The Old Collie in the Vet Clinic Lot

Mom bent down into that sable-and-white ruff and stayed there. She did not cry. She did not say anything.

She just held still with her cheek against the dog’s neck, the way she used to hold me when I had a fever.

I stood beside the open door with my hand resting on the top of it, in the sun. Dr. Pruett had come out and was standing on the clinic step with his arms folded, and I could tell he was in no hurry to go back in.

That was when I heard tires on the gravel.

I knew the sound before I turned around. I had heard that engine pull into my mother’s yard a thousand Sundays.

Arliss was turning in off the road, slow, and he pulled up three spaces down from us and shut it off.

Mom had left him a note on the kitchen table that morning. I had watched her write it.

She wrote, “At Dr. Pruett’s with Sadie. Harriet is paying. Dinner is in the oven. Love, Gus.” She does not lie to him. She never has, not once in ten years.

He sat there for a minute with his hands on the wheel. I could see his face through the windshield, and I could not tell what was on it.

He has one of those faces, weathered and closed, that does not give much away.

Then he opened his door and got out. He was still in his feeding clothes, his old canvas coat and his overshoes, with hay on his shoulder.

He walked across the gravel toward us, not fast, the way he walks out to check a heifer.

Mom did not get up. She could not have, with fifty-some pounds of sleeping dog across her lap.

She kept one hand flat on Sadie’s side and lifted her head and looked straight at him.

I stepped back a little to give him room. I do not know why.

Maybe because Mom had asked me not to start a war, and I could feel one right there in my chest, wanting out.

Arliss stopped beside the open door, close enough to see the shaved patch and the row of stitches.

He looked at the dog for a long time. He looked at Mom. He opened his mouth like he was going to say something, and then he shut it.

Behind him, the clinic door swung open again. Dr. Pruett came down the step and crossed the lot toward us, wiping his hands on a paper towel.

“Arliss,” he said, and nodded.

“Doc,” Arliss said.

“Came out good,” Dr. Pruett said. He did not wait to be asked. “It was a lipoma, a fatty tumor, a big one, grown down in between the muscles. Not cancer. I got all of it. It was pressing on the nerve, and that was the limp.”

Arliss looked down at Sadie again. “She’s thirteen,” he said. It did not come out the way he said it at Sunday dinner. It came out like a question.

“She is,” Dr. Pruett said. “Heart like a two-year-old. Kidneys good. Teeth better than mine. She’ll be sore a week. Then she’ll walk better than she has all winter. I’d say she has a couple of good years left in her, maybe more.”