The Dog Who Would Not Eat
Dr. Vasek was quiet on the line. Then he said, “I knew his father. I can do that,” and I believed him.
I did not know what to do with myself until eleven, so I cleaned.
I washed the kitchen floor on my hands and knees. I do not know what I thought I was getting it ready for. I shook Duke’s rug out over the porch rail.
At one o’clock the phone rang.
I knew the number. It had been written on the pad by my telephone for twelve years, and in twelve years it had never once called mine.
“Colleen?” Tina said. “It’s Tina.” She sounded like a person who has been crying and has finished.
“I know, honey.”
I do not know where the honey came from. I had never called her that. There was a silence on the line, and I think it surprised us both.
“I read it,” she said. “All of it. I read it at Brad’s kitchen table Monday night after the boys went to bed. I didn’t know about the knee. I didn’t know you paid for that.”
“That isn’t why I sent it.”
“I know why you sent it.”
I let that be.
“How is he?”
“Dr. Vasek took blood. He said his kidneys and his liver are all right. He gave him something to coat his stomach. He’s down three pounds.”
“And Brad?”
Nothing.
“Tina. What did Dr. Vasek tell your brother?”
She was quiet a long time. I could hear an engine idling behind her.
“Look out your front window,” she said.
I carried the phone to the front room, the same room where the hospital bed had stood. Brad’s pickup was parked at my curb. Not in the driveway. At the curb, like company.
Tina was in the passenger seat with her phone at her ear. She lifted her hand to me.
Brad was already out. He stood on the sidewalk a moment with his hands at his sides, looking at the house. Then he went around and opened the back door of the truck, and he bent, and he got one arm under Duke’s chest and the other under his haunches, and he lifted him down onto the grass.
I got to the front door before they got to the step.
Duke saw me through the storm door. He did not run. He could not run anymore. He came up the walk at that stiff, rocking walk of his, with his whole back half going side to side, and he made a sound I had not heard out of him since he was a pup.
I opened the door and went down on my knees right there on the mat, and he put his whole head into my chest and leaned.
I held on to him a good while.
When I looked up, Brad was standing at the bottom of the step with his cap in his hand. He had the brown envelope under his arm.
“I’d have brought his bed,” he said. “Except we never took it.”
“No,” I said. “You didn’t.”
“I didn’t take his leash either. I had him on a piece of clothesline.” He looked at the cap. “I didn’t know he couldn’t jump. I didn’t know he couldn’t get up off a kitchen floor. Jake found him Sunday morning with his back legs splayed out on the tile, and he’d been there I don’t know how long. He never made a sound.”