The Dog Harlan Left Behind

I did not know that Wade, ninety miles away, was looking at all this and seeing something else entirely. He came down every other Sunday and never missed. But after Christmas I noticed that when he drove in, he parked by the garage and did not look at the shed.

And I noticed that he started asking questions that were not really questions.

“How much is that medicine costing you, Mom?”

I told him. He wrote it down. I should have understood then what a man writing it down was going to do with it.

On Monday morning at ten o’clock, I walked into the Tobin Veterinary Clinic with a seventy-one-pound dog on a leash and my checkbook in my purse.

Marlene Voss was at the front desk in her lavender smock. She stood up when she saw me. She came around the counter, which she had never done before, and took both my hands.

“I told him I’d put you down for a consultation,” Marlene said, and her eyes were wet, “because that’s all I’m allowed to do. But I also told him I wouldn’t do one thing more until I’d heard it from you.”

Dr. Karen Lund came out of the back with her reading glasses pushed up in her hair. She is a plain, tired, kind woman in her fifties.

She did not ask me why I had come. She knelt on the floor of the exam room and went over Chief slowly. His hips, the long muscles in his back legs, the soft cloudy blue in both eyes. She listened to his chest for a long time.

“Seventy-one pounds,” Dr. Lund said finally. “He was eighty-eight at his last good checkup.” She sat back on her heels. “Your son said some things on the phone.”

“I’m sure he did.”

“He told me the dog was suffering and you were in denial.”

My face went hot. I looked at a poster about heartworm on the wall, and I made myself breathe.

“I’ll tell you what I told him,” Dr. Lund said. “I’m not going to recommend something I don’t see. This is an old dog. He is not a dying dog. Those are not the same.”

She counted it off on her fingers, plain as a feed bill. His hips were bad but not ruined. His heart was sound. The pills and the shots were giving him back his mornings.

“There are things we watch for,” she said. “When he stops eating. When he can’t stand even with help. When the bad days outnumber the good.”

“How will I know?”

“You’ll know before I do.” She smiled a little. “Tell me this. What does he still love?”

I had to think about it. Then I said, “Four o’clock,” and I told her about the shed door and the bucket, and my voice went thin, and I stopped.

Dr. Lund was quiet a moment. Then she said, “Della, that is a dog with a reason to get up. That’s not suffering. It might be the best medicine I’ve got.”

The exam and the first month of shots came to a hundred and thirty-eight dollars. I wrote the check at the front desk in my slow, even hand, and in the memo line I put his name. Chief.

Wade called that night at seven. I let it ring twice before I answered, so I would be steady.

“Marlene said you came in,” he said. His voice was strained. “Mom, I was only trying to help.”

“I know you were.”