The dog slept against the recliner while Joe dozed. He followed the oxygen tubing with absurd caution, as if aware it mattered. He stood beside the bathroom door and waited. When home health nurses came, Buddy withdrew to the hallway, watching their hands and shoes and bags. He accepted them eventually because Joe accepted them, but he never liked them.
“Dog’s going to have opinions about all this,” Raymond said once.
Joe breathed through a coughing spell and then nodded.
“He’ll manage.”
That was not the same as believing it.
Three weeks before Joe died, Lila raised the question that everyone else had been circling.
“What happens with Buddy?”
Joe looked toward the dog bed by the window. Buddy was asleep with his chin on the edge of the plaid blanket.
“Not the shelter,” Joe said.
“No one’s saying that.”
Raymond was there that afternoon, replacing a porch light and pretending not to listen too closely.
Lila suggested a couple she knew in Hutchinson. Joe said no. She suggested bringing Buddy to Topeka with her. Joe hesitated, but only because her apartment had stairs and she worked twelve-hour shifts as a nurse. Raymond suggested they think about it later, which was his usual strategy for problems that hurt too much when named too early.
Later arrived faster than any of them wanted.
Joe died on a Thursday in February just after dawn, at home, with hospice having come and gone during the night and Lila asleep in the front bedroom. Raymond was on the road in Nebraska when she called. By the time he reached Pratt the next morning, the house had that terrible post-loss stillness common to places where people are trying to be practical around grief.
Buddy was in the kitchen.
He did not rush the door when Raymond entered. He walked forward slowly, sniffed his jeans, and then turned toward the bedroom where Joe’s hospital bed had been.