Part 4
“No,” Owen said.
He said it before he had thought about it, the way he’d say it to a man reaching under a car seat. Lo let the word sit there. Then she told him Sam was driving out to the rescue at noon, and if Owen wanted to say no to someone, he could say it to Sam.
He brought Tug. The pup had been cleared that morning, which was reason enough, and Owen didn’t look for another one. In the truck, Tug stood with his front feet on the console and Juno’s rope in his mouth. He had taken it off the pile on his way out the door, and Owen had let him.
Lo met them in the rescue’s exercise room, a converted garage with rubber mats and a space heater roaring in the corner. Wren was already on the floor. Sam had taken the splint off that morning to see what the leg would do on its own. When the door opened, she came across the mats at a fast, rocking hitch, her front legs doing most of the work and the bare hind leg dragging and catching behind her.
Tug dropped the rope and met her halfway. They collided, went over together, and came up licking each other’s faces. Wren put a paw on his head and pushed him down onto the mat, and he let her. Then he got loose, went back for the rope, and laid it in front of her.
She lay down on it at once.
Owen laughed out loud, surprising himself. Lo was smiling at the floor. Sam had come in behind them and was leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded.
Tug wanted the rope back. He took one end and pulled; Wren held on to the other. They tugged across the mat in a slow circle, growling like small engines. Wren braced on her good legs and swung her hindquarters for balance, and the bad foot hit the mat knuckles-first and scraped along it.
She didn’t notice. She couldn’t feel it. When she let go and turned, there was a smear of blood on the black rubber.
“That,” Sam said quietly. “That’s what I mean.”
He explained it sitting on an overturned bucket while Lo cleaned the foot. The first repair had held the tendon for a while, but the nerve below it had never come back. Wren couldn’t feel the top of her paw, couldn’t lift it, couldn’t tell where it was. She was wearing it down to the bone a little more each week. A specialist in Spokane could try to fuse the joint. That might take months in a crate, cost four thousand dollars or more, and still leave her with a numb foot she would keep injuring.
“Or I take the leg at the hip,” Sam said, “and in three weeks she’s running.”
“With three legs,” Owen said.
“With three legs. Pups that age don’t miss it the way we think they will. She’s been running on three for two months already. The fourth one just keeps getting in her way.”
Lo finished taping a gauze pad over the paw. “The medical fund’s got eleven hundred dollars left for December,” she said, not looking at either of them. “Sam’ll do the amputation at cost. Spokane, I can’t.”
“I’ll pay for Spokane,” Owen said.
Lo looked up. Sam didn’t.
“Owen.” Sam spoke the way he must speak to a lot of people in his exam rooms, slowly, giving each word room. “This isn’t about money. Even if the fusion worked, she’d still have a foot she can’t feel. You’d be buying her six months in a crate so you don’t have to watch her lose something.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.”
“I know you don’t want to be in my building,” Sam said. “I’m doing it either way, Owen. I’d rather she had somebody she knows in the room.”
Owen stood up. The space heater was suddenly too loud. He got the slip lead over Tug’s head, and Tug went with him, but slowly, looking back at Wren the whole way to the door.
He didn’t go into the house when he got home. He sat in the truck in the driveway with the engine off.
Juno had collapsed at a training day in March, in the middle of a building search, and gotten up again as if she’d tripped. By that evening her gums were white. Sam found the tumor on her spleen and showed Owen the shadow of blood around it on the screen. There had been nothing to fix. Owen signed the form at the counter, went into the room, and put his hand on her head. Then he said, “I’ll be right outside,” and walked out to this truck and sat with her leash on the seat beside him. A vet tech named Callie had stayed with her. Owen had never gone back in.
Nobody had ever said a word to him about it, and he had never once let the subject come up.
In the back seat, Tug had climbed into the footwell and found nothing there. He came up and pushed his face between the seats, and Owen put a hand on his head and went inside.
That night he lay on the couch with the stove ticking down and watched Tug take up his place by the front door. The pup turned twice, lay down with his back pressed flat against the cold crack beneath it, and sighed. The rest of the room was warm, and the stove was right there. Tug had chosen the draft.
Owen got up at nine and called Lo.
“Tell Sam to do what he thinks is right,” he said.
“He’ll be glad to hear it from you.” She was quiet for a moment. “I’ve got a problem, though. I’m driving six dogs to the partner rescue in Spokane on Thursday. We’ve had the transport set up for a month, and there’s a storm behind it, so I can’t move it. Sam wants her calm going under. She’s never calm at the clinic without Tug. And Tug doesn’t go anywhere without you.”
Owen looked at the pup against the door. “What time?”
“Seven.”
He picked Wren up from the rescue at a quarter past six on Thursday, in the dark, with a volunteer holding the door. He settled her on a folded blanket in the back seat. Tug lay down along her side and put his chin over her neck, and neither of them moved for the whole drive into town.
At six fifty-two, Owen was sitting in the clinic lot with the engine running. It was the same parking space. He hadn’t chosen it; the truck had simply gone there, the way his mouth still said load up to an empty seat.
The lights came on inside. The front door opened, and a young woman in purple scrubs propped it with her hip and stood there in the cold, waiting. It was Callie.
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