The Old Lab Who Came Back Home

I could hear her crying change through the phone, the way crying changes when somebody lifts something heavy off of you.

“I built him a ramp,” Dale said. “His hips are bad. He couldn’t do the steps. He’s up there now by the swing, sleeping like he never left.” He listened. “No. No, he’s fine. He’s good, honey. He’s a good dog. You said so yourself.”

He handed the phone back to me and walked off toward the shop, and he stayed out there a long time with the light on, not building anything that I could hear.

Before we hung up I gave Megan Barb’s number. I told her a woman who did not have to make a phone call had made one, and that she owed that woman a thank you in her own voice, not passed along through her mother.

She called Barb the next day from somewhere in New Mexico. Barb told me later that Megan cried the whole call and so did Barb, and that Barb told her about the notes that say worse, and that it seemed to help her some.

Ryan called Dale the day after that. I did not hear that conversation.

Dale told me only that Ryan said he should have stood up and said they would find another apartment or drive the dog home themselves, and that he had not, and that he was sorry.

Dale said he was a decent kid and he would be all right.

A week later a check came in the mail from Phoenix, made out to me, for eighty-five dollars.

In the memo line Megan had written Moose. There was a note with it, on real stationery this time, folded in thirds.

It said, Thank you for going first. I’m sorry I made you.

And under that was the whole letter about him she had not been able to hand the shelter: his food, his hips, the spot behind his left ear, how thunder scares him and he should be let into the bedroom when it storms.

I put the check in the folder with Barb’s papers and the receipt and the stationery. I never cashed it. It is still in there.

Moose settled in like he had never been gone. He slept by the swing at night and in the sun on his ramp in the afternoons.

He followed Dale to the shop in the mornings, slow, and lay in the doorway while Dale worked, the way he used to when he was young.

The vet in Brookings put him on a joint pill.

Dale started walking him to the mailbox and back every evening, a half mile round trip, and some evenings it took them forty minutes because Moose stopped to smell every fence post twice.

Megan started calling every Sunday after church. That was new. She had always been a once-every-two-weeks caller, busy, rushing.

Now it was Sunday at one o’clock, Arizona time, and the first thing she asked was always how he was doing.

Some Sundays she asked me to put the phone to his ear.

I felt foolish the first time, holding my cell phone to the side of a dog’s head on the porch while my daughter talked to him from a thousand miles away.

But his ears came up at her voice every single time, and his tail went.

After a while I stopped feeling foolish about it. After a while Dale started asking, around noon on Sundays, whether it was about time for Megan to call.