The Old Collie in the Vet Clinic Lot

She has done it my whole life, in the hospital waiting room when Dad was sick, in the car on icy roads, in the kitchen the night my son was born early.

She hums the old hymns, the ones she played on the organ every Sunday for forty years until her hands got too stiff for the pedals and the stops. That morning it was “Blessed Assurance,” over and over, very soft.

I sat and listened to her and watched the clinic door. A rancher came in with a calf in the back of his pickup, wrapped in a feed sack, and came out twenty minutes later carrying it in his arms.

A girl came out with a cat in a carrier. The sun climbed.

Around ten Mom dozed off with her head against the window. I covered her with her good coat.

I sat there with my phone in my lap and thought about Arliss, which I had been trying all morning not to do.

I had not liked him at first. When Mom told me she was marrying a sixty-four-year-old widower she had met at the sale barn cafe, I thought she was lonely and I thought he was looking for a cook. I was wrong about the second part, mostly.

He fixed her porch. He put new shingles on the chicken house.

When she had her knee done he drove her to physical therapy in Lewistown three times a week for two months and sat in the truck and read the farm paper the whole time.

He is not a cruel man. He is a hard one, raised hard, and in ten years I had never once heard him say a soft word to that dog.

He did not hate Sadie. He just did not see her the way Mom saw her.

But he had opened my mother’s piano bench, where she has kept her money for sixty years, and he had taken what was in it, and he had not even asked.

I could not get past that. I sat in that car and could not get past it.

At noon Mom woke up and asked me what time it was. I told her. She said that seemed long, and I said Dr. Pruett had told us early afternoon, and she nodded and went back to humming.

My son Rhett called around twelve thirty from the parts counter where he works in Great Falls.

He is nineteen and saving for a pickup of his own. He asked how Grandma was, and how Sadie was, and I told him.

“Is he there?” Rhett asked. He did not say who. He did not have to.

“No,” I said. “It’s just us.”

“Good,” he said. Then, after a minute, “Mom, does Grandma need a ramp? For her steps, I mean. For Sadie, after.”

I said I did not know, that we would see. He said he had Saturday off and some scrap lumber in the back of his buddy’s truck, and he would come down either way.

At two o’clock exactly my phone rang. It was Dr. Pruett himself, not Ottoline. Mom grabbed my arm so hard I had a mark the next day.

“She did fine,” he said. “Good as I could ask. Got it all, clean edges. She’s awake and grumpy. Come get her whenever you’re ready.”

I put the phone on speaker and had him say it again, so Mom could hear it in his own voice.