The Old Collie in the Vet Clinic Lot

When the tractor got far enough away that we could not hear it, Mom set down her dish rag and took me by the wrist, out the back door and onto the porch.

The afternoon was clear and cold, the way April is up here.

You could see all the way to the Judith Mountains, and the Big Snowies off to the south still had their white tops.

“Harriet,” she said. “I know what you are going to say, and I need you not to say it.”

“Mom, he took your money.”

“I know he did.” She held onto the porch post. “And I am eighty years old, and I have been married to that man for ten years, and he has been good to me in every way he knows how to be.”

“Not in this one.”

“Not in this one,” she agreed. “But I am not going to start a war in my marriage at eighty over a rifle. I am not going to have you two not speaking at Christmas. I do not want a fight. I want my dog to walk right.”

I looked at her. She has gotten small in the last few years, my mother.

She used to be taller than me, and now the top of her white head comes up about to my chin.

“Then let me pay for it,” I said.

“I didn’t call you out here for money,” she said.

“I know you didn’t. I’m offering it anyway.”

She was quiet for a long while. Down by the porch steps Sadie had come out and lain in the sun, with that bad leg stuck out stiff behind her.

“You’ll let me pay you back,” Mom said finally. “Out of the eggs. A little at a time.”

“If you want,” I said, though I knew I would never cash a dime of it.

So that was the deal. I did not call Arliss out to the porch.

I did not call the sheriff, the way the practical part of me wanted to. I did not call anybody but the vet.

On Monday morning I called Dr. Pruett’s office from the back room of the school library, between the second graders and the fifth graders.

Ottoline answered the phone the way she has answered it for twenty years.

I told her I was Augustina Merz’s daughter and that the Tuesday surgery for Sadie was still on, and that I would be the one paying.

She did not ask me any questions. She just said, “Good. We’ll see you at eight.”

I asked my principal for a personal day. She signed the slip without looking up and said she hoped everything was all right at home. I said it was going to be.

Tuesday came up clear and bright, with frost on the windshield and a hard blue sky.

I drove out to Mom’s place at a quarter to seven, and she was already sitting on the porch steps in her rose-pink sweater, her good coat over her arm, with Sadie lying beside her.

Arliss had gone out early to feed. His pickup was down by the stock tank. He raised one hand to me from across the yard, and I raised one back, and that was all.

We took Mom’s car, the old tan sedan she has had since before she married him, because it rides low enough for an old dog to get into.