Because she tells me he has not eaten since.”

I sat down.

“Since Friday?”

“Since Friday. The brother has been getting the pills into him with peanut butter. He’ll take the peanut butter. He will not touch his food. They tried chicken. They tried hamburger. The wife fried him an egg. He lies by their front door.”

Four days. Four days of that tan pill going down into an empty stomach.

“I told her not one more carprofen until I’ve seen him,” Dr. Vasek said. “The brother’s driving him up. I’ll have him on my table at eleven.”

“Ed. Did anybody sit on the floor with him?”

He was quiet a moment. He knew all about the floor. He was the one who had told me to get food into that pup any way I could.

“The sister did,” he said. “Last night, after she read your note. She says she got down on her brother’s kitchen floor at eleven o’clock at night with the bowl in her lap. He took four pieces out of her hand. Then he got up and went back to the door and lay down facing it.” He cleared his throat. “She said to me, Doctor, he is waiting for somebody, and it isn’t me.”

I put my hand over my mouth. I did not want him to hear what was in my throat.

“You want to be here at eleven?” he said. “It’s your dog. I’d not see him without telling you.”

I looked at the bed by the table.

I could have gone, of course. I could have walked into that exam room and held out my hand for a leash that was not even with him. Nobody would have stopped me. But then I had taken him. Brad would tell it for the rest of his life as the day his father’s widow took his father’s dog, and it would be one more thing those children did not have of Dennis because of me.

I wanted Brad to know it for himself. I did not think I could be the one to tell him. I thought there was one man who could.

“No,” I said. “If I’m standing in that room, he’ll hear me and not you.”

“That’s about what I figured you’d say.”

“Ed. He is going to ask you what’s wrong with that dog. Tell him the truth. But tell him kindly. He buried his father on Friday. He isn’t a bad man. He just wasn’t there.”