The Old Lab Who Came Back Home

“She left him at the shelter,” Dale said slowly. It was not a question. He was setting it down somewhere inside himself to look at later.

“With a note,” I said. “Three words. Old, good dog.”

He was quiet a long time. Dale is a quiet man in general, the kind who says grace in nine words and means every one of them.

But this was a different kind of quiet, and I let it sit.

“Go get him,” he said finally. “I’ll be in by supper.”

“You’ve got beans to cut,” I said. “They said rain by Thursday.”

“The beans will be there tomorrow,” Dale said. “Go get him, Peg. Bring him home.”

I asked my manager for the afternoon. She took one look at my face and did not ask a thing.

Kim hugged me on my way past her window, which she has never done in eleven years of working next to me, and I did not know I needed it until she did it.

It is about sixty miles from our place to the shelter in Sioux Falls, nearly all of it straight down the interstate through bean fields and corn going gold, under a sky so big it makes you feel like a crumb on a plate.

I do not remember much of that drive. I remember the sun on the dash.

I remember I kept my hands at ten and two like my father taught me and drove exactly the speed limit, because I was afraid that if I let myself go any faster I would not stop.

I tried Megan twice more on the way. Voicemail both times. I did not leave a message.

I did not trust my own voice on a recording she could play back over and over.

What I mostly thought about was the receipt. A grocery receipt. My daughter, who cried for two days when her hamster died in the fourth grade, had stood in a shelter lobby and turned over a grocery receipt and written three words on it and walked out.

I could not make the girl I raised and the hand that wrote that note into the same person.

I kept trying, all sixty miles, and I could not do it.

The shelter is a low tan building off a frontage road, with a chain link yard on one side and a parking lot full of cars with car seats in the back.

You could hear the barking from the lot before I even shut the engine off.

Barb was waiting in the lobby. She was a little older than me, sixty-five maybe, with short white hair and a gray sweatshirt with dog hair down the whole front of it.

She took both my hands before I could tell her who I was.

“You’re the mom,” she said. “I can see her in you. He’s out back. I told the girls at the desk family was coming, so nobody’s going to walk off with him.”

She took me through a steel door into the noise. It was loud the way only a room full of dogs can be loud, every one of them up on its hind legs at the gate saying pick me, pick me, pick me.

Moose was in the last run on the left. He was lying on a thin rubber mat with his chin on his front paws, and he was not barking.