The Blind Dog By The Register

The chalkboard out front is what pulled me in. DOGS WELCOME, in a looping kid’s handwriting with a little paw print drawn under the words, propped on the gravel by the front step of a low brick diner on the county road. I have driven past that place a hundred times in my life and never once stopped. I stopped that day because I was about to fall over, and because the sign said my dog could come in with me, and on that particular day those were the only two things in the world I needed to be true.

I should tell you about the day first, so you understand why I was in the shape I was in.

My name is Carrie. I am thirty-eight years old, and I have lived in this county my whole life. That morning was my mother’s birthday, the first one since we lost her the winter before. I had gone out to the cemetery with a bunch of pink carnations from the grocery store, the cheap kind wrapped in crinkly plastic, because they were the kind she always bought for herself and refused to let anybody spend real money on. I sat out there on the cold ground longer than I meant to. I had not eaten since supper the night before, had not slept much either, and by the time I got back into town my head was swimming and there was a gray fuzz creeping in at the edges of everything.

And I had Biscuit with me, because I almost always have Biscuit with me.

Biscuit is a fourteen-year-old Chihuahua mix, blind in both eyes, with cloudy blue-white marbles where his dark eyes used to be and only three teeth left in his head. I adopted him from the county shelter about eight months ago. He had been there most of a year, they told me, because everybody who comes to a shelter wants a puppy, or at least a dog that can see them and wag and put on a show. Nobody wants an old blind thing that shakes. One of the volunteers, a teenager, told me that Biscuit cried, a thin little whimper, every single time a person walked past his kennel and did not stop. She said it broke her heart every shift.

I had spent most of that year being the person nobody stops for too. My mother had been sick a long time, three years of it, and I had been the one who took care of her, because I was the only one close enough and the only one who would. I moved back into her little house to do it. I learned how to work her oxygen and how to lift her without hurting either of us and how to fill out the forms the county kept sending. I gave up a lot of things that year without ever quite deciding to, the way you do, a job I liked and a man I had been seeing and most of a life, and I do not regret a minute of it, because she was my mother and she was worth every hour.