The Dog Harlan Left Behind

“Wade.” I said it very quietly. “Thank you for coming through that ice for me. I will never forget it as long as I live.”

He stopped.

“I’m not moving to Lincoln. I was born eleven miles from this hospital. I’ll be buried next to your father in the Tobin cemetery, and between here and there I’m going to live in my own house with my own dog. That is mine to decide. It was not decided on a bad night, and it will not be decided on a bad week.”

He opened his mouth.

“But I’m not a fool. You were right that I’m alone out there. Not about the dog. About that.”

He closed his mouth again.

“So here is what I’ll agree to. I’ll wear one of those buttons that calls the ambulance. I’ll keep my cell phone on the charger by my bed, and you’ll show me how it works. We talk every evening at six, and if I don’t pick up, you call Gene. Gene gets a key.”

“I’ll do it because I choose to. Do you understand the difference?”

My son looked at me a long time. Then, slowly, he smiled. It was a tired, damp, crooked smile, and it was his father’s smile all over again.

“I understand, Mom. I think I do.”

“Good.”

“Is that all the terms?”

“One more.” I squeezed his sleeve. “Chief eats cheese crackers whenever he wants.”

He laughed, a real one, and it was the sound I had been missing for more than two weeks.

On the second afternoon Jenny drove down from Lincoln with Katie, who is nine and as serious as a judge. Katie walked straight past my bed, out to the hallway, and sat down on the floor beside Chief.

I watched them through the open door. My granddaughter put her whole arms around that dog’s neck and said something into his torn ear.

“She’s been telling him things since the funeral,” Jenny said quietly, from beside me. “When she calls you on Sundays, she asks you to hold the phone down by his ear. Did you know?”

I looked at Wade, who stood in the doorway watching his daughter on a hospital floor with her face in a dog’s neck. I watched him understand it.

He did not say a word, then or later. But he went out and sat down on the floor of that hallway in his good pants, next to his daughter and the dog, and put an arm around them both.

The first Saturday in March, Wade pulled into the yard with Katie in the front seat and a stack of two-by-sixes in the bed. He did not ask. He looked at the four porch steps, too steep for an old dog’s hips, and went to work.

By Sunday supper there was a ramp, wide and gently sloped, covered in the rough gray carpet they use on boat docks. Wade would not let me pay for the lumber. I asked him twice.

Chief walked up it that evening, all the way, for the first time in two months. At the top he turned around and looked at my son with his soft clouded eyes.

“You’re welcome, Chief,” Wade said gruffly.

And then, because the Lord does have a sense of humor, the old dog walked back down that ramp, nosed into Wade’s hand, and sat on his foot.

It is October again. I am writing this at my kitchen table on the evening of the second Thursday, one year to the day.