The Old Lab Who Came Back Home

He rode in the back of Dale’s pickup until the vet told us his hips could not take the jump anymore.

Megan was thirty-two now. She had married Ryan the year before, a quiet young man who did sheet metal work for a heating and cooling outfit in Sioux Falls.

In August his company offered him a foreman job in Phoenix, more money than either of them had ever seen.

They found an apartment over the internet. I had heard Megan mention, once, at Sunday dinner, that the complex had a weight limit on dogs.

Thirty-five pounds, she had said, and then she had changed the subject, and I let her.

Moose weighed about eighty pounds. I did that math at Sunday dinner, and I am ashamed to say I did not do it out loud.

I assumed she had a plan. Megan always had a plan, right up until the day she didn’t.

I called her from the break room. It rang four times and went to her voicemail, her bright little recorded voice telling me to leave a message and have a great day.

I called again. Voicemail again. They had pulled out of Sioux Falls at dawn that morning in a rented truck with Ryan’s pickup on a trailer behind it, and I figured they were somewhere in Nebraska by then, somewhere with no signal, or somewhere she was looking at her phone and turning it face down.

I typed out a text. Call me. It’s about Moose. I looked at it a long time before I sent it, because I wanted to type a great deal more than that, and I knew anything more would be something I could not take back.

Nothing came back. The little word under my message said delivered, and then it just sat there.

I went back to Barb, who had waited on the line the whole time.

I asked her what happened now, and how long I had, and whether I could just come and get him, since he was family.

“I wish I could tell you yes,” Barb said. “When it’s a stray, there’s a hold, a few days for the owner to come looking. When the owner signs him over, there’s no hold. He belongs to the shelter now. Your girl signed the paper.”

“So what happens to him?” I asked. I was holding the edge of the break room table with my free hand.

“He gets his vet check and his evaluation, and then he goes up on the board for adoption,” she said. “Could be tomorrow. Could be this afternoon if the vet gets to him.” Her voice went careful. “The old big ones don’t always get picked. Some do. Some go to whoever walks in first.”

“Then I’ll be the one who walks in first,” I said, and I was surprised at how steady it came out.

“I’ll put a note on his run that family’s coming,” Barb said. “That’s all I can do. Drive safe.”

Dale was combining soybeans on the north quarter that week, trying to get them out before the rain they kept promising on the radio.

I called his cell and it rang a long time, and I pictured him up in the cab with the radio going and the dust rolling off the header.

When he picked up, I could hear the engine. I told him in about four sentences.

Then I heard the engine drop and go quiet, and I knew he had pulled the throttle back and shut it down out there in the middle of the field to hear me.