The Old Lab Who Came Back Home

“Is this the Halvorsen place?” the woman on the phone asked, and I said it was, and she said, “Then I think I have your dog.”

I was standing at my teller window at the bank in Brookings with a stack of twenties half counted in my hand.

It was a Tuesday in September, and the line behind Mr. Olson was three people deep.

“We don’t have a dog,” I said, because for a second that was true. Then my stomach went cold, because there was one dog in our family, and he was not ours.

“He’s a yellow Lab,” the woman said. “Old fellow, gray in the face. He’s got a brass tag on his collar that says Moose on one side and Halvorsen and a phone number on the other. The number rang through to a farm, and the machine there gave me this one.”

That would have been the old house line, which we still keep, with a message on it that gives my cell for anybody who needs us in a hurry.

I put the twenties down on the counter and held up one finger to Mr. Olson, who nodded and looked at his boots.

“Where are you calling from?” I asked her. My voice sounded like somebody else’s, very polite and very far off.

“The county shelter in Sioux Falls,” she said. “My name is Barb. I’m a volunteer. I’m not really supposed to be calling anybody, but I grew up out by Volga, and I know a farm tag when I see one.”

I asked her to hold on. I finished Mr. Olson’s cash with my hands shaking, and I asked Kim at the next window to cover me, and I walked back to the break room and shut the door before I let Barb say one more word.

“He came in yesterday afternoon,” Barb said. “Owner surrender. There’s a note taped to his intake card. Do you want me to read it to you?”

I said yes. I have thought since that I should have said no, that I should have let myself drive down there not knowing. But I said yes, and she read it to me.

“Old, good dog,” Barb said. Then she was quiet a moment. “That’s all it says. Three words. Somebody wrote it on the back of a grocery receipt.”

I asked her to send me a picture of it. She did, while I stood there by the coffee maker, and I knew the handwriting before the picture finished loading.

The round o’s. The little hook on the d. It was my daughter’s.

Moose was a fat yellow pup when Megan picked him out of a litter at the Lindquist place two miles down our gravel road.

She was twenty that summer, home from college in Brookings, and she paid fifty dollars for him out of her own pocket and carried him home inside her sweatshirt.

He grew up on our front porch. He slept by the swing every night of his life until Megan moved to Sioux Falls, and then he slept on a dog bed in her apartment, and then in the little rental house she had with her first husband, and then back in an apartment again after that marriage came apart.

He was the kind of dog who would walk out to the end of the lane with you to get the mail and walk back carrying nothing, proud as if he had carried all of it.