“Just put her down, Gus,” my stepdad said, with his fork still in his hand and a bite of roast on it. “She’s had a good run. That’s more than most dogs get.”
It was Sunday dinner at Mom’s place, the second Sunday in April, and the sun was coming in the kitchen window so bright you could see the dust over the table.
Sadie was lying under that table where she always lies, with her chin resting on the toe of Mom’s church shoe. She thumped her tail once when she heard her name.
Mom set her fork down very carefully, the way she sets things down when she is trying not to drop them. She did not look at Arliss. She looked at the dog.
“Dr. Pruett says she has years left in her,” Mom said quietly. “It is not the bad kind. It is just in a bad place.”
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“Dr. Pruett says a lot of things,” Arliss said. “He gets paid either way.”
I was sitting across from them with a glass of iced tea going warm in my hand.
I had come out after church like I do most Sundays, thirty miles from town on the county road, and I wished right then I had stayed home.
Sadie is a rough collie, sable and white, thirteen years old that spring.
Mom got her as a pup the year after my father died, from a ranch family near Denton who had a litter in their machine shed.
She is the kind of dog that walks you to the mailbox and walks you back.
She has slept on the rug by Mom’s side of the bed every night for thirteen years, through the lonely years after Dad, through Mom’s knee surgery, and through the second wedding.
In February Mom had noticed a lump on Sadie’s back leg, high up on the inside of the thigh.
By March it was the size of a baseball, and Sadie had started to swing that leg wide when she walked.
Mom took her to Dr. Ivo Pruett in Lewistown, who has been doctoring animals in Fergus County longer than I have been a librarian.
He put a needle in the lump, looked at it under his microscope, and told Mom the news straight.
It was a fatty mass, the kind old dogs get, not a cancer. But it had grown in between the muscles, and it was pressing on things it should not press on.
Left alone, it would keep growing, and Sadie would keep limping until she quit walking altogether.
He could take it off. Her bloodwork was good for a dog her age, her heart was strong, and he had done a hundred of these.
Four hundred dollars, he told her, for the surgery, the anesthetic, the stitches and the pain pills to bring home.
Mom said later that she knew it was a kind price. Dr. Pruett charges what a ranch county can pay, and everybody around here knows it.
She thanked him and said she would call when she had it.
Mom does not have much. She has her Social Security, a little from the piano lessons she still gives two farm girls on Thursdays, and what she gets for her eggs.
Arliss has his own check and pays the light bill and the propane.
So she saved. She sold eggs to the ladies at church and to two families on the county road.