“I’ll make the call.”
Tommy finished the route, though not very quickly. He kept thinking about the dog under the porch and the cart that had stopped halfway down the driveway. By the time he and Luis reached the county garages just after noon, there was a voicemail on the truck line telling Tommy to call the sheriff’s office.
Deputy Carla Munroe answered.
“You’re the sanitation driver?”
“That’s right.”
“You did the right thing.”
Tommy leaned against the truck door.
“What happened?”
Deputy Munroe explained that Evelyn Cross, eighty-three, had been taken by ambulance to Grady Memorial in Delaware late Saturday evening after a church friend found her feverish and having trouble breathing. She had pneumonia, dehydration, and a low oxygen level. She was stable now, but likely facing several days in the hospital followed by short-term rehab.
“And the dog?” Tommy asked.
“That’s part of why I’m calling back.”
Evelyn had one daughter, Karen Bishop, who lived outside Lexington, Kentucky, nearly three hours away. Karen knew her mother had gone to the hospital. She believed, incorrectly, that a neighbor across the road had taken Buster in. The neighbor believed, incorrectly, that Karen had arranged something through a cousin. By Monday morning, everyone involved had been worried mostly about Evelyn herself, and the dog had slipped between assumptions.
“He’s still there,” Deputy Munroe said. “We can get animal control involved.”
Tommy thought about the dry bowl, the way Buster had climbed to his feet as though each leg belonged to a different dog.
“Is there some reason he has to go today?”
“Not if someone can check him.”
Tommy looked at the truck lot, the line of diesel cabs cooling in the early afternoon heat.
“I can go back after shift.”
That was how it began.
The first evening Tommy returned alone, carrying a bag of kibble from the hardware store and a plastic sack with two cans of food his wife had sent from home after hearing the story over the phone.
“An old dog doesn’t need a stomachache on top of everything else,” Darlene Elkins had said. “Mix the wet in with the dry.”
Tommy had been married to Darlene thirty-eight years, which meant she knew the shape of his heart better than he ever described it. When he came through the back door after work looking preoccupied, she let him wash up and take off his boots before asking how the route had gone. By the time he finished telling her about Evelyn and the dog, she already had two dog bowls from their own garage on the counter.
Their last dog, an Australian shepherd named Wiley, had died three years earlier. Darlene had not wanted another one yet. That grief still lived in the house somewhere, in the leash hook by the mudroom and the stubborn habit Tommy had of closing the porch gate even though nobody pushed against it anymore. Perhaps because of that, she did not tell Tommy he was being softhearted or impractical.
She only asked, “Who’s feeding him tonight?”