It became, quietly and without formal discussion, a project that involved more people than Tommy first realized. Darlene began packing slices of boiled chicken in a plastic container because Buster ate better when his food smelled interesting. Karen left money on the kitchen table for supplies and found it untouched each time she returned. Deputy Munroe stopped once to make sure everything was in order and ended up tightening the screen door closer. A neighbor across the road, Walt Pennington, mowed the side strip so the dog would not have to push through weeds taller than his chest when Tommy took him out.
Luis, the young coworker who had originally questioned whether missing barking justified anything at all, started saving the bacon ends from his breakfast sandwiches and handing them over in foil.
“Not every day,” Tommy told him. “You’ll spoil him.”
Luis shrugged.
“He’s had a rough week.”
By the second Monday after Evelyn went into the hospital, Tommy no longer needed the sheriff’s office or Karen to tell him he was doing the right thing. He could see it in the dog.
Buster began meeting the truck again.
Not with the old energy—not the sharp trot to the fence and the authoritative bark from younger years—but he came farther each morning, often as far as the gate before Tommy even shut the cab door. Sometimes he barked once. Sometimes not at all. Often he simply stood there with his back half moving and waited for Tommy to come in.
The route itself began to absorb the dog into its folklore. The drivers in the lot asked, “How’s your Monday dog?” Men who had spent years pretending not to care about much beyond brake maintenance and weather delays began offering opinions about old-dog kibble and flea treatment. One dispatcher suggested the county should reimburse Tommy for the extra fuel. Another said, “Good luck getting the county to reimburse compassion.”
Tommy’s answer to that, when it came, was to laugh.
No one made a hero of him at home either. Darlene would not have permitted it.
On the fourth night she looked at the mud on his work pants from kneeling in Evelyn’s yard and asked, “You sitting on the ground with him now?”
“He likes company.”
“You could bring the folding chair closer.”
“He doesn’t always want the chair.”
Darlene set a clean dish towel on the counter.
“That’s what I thought.”
There had been difficult moments too. One evening Buster refused his food and only stood facing the back door. Tommy called Karen, who called her mother’s hospital room. The nurse answered and, indulgent or wise enough not to dismiss the request, carried the phone close so Evelyn could speak. Her voice came thin through the speaker, weaker than Tommy had ever heard it, but still recognizably herself.
“Buster,” she said, and then, after a cough, “quit your foolishness.”
The dog lifted his head.
Tommy watched in silence as the old Lab mix walked to the bowl and began eating.
Karen cried so hard she had to mute the phone.
Evelyn did not return directly home from the hospital. Rehab took another twelve days. She hated every one of them. Karen told Tommy that her mother’s main complaint was not the food, not the exercises, and not even the indignity of needing help to stand from a chair.
“It’s that they don’t let her know every evening how the dog’s doing unless she asks five times.”