The Old Collie in the Vet Clinic Lot

She played the organ for two funerals in March, which she still does when they ask her, and the families paid her fifty dollars each.

She kept all of it in a plain white envelope inside her piano bench, under the old hymnals, where she has kept her household money since I was a girl.

By the first week of April there was four hundred dollars in it, and she had called Dr. Pruett’s office to set a date.

That was what she was talking about at the table. She had planned to tell Arliss over dinner, nicely, that Sadie’s surgery was set for Tuesday, and that she had saved the money herself and would not need a dime from him.

“You saved for it,” Arliss said. It was not a question.

“I did,” Mom said. “It’s in the bench.”

He took another bite of roast and chewed it for a while. Then he said, “It’s not in the bench.”

Mom looked at him for a long moment. Then she pushed her chair back, got up slowly the way her knees make her get up now, and went into the front room where the piano is.

I heard the lid of the bench open. I heard the hymnals shift. I heard a long quiet, longer than it should take anyone to look inside a piano bench.

When she came back she was holding the envelope in her hand, and it was flat.

“I bought a rifle off Cyril on Friday,” Arliss said, before she could ask. “A good used one, with a scope. The coyotes got two of his calves last month and they’ll be in our chickens next.”

“With my money,” Mom said.

“With the money,” Arliss said. “I’ll make it up to you on the egg feed. But I am not paying four hundred dollars to cut on a thirteen-year-old dog. That’s not money, that’s foolishness.”

I want to be fair to Arliss, because Mom would want me to be.

He grew up on a cattle ranch north of the Missouri Breaks, one of eight kids, in a house where a dog was a working animal or nothing at all.

When a dog got old out there, nobody called a vet. Somebody’s father walked it out behind the barn with a rifle and came back alone.

Arliss told me that once, years ago, the way you would tell somebody what kind of weather you grew up in.

That is how he was raised. I believe that is honestly where the words came from.

But it was still not his money, and it was still not his dog, and he still opened her piano bench without asking her.

Mom did not raise her voice. She has never raised her voice in my hearing in fifty-one years. She folded the empty envelope in half and put it in the pocket of her cardigan.

“I’ll do the dishes,” she said, and she did, and Sadie got up and limped after her to the sink and lay down on the rug there.

Arliss finished his dinner, said it was good, which it was, and went out to the shop. A minute later I heard him start the tractor to drag the corrals.

I dried dishes beside my mother and did not say anything either, because I did not trust what would come out. My hands were shaking and I kept missing the edge of the drainer.