Part 2
Ruth left Friday on the page. In the space below it, she wrote that she had not checked the bus over the weekend. The pen pressed hard enough to leave the next sheet dented.
“Then I’ll have to answer them,” she said.
Graham moved his chair back an inch. Across the waiting room, Lou stood at the water cooler with an empty paper cup, giving them a privacy Ruth didn’t want anymore. She handed the sheet to the receptionist and called Owen.
He picked up so quickly that she knew the phone had been in his hand. Before she could say where she was, he asked which shelter had taken Tuck. Graham had told him a rescue had him, but the places he’d reached that morning had no record of the dog.
“He’s here with Dr. Navarro,” Ruth said. “At the animal hospital.”
“What happened?”
She watched Graham smooth his shirt over his stomach. “I found him in nineteen. He’s overheated. They’re working on him.”
Owen’s breathing grew audible. Something rattled on his end of the call, and a woman asked if he needed her to move the table. Ruth held the phone so tightly that the case creaked.
“Let me talk to them,” he said.
She started to explain what the veterinarian had told her. Owen interrupted, the way he never did when she was explaining a job. “Please. Give them the phone.”
The receptionist took it. Ruth heard Tuck’s age, nine, and the name of the clinic that held his regular records. Then Owen asked about paying, and the receptionist moved away from the counter to speak to him more quietly.
Graham stood. “I’ll handle the bill.”
“Who was supposed to come Saturday?” Ruth asked.
He glanced toward Lou. “I called a couple of places. Everybody’s full.”
“But you told me—”
“I know what I told you.”
His face had gone red above the collar. Ruth had seen that color when a driver failed to appear and he had to put on his coat over his pajamas to take the early route. For years she had trusted it as evidence that he would do whatever was needed to make a bad morning work.
“Why didn’t you call me?”
“You’d already been here all week. Owen said he might be out Sunday. I thought we’d get through a couple of days.”
“With the door chained?”
Graham looked at his shoes. “He kept trying to come after the trucks. I didn’t want him hit.”
Ruth waited for him to finish. A delivery van passed the window, carrying flowers in white buckets, and for a moment she was furious that the driver could be thinking about flowers. Graham said he had left food and water. He said the windows had been down when he left.
“I didn’t go back,” he said finally.
It was the first thing he’d said that she didn’t have to take apart.
Dr. Navarro let Owen make the treatment decisions. Ruth paid the initial deposit because she had her card out before Graham found his wallet, and she asked the hospital to call Owen directly with updates. Graham offered to reimburse her. She said they could discuss it later, then realized that later was how they had got through most of the things they didn’t want to discuss.
That evening, Lou dropped her at the yard to collect her van, then went home to make dinner for his husband. Ruth had thanked him three times at the clinic; on the third, he had told her to stop thanking him and eat something.
Nineteen stood where they had left it, its rear door open. The blue dog bed lay against the wheel well, one corner turned inside out. Ruth had repaired its seam two winters earlier after Tuck worried the stuffing loose, using a scrap from an airport seat because Owen said the dog wouldn’t mind the color.
She nearly picked it up.
Instead, she called the hospital and asked whether anyone needed to see the bus as it was. The receptionist connected her with Dr. Navarro, who said she was reporting her concerns through the local animal-welfare process and would pass along Ruth’s number. Ruth stepped down without touching the bed and shut the yard gate behind her.
At home, she opened her workroom to the heavy evening air. The sewing machine sat with its needle down in the last Sutter cushion, holding the fabric exactly where she had stopped Friday. She lifted the presser foot and took the cushion out, then had to put it back because her hands had nowhere else to go.
Owen called after nine. The veterinarian had spoken to him; Tuck was still very ill, but he had lifted his head. Owen asked Ruth to tell him everything she had seen, without trying to make it easier.
She described the overturned water tub, the chain, and the way his paw had scraped the floor. When she got to the sound, Owen asked her to stop for a minute. She sat on the workroom stool and watched a moth beat against the screen while he was quiet.
“He doesn’t bark when he’s stuck,” Owen said. “He goes quiet. I told Graham that.”
Ruth remembered Tuck waiting under the machine through thunderstorms, his muzzle on Owen’s boot. Owen had worked nights at the yard, cleaning buses and answering the late dispatch calls, with Tuck making his rounds beside him. Neither of them had much patience for being indoors when there was work outside.
“I can take him when they let him out,” Ruth said. “Till you’re able.”
Owen didn’t answer immediately. He had already signed a lease on an apartment for September, after the yard closed, but for now he was still in the hospital. His sister could put him up after discharge; her landlord wouldn’t allow Tuck.
“I’d do what the vet said,” Ruth added.
“I know you would.” His voice was tired enough that she couldn’t tell whether he meant it kindly. “I need to know what happened first.”
“Graham said somebody was coming.”
“I’m asking about you.”
She picked at the thread hanging from the cushion. Owen had been twenty when he first brought her a seat cover to mend, convinced he would have to pay for the tear out of his wages. She had told him to hold the fabric flat and shown him how to make the damage smaller without hiding it.
“You asked me to check,” she said. “I said I would.”
“Did you?”
Ruth wound the thread around her finger until it caught. She could hear a cart rolling past his hospital door, somebody laughing in a room farther down the hall. She unwound the thread and put both feet on the floor.
“No,” she said.
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