The Old Collie in the Vet Clinic Lot

I spread a quilt on the back seat and lifted Sadie in, and she sighed and lay down like she knew.

Mom sat in the front, but she rode the whole thirty miles turned halfway around, with one hand over the back of the seat resting in that long sable ruff.

Every few miles she said something to the dog, too quiet for me to hear.

The county road was empty except for a stock trailer heading the other way.

Somebody’s calves were out in the ditch near the Plum Creek turnoff, and I slowed down for them, and Mom said she hoped they belonged to someone who knew they were out.

Dr. Pruett’s clinic sits at the edge of Lewistown, a low block building with a gravel lot and a little sign out front by the road.

From that lot you can see the mountains on two sides, and on a clear morning they look close enough to walk to.

Ottoline met us at the door. She is a big, comfortable woman with reading glasses on a chain, and she got down on one knee on the clinic floor to rub Sadie’s ears before she said one word to either of us.

“Hello, old girl,” she said. “We’re going to take good care of you today.”

She brought out the paper to sign, and I signed where it said owner or agent, and wrote my phone number twice so they would have it for sure. Mom signed under me in her careful organist’s hand.

Dr. Pruett came out from the back in his green coveralls. He is a tall, quiet man with gray in his mustache, and he shook Mom’s hand, then mine, then crouched and ran his hand down Sadie’s bad leg the way you would smooth a tablecloth.

“Same as two weeks ago,” he said. “Maybe a little bigger. She’s ready, Augustina. I’ll call you as soon as she’s awake.”

Mom asked if she could stay with her until they put her under, and Dr. Pruett said of course.

So Mom sat on the floor of the exam room with her back against the cabinet and Sadie’s head in her lap until the tech came for her.

I stood in the doorway and watched. I had not seen my mother sit on a floor in ten years.

When she got up, it took both of us and the edge of the table, and she laughed at herself.

Then they took Sadie through the swinging door, and she looked back once over her shoulder, and Mom stood there with her hand still out a little, holding nothing.

We went back out to the car because neither of us wanted to sit in the waiting room. I parked so Mom could see the clinic door from her seat.

I left the windows cracked, and the air coming in smelled like cold dirt and the start of spring.

I had brought a thermos of coffee and a sack of the cinnamon rolls from the bakery on Main.

Mom drank her coffee and did not touch her roll. After a while she reached over and patted my knee.

“You didn’t have to do this,” she said.

“I know I didn’t.”

“Your father would have,” she said, and then she looked out the windshield at the mountains for a long time and did not say anything else about it.

Then she started to hum. My mother hums when she is scared.