The Dog Who Would Not Eat
“He wouldn’t.”
“No.” Brad’s jaw worked. “Colleen, I need to tell you what that vet said to me, and I need you to let me get through it.”
“All right.”
“He had him up on the scale and he said, this dog’s not sick, son. This dog is homesick. And I said, he’s home, he’s my dad’s dog, he’s with family. And he didn’t argue with me. He sat right down on the floor of that exam room, a man his age, and he got Duke’s head in his lap, and he said, I knew your dad. I liked him. He kept the Page road open for my folks more winters than I can count.”
Brad stopped and got his breath.
“He said, your dad sat in my waiting room exactly two times in ten years. Both times I asked him to come on back, and both times he said, no, Doc, I’m only the driver, that’s Colleen’s dog. He said, your father wrote one check for this dog. I have got forty-three of them in that file, and I can tell you who wrote every one. He said, I’m not telling you that to shame you. I’m telling you because nobody else is going to, and because your dad would want you to know who looked after what he loved.”
Tina had got out of the truck. She came up and stood beside her brother.
“He said one more thing,” she said.
Brad nodded. He could not say it. She said it for him.
“He said, the woman could have come and got him Friday night and nobody in this county would have blamed her. She sent you his pill times instead.”
None of us said anything. Duke leaned on me.
“I thought he was Dad’s,” Brad said. His voice broke clean in half on the word. “I thought if I had him, I’d have some of Dad. That’s all it was. I wasn’t trying to take something of yours. I didn’t know he was yours. Nobody ever told me.”
“I know that, Brad.”
“He kept going to my truck. Every time I let him out, he went and stood at the door of my truck. I thought he was looking for Dad.”
“He was,” I said. “He’s been looking for him since the last week of August. So have I.”
That was when that big man put the back of his hand against his eyes and stood on my front walk and cried like a boy. And I got up off my knees, which took some doing, and I did what I had wanted to do at the cemetery and had not dared. I put my arms around Dennis’s son.
He let me.
“He still hasn’t eaten,” Tina said, after a while, wiping her face. “Dr. Vasek said to try him as soon as we got him here.”
So the four of us went into the kitchen.
I measured two level cups. I ran the tap until it was warm and poured it over, and I let it sit the five minutes, with Duke standing over the bowl and looking from it to me. He was trembling in his back legs.
Then I put one hand on the counter and one hand on the table, and I lowered myself down onto my clean kitchen floor.
Duke looked at me. He looked at the bowl.
He ate.