Part 2
She read it twice, then stepped into the tack room and shut the door so the calf wouldn’t hear her voice change.
Dale picked up on the third ring. He taught high school band in Topeka and had always been an early riser, like his father, though in nothing else.
“I got your text,” Jo said.
“I figured you’d be up.” He sounded tired, and careful, like a man who has rehearsed a call. “I know it’s hard. I’m not doing it to be hard.”
“He’s ten, Dale. He’s healthy except his hips.”
“He put Cody Pfannenstiel in the ER in October. Eight stitches in the kid’s hand for reaching over a gate. Dad paid the bill and didn’t tell me till Thanksgiving.” He paused. “Nobody’s taking a ten-year-old dog with bad hips who bites. You know that better than I do. Dad would’ve done it himself, Jo. He’d have done it on a Sunday with the rifle and buried him under the cedar. I’m trying to do it with a vet.”
Jo looked through the tack room window at the aisle, where the dog was a white shape against the gate.
“I need a little time with him.”
“For what?”
She could have said grief. She could have said Walt. She said what was true. “There’s a blind giraffe calf at the rescue who stood up for the first time in a day because your dad’s dog lay down outside her pen.”
The line was quiet long enough that she checked it was still connected.
“Wednesday,” Dale said finally. “I already took the day off.” He hung up without being rude about it, which was somehow worse.
Gil Mercado came in at seven-thirty with sleet melting on his cap and his reading glasses swinging on their cord. He was sixty-three, and he had started Tallgrass nineteen years ago with Jo in the barn his late wife Ana had kept horses in. Since then he had done the books, the permits, the grant reports, and the hard phone calls, and he had never once in nineteen years told Jo how to treat an animal. He stood in the aisle now and looked at Boone for a long time.
“The state has two people who call me every week about that calf,” he said. “One of them is a veterinarian who thinks we’re in over our heads. If she hears we put a strange dog against the pen, she’s going to be right.”
“He hasn’t moved.”
“He hasn’t moved yet.” Gil took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt, a thing he did when he was deciding whether to raise his voice. He didn’t. “You’ve got two days on her and two days on him, and you want to tie them together.”
“I want one night.”
“That’s what you said about the pronghorn.”
It landed where he meant it to. She let it.
“Second panel,” Gil said. “Three feet between them. He’s leashed to something that doesn’t move. Becca’s never in there alone with him. And if that dog so much as stands up wrong, he goes back in your truck.”
“Agreed.”
“And Wednesday is still Wednesday.”
“I know.”
They ran it like a test, because Jo didn’t trust anything that looked like a miracle in a sick animal. Sick animals had good hours for no reason at all. At the eleven o’clock feeding, Boone was shut back in the feed room. Wren lay with her head toward the empty gate and took two ounces before she let the nipple fall out of her mouth.
At three, they brought him back. Maintenance had bolted a second hog panel across the gateway, and Becca had padded both with old mats from the gymnastics place in town. Boone was clipped to a ring in the wall on twelve feet of chain. He walked to the end of it, lay down on the concrete, and groaned.
Wren got up on her own on the second try. She drank two-thirds of the bottle.
“That’s not a fluke,” Becca said.
“Two is not a pattern,” Jo said, but she wrote both numbers on the whiteboard and underlined them.
Becca was the one who noticed the rest. She had a knack for reading animals that Jo had stopped trying to teach and simply borrowed. Over the afternoon she pointed out that Wren lay with her head toward Boone’s breathing no matter where they propped her, and that her ears tracked his chain when he shifted. When he got up to drink from his bucket, she stopped chewing her cud until he lay down again.
“She’s using him to find the room,” Becca said. “Everything else in here moves. People come and go and smell different. He just stays where he is.”
Jo slept on the cot in the office with the door open. Boone didn’t come to the office. He stayed on his chain at the gate, and twice in the night she heard him groan as he rearranged his hips, and once she heard the calf’s straw rustle in answer.
At one in the morning, Becca fed her. At 1:20, Jo’s phone lit up on the desk with a photo: an empty bottle held up against the pen light, Becca’s thumb over half the lens.
Jo lay looking at the ceiling until the sky went gray.
At three on Tuesday afternoon, while she was writing the morning numbers on the board, a gray sedan turned in off the county road and parked by the side door, a day early. Dale Kessler got out with a new leash still folded in its cardboard…
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