Part 4
He was there by one-thirty. A tech let him into the run with a stainless bowl of wet food, and Ben sat down on the floor with his back to the chain-link and set the bowl beside his knee instead of in front of her.
Kaya watched him with her good eye for a long minute. The pup slept in a heap against her belly. Then she stretched her neck out, slow, careful of the ribs, and took a mouthful out of the bowl. Then another. When the bowl was half gone, she put her nose against the back of his hand, and Ben sat there without moving until his legs went numb.
He came every day after that, before work and after. The tech started saving the evening feeding for him.
The hearing in Sussex General District Court was on a Thursday morning. Carol drove herself the two hours and sat in the second row in a navy church dress, her purse held on her knees in both hands. Pruitt’s lawyer stood and explained that his client had lawfully acquired the dog from her previous owner. He had been seeking veterinary care for a sick animal, he said, and the matter was a property dispute blown out of proportion.
The county’s attorney called Carol Sutton.
She identified her signature on the rehoming agreement. She identified Kaya from Dr. Okafor’s photographs, and her voice held until the third one. Then the county’s attorney handed her a printout and asked her to read the highlighted part aloud.
Carol put on her reading glasses. “‘Mother is a decorated combat veteran. Her handler gave his life for this country in Afghanistan. Own a piece of history.'” She took off the glasses and looked across the room at Pruitt, who was studying the table. “That handler was my son. His name was Eli James Hollis Sutton. He was twenty-nine. That man has a picture of my son’s dog on his phone next to a price.”
The judge ordered both dogs forfeited to the county before Pruitt’s lawyer finished standing up. Outside, Haskins told them that after Dr. Okafor’s report the prosecutor was looking at a felony count, and that if it stuck, the court could bar Pruitt from owning another animal. The trial wouldn’t be until spring. “Don’t count on everything you’d want,” Haskins said. “But he’s not getting another dog out of this county. I’ll see to that part myself.”
Carol nodded. On the courthouse steps she opened her purse, took out a tissue, and didn’t use it. “I’d like to see her now,” she said. “If you’ll drive.”
Kaya came home to the farmhouse outside Stony Creek on the third Saturday in October. She had a shaved patch on her foreleg, a cone she hated, and a plastic bag of antibiotics. The pup came in a cardboard carrier, yelling the whole way.
For two days she lived in the laundry room. She lay in the corner between the dryer and the wall with her back to the kitchen and wouldn’t come out, even for chicken. When Ben came in with the broom to sweep up spilled kibble, she flattened against the wall so hard that he backed out and swept the rest of the house instead. The pup went in and out a hundred times a day, delivering socks, sleeping against her chest, chewing her tail. She let him. She didn’t let Ben past the doorway.
He’d expected that. It still sat on him like wet clothes.
On the third night he went out to the truck in the dark, reached behind the seat, and pulled out the fleece. It was stiff with two years of dust and smelled mostly of the truck. He stood in the driveway holding it longer than he meant to. Then he went inside, sat down on the laundry room floor with his back against the washer, and laid it across his knees.
“This was his,” he said. “He left it in my truck. He was always leaving stuff in my truck.”
Kaya didn’t turn around. Her ears moved.
“I should have brought this to your house a long time ago. To his mom. I kept thinking if I gave it back, that’d be the end of it. Like as long as it was behind my seat, he’d come looking for it.”
The pup climbed into his lap and went to work on the zipper pull. Ben let him.
After a while Kaya got up, back end first, favoring the ribs. She came across the linoleum one slow step at a time, head low, nose working. She put her face into the fleece and breathed, long pulls of air deep into the fabric, again and again, the same slow sweep she used to give a car at a checkpoint. What she found there, he had no way to know. Maybe it was nothing but dust and the inside of a truck. Maybe two years hadn’t been long enough to wash him out.
She stood with her nose buried in the fleece for a long time. Then she lifted her head and looked at Ben. The bad eye was open now, the swelling gone, a faint cloud still in it that Dr. Okafor said might never clear. She set her chin down on his knee. The breath went out of her in one long shudder that he felt all the way up his leg.
He put his hand on her head. She didn’t flinch.
“Yeah,” Ben said. His voice cracked on it, and he let it. “Me too.”
He slept on the laundry room floor that night and the next. On the third, she followed him to the bedroom and lay down across the doorway.
She wasn’t fixed. She still left the room when he picked up the broom, and the first thunderstorm in November sent her into the bathtub, where he sat on the tile beside her until it passed. She limped a little on the left side and probably always would. The schoolhouse at Little Creek meant a long commute and a lot of standing in front of kids who looked at him like he’d quit something. Some mornings he felt like he had. Then he’d pull into the yard at dusk and there she’d be at the front window, with the pup hanging off her ear.
Carol and Ray came the second Sunday in November. Carol drove the whole way with Ray’s wheelchair folded in the back of the Buick, and it took both of them and Ben to get him up the front steps. Ben had built a ramp by then. It wasn’t a good one, but it held.
Kaya went to Carol first. She didn’t rush. She crossed the porch, pushed her head under Carol’s hand, and stood there. Carol sat down on the top step, put her face in the dog’s neck, and didn’t lift it for a long time. Ben took the pup into the yard and threw a tennis ball that the pup ran past every single time.
When Carol came inside, she’d cried and was finished with it. She sat at Ben’s kitchen table, which still had three chairs because he’d never needed more, and watched the pup try to climb the back of the couch.
“You haven’t named him,” she said.
“I was waiting on you.”
Ray made a noise that might have been a laugh. “Don’t name a dog after me. I’m not dead yet.”
“Nobody’s naming anything after you, you old goat.” Carol watched the pup slide off the cushions, shake himself, and start over. “Hollis,” she said. “It was my daddy’s name, and Eli’s middle one. He hated it.”
“Hollis,” Ben said. The pup looked up at the sound of the new voice, then went back to the couch.
“He’ll grow into it,” Carol said.
They stayed until the light went orange over the pines. Before they left, Ben brought the fleece out of the bedroom and held it out to her. Carol looked at it for a long time, then folded his fingers back over it.
“She needs it more than I do,” she said. “Bring it next time you come. Every other Sunday. I’ll make roast.”
After the Buick pulled out, Ben stood on the porch in the cold. Rain was starting again, thin and quiet this time. Behind him in the doorway, Kaya lay across the threshold with Hollis asleep between her front legs. When Ben turned around and reached into his pocket for the keys to lock up, her tail came up off the boards and came down once, heavy, against the wood.