The Old Collie in the Vet Clinic Lot

“The rifle goes back to Cyril tomorrow,” he said. “He’ll give me what I paid. That money goes back in the bench. I’ll put it there myself, and I won’t go in that bench again.”

Mom looked up at him. Her eyes were wet, but she was not crying, not quite. “The coyotes,” she said.

“I’ll set traps like my dad did,” he said. “Or I’ll borrow Cyril’s gun when I need one. I didn’t need my own. I just wanted it.” He was quiet a moment. “That’s the truth, Gus.”

“I know it is,” Mom said.

Then Arliss did something I had never seen him do in ten years.

He reached into the car, past Mom’s shoulder, and laid his big rough hand on Sadie’s head, between her ears, very gently, the way you would touch a newborn calf.

Sadie did not wake up. Her ear twitched under his hand. Arliss left his hand there a moment longer than he had to. Then he took it back and put it in his coat pocket.

“I’ll follow you home,” he said. “Help you get her in the house.”

I did not gloat. I want to say that plainly, because it would have been easy, and some part of me wanted to.

I stood in that lot with four hundred dollars in my hand and the man who took it standing right in front of me, and I did not say one word I would have to take back.

I put the envelope in my coat pocket. I shut Mom’s door gently with her and Sadie inside.

I walked around and got behind the wheel, and Arliss went and got in his pickup, and we pulled out onto the road one behind the other.

Mom rode home with Sadie across her lap and her hand on the dog’s side the whole thirty miles.

She did not turn around this time. She did not have to. Everything she wanted was right there in the front seat with her.

About halfway home, past the Plum Creek turnoff, she started humming again. Not scared humming this time.

It was the same hymn, “Blessed Assurance,” but slower, and lower, the way she used to play it at the very end of the service while people were filing out.

Sadie slept through all of it. Her nose twitched. Once her bad leg moved, like she was running in her sleep, and Mom put her hand over the stitches and hummed a little louder until she settled.

I looked in my rearview mirror and saw Arliss’s pickup a quarter mile back, keeping exactly that distance the whole way, not crowding us, not falling back. Like an escort.

When we got to the house he was out of his pickup before I had the car stopped.

He came around to Mom’s side and opened her door all the way and said, “Let me.”

He lifted Sadie off Mom’s lap, towel and all, the way I had, with his arms under her chest and her back legs.

She woke up enough to look at him. She did not fuss.

He carried her up the porch steps, careful, one at a time, and in through the front door, and laid her on her rug by Mom’s side of the bed.

Then he came back out and helped Mom up the steps too.

I stayed for supper, which was the dinner Mom had put in the oven that morning. Arliss said the grace, which he does not usually do.