The Old Lab Who Came Back Home

He was not doing anything. He was just lying there with his eyes open, watching the drain in the floor.

He did not get up when we came in. I want to be honest about that.

For about two seconds I thought maybe he had gotten too old, or too sad, and that he did not know me at all anymore.

Then the fan turned or the air shifted, and he lifted his nose. His tail hit the concrete once, a heavy thump, and then again, and then again.

He tried to get his back legs under him and they would not go.

He tried again, and the second time he made it, and he came to the gate with his whole back end swinging and pushed his gray face into the chain link where my hand was.

I knelt down right there on that wet concrete in my good bank slacks and put my fingers through the wire, and he licked them like he had found something he had been looking for since yesterday afternoon. I suppose he had.

“Well,” Barb said behind me, and her voice went a little thick. “There’s no question whose dog that is.”

The adoption fee for a dog over seven was eighty-five dollars. That covered his rabies shot, which was due, his microchip, and the exam the vet had done on him that morning.

Barb said the vet had written arthritis in both hips, some cloudiness in one eye, heart good.

There was a form. I filled it out at the counter. Name, address, own or rent, other pets, fenced yard.

I wrote that we had a hundred and sixty acres and two barn cats, and the girl at the desk smiled and said that would probably do.

When I turned to the second page there was a copy of the surrender form stapled to the back of his file.

My daughter had signed it the day before, in her round handwriting, on the line for the owner giving up all rights to the animal.

I signed my name on the adopter’s line, right under hers. Peggy Halvorsen.

I paid the eighty-five dollars with my debit card, the same card I buy groceries with, and the little machine took a long time to think about it.

Barb handed me a paper folder with his shot record, his chip number, the vet’s notes, and a care sheet for senior dogs.

The receipt with the three words on it was paper-clipped inside the front cover.

“I didn’t think you’d want me to throw it out,” she said. “But I can, if you’d rather.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll keep it.”

She walked us out to the car herself. In the lobby she put her hand on my arm. “I’m sorry it was your own girl,” she said.

“So am I,” I said, and that was the truest thing I said all day.

“She wrote good dog, though,” Barb said. “I’ve read a lot of those notes. Some of them say a lot worse. She wrote good.”

I did not know what to do with that, so I thanked her, and I asked for her number, and I put it in my phone under Barb Shelter.

Moose could not jump into my car, so Barb and I lifted him in together, her at the front end and me at the back, and he let us, patient as a sack of feed.

I spread my jacket on the passenger seat. He climbed over the console anyway and lay with his head on my leg the whole sixty miles.