Part 2
Owen took the lead because his hand was already out. Then he heard himself setting terms, as if he were on a call.
“Until Sam clears him,” he said. “That’s it.”
“Ten days, maybe fourteen. He’ll see him tomorrow.” Lo was already writing her number on a brochure. “Not inside the clinic. Sam does the coughers in the parking lot.”
Getting Tug into the truck took longer than it should have. Owen lifted him into the back seat, and the pup scrambled straight across to the window facing the van. Lo had put Wren back in her crate. She lay with her chin on her front paws, watching the truck through the bars. When Owen pulled out, Tug turned in the seat and kept watching through the rear glass until the feed store was gone.
Lo called before he reached the turnoff. “She’s facing the van door,” she said. “I just wanted somebody to know.”
Owen’s place was a log-sided house on a rise above Burnt Creek, with a woodstove, a fenced side yard, and a garage he hadn’t been all the way into since spring. Juno’s bowls sat under the kitchen counter, washed and turned upside down. He looked at them for a while, then fed Tug from a mixing bowl.
Tug ate half and went to investigate the house. He coughed his way through every room, nose low, and came back carrying a dish towel. He dropped it by the front door. Then he went for Owen’s slipper, a potato that had rolled out of the bin, and a pot holder shaped like a fish that Owen’s sister had given him as a joke. All of it went into a careful pile against the door.
Owen put everything back. In the morning the pile was there again, plus a roll of paper towels.
He stood in the hall holding his coffee and looking at it. A dish towel, a slipper, a potato. Nothing Tug chewed or played with. He only collected things and lined them up at the door like luggage, the same way he’d carried that jerky stick to the crate. Owen thought of the gray pup sliding down out of the van to sleep on his boot. He left the pile where it was.
Sam Okafor met them at the far end of the clinic lot on Sunday morning, a stethoscope looped over a parka. Owen had parked as far from the building as he could. He hadn’t been through that door since March, when he’d signed a form at the counter and walked back out to this lot alone.
“Owen.” Sam opened the back door of the truck and let Tug sniff his glove. “Been a while.”
“Yeah.”
Sam listened to the pup’s chest, pressed his throat until he honked, and took his temperature on the tailgate while Tug tried to fold himself into Owen’s lap. No fever, clear lungs. Garden-variety kennel cough. Sam handed over a bottle of cough suppressant and two rules: no other dogs, and a harness instead of a collar so nothing pressed on his throat.
“And nowhere near Wren,” Sam said. “Ten days at least. Her surgery’s on the eighteenth, and I need her lungs perfect.”
“Lo says the first repair didn’t take.”
Sam looked at the clinic for a moment. “She’s not using the foot. We’ll see what I find.” He said it the way doctors do when they’ve already found it.
On the drive home, Tug climbed into the footwell behind the passenger seat and came up with something in his mouth. It was a braided fleece tug rope, orange and gray, gone stiff and faded. Owen had stuffed it back there in March with the rest of what he couldn’t look at and then forgotten it.
Tug carried it into the house and laid it on the pile by the door.
Owen picked it up. It still had the knot Juno had chewed nearly through, and the fleece smelled like the truck and very faintly like her. He stood in the hall holding it until the stove ticked, then set it on top of the refrigerator, where nobody with four legs could reach.
The nights were the hardest. Tug didn’t cry, exactly. He lay with his nose against the crack under the front door, where the cold came in, and made a small creaking sound whenever the wind moved the trees. Owen tried a bed in the bedroom and a bed by the stove. He finally slept on the couch with one arm hanging down, and around three each morning a warm head pushed up under his hand and stayed.
He called Lo every evening. She reported that Wren was eating, that Wren had pulled her blanket over to the door of her run, that Wren had nipped a volunteer who tried to take it back. Lo sent a picture: a gray puppy lying on a tangle of fleece, looking at a door.
On Wednesday afternoon Owen split wood until dark. The woodpile sat at the back of the side yard behind its own gate, and he propped the gate open with a round of tamarack so he could carry armloads to the porch. When he finished, he stacked the last load, washed up, and fell asleep on the couch with his boots still by the stove.
At twenty past four, Tug’s coughing woke him. The pup was pacing between the door and the couch, honking and shaking his head. Owen got up, clipped nothing to him because it was ten steps to a fenced yard, and let him out the side door into new snow.
He went back in for his coat. It took him perhaps a minute and a half to find his other boot.
When he stepped outside, the yard was silent. The porch light showed fresh snow over the woodpile, an inch of it, unmarked except for one line of small tracks. They crossed the yard at a lope, went through the back gate still propped open on the tamarack round, and continued around the side of the garage to the road.
Owen followed them to the end of the driveway. At the edge of the road, the tracks turned south, toward the rescue three miles away. Far down Burnt Creek Road, beyond the curve, the amber light of a county plow swept across the trees and came on.
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