Part 5
Owen turned off the engine.
He carried Wren in himself, the blanket and all, with Tug’s lead looped over his wrist. Callie held the door until all three of them were through. “Hey, Owen,” she said, as if he’d been in last week, and she led them past the counter into the exam room on the left. It wasn’t the room. He noticed that he had checked.
Sam was drawing up something at the counter. He looked at Tug, then at Owen. “He can stay on the floor while she goes under. Calm is better.”
Owen set Wren on the table and kept both hands on her. She stood shakily on three legs, the bad one hanging, and looked around the room. Tug sat against Owen’s boots and leaned his weight there.
Callie clipped a patch of fur on the gray foreleg. Wren flinched at the clippers, then flinched harder at the cold swab, and Owen bent until his face was next to hers.
“You’re all right,” he said. “Listen. Your brother’s been robbing my house. He took my slipper. He took a potato. He’s got a pile by the door so tall I have to step over it, and every bit of it’s for you.” Her ears turned toward his voice. The catheter went in, and she only jerked once. “He walked all that way in the dark to look at you through a window. So you come back, because I’m not explaining this to him.”
Sam pressed the plunger slowly. Owen felt the change in her almost at once: her head grew heavy in his palm, then heavier, until he was holding all of it. Tug stood and put his front paws on Owen’s thigh to see.
“I’m right here,” Owen said. He stayed where he was until Wren’s eyes were closed and her breathing had gone long and slow and Callie had slid her arms under her. Then he let Callie lift her away.
At the door, he spoke without meaning to. “You were with Juno.”
Callie stopped with the puppy against her chest. “I was.”
“Was it—” He couldn’t find the end of the question.
“It was quiet. She had her head on my arm.” Callie looked down at Wren, then back at him. “I told her you were right outside. Her ears kept going toward the window. I think she knew where the truck was.”
Owen nodded. He didn’t trust himself to do more. Callie carried Wren down the hall, and the treatment room door swung shut behind her.
He didn’t leave. He took the chair in the lobby that faced the hall and sat with Tug on the floor between his boots. The clinic opened around them. A woman came in with a cat carrier and a cough of her own, and a man arrived to pick up a box of prescription food. The phone rang, and the receptionist answered it in a low voice. Owen texted Dale: She’s in surgery now. Dale wrote back two minutes later, though he must have been asleep after his shift: Ok. Tell me.
Lo texted from somewhere on Highway 2: Snowing here. Everybody’s barking. Is she in? He answered that, too.
At ninety minutes, he took Tug out to the edge of the lot to pee and came straight back in. Tug went to the hall door and lay down against it with his back to the lobby.
Sam came out at a little after nine, pulling off his cap. There was a red line across his forehead from the band.
“She did fine,” he said. “Good pressures the whole way, and the tissue at the hip looked healthy. She’s waking up now.”
Owen sat down in the nearest chair, which he hadn’t meant to do.
“She’s going to be sore and goofy for a day. The stitches come out in two weeks. After that, honestly, the hardest part will be keeping her from doing too much.” Sam paused. “You can bring him back. Just for a minute.”
Wren lay in a low recovery kennel under a fleece blanket, her right side shaved pink, a neat line of stitches where the leg had been. Her eyes were open but not quite focused. When Tug’s nails clicked on the tile, her tail moved under the blanket.
The kennel stood across from the back door of the treatment room, and every time someone went out to the dumpster, cold air rolled across the floor. Owen loosened the lead. Tug didn’t go to Wren’s face. He went to the open side of the kennel, between her and the door, turned once, and lay down with his back to the draft.
Callie looked at Owen. Owen looked at the floor for a moment.
He stepped out into the hall and called Lo. The connection crackled with wind and a dog yelping somewhere in her van.
“She’s out,” he said. “She’s good. Lo, put both of them on my application.”
There was a long hiss of static. “Owen, she’s going to need—”
“I know what she’s going to need.”
“And he’s going to be a hundred pounds.”
“I’ve got a big truck.”
Lo laughed, a short, wet sound, and said she would pull both files when she got back.
Snow fell every few days through January, and the plow came by every morning before dawn. Owen started making coffee when he heard it.
Wren’s stitches came out on the second of January. By the middle of the month, she was running. She ran the way Sam had promised, not carefully, with a little extra bounce on the back left foot and a swing of the hips to keep her line. Tug hadn’t adjusted yet. Twice a day he started a chase, sure he’d catch her on the turn, and twice a day she cut the corner by the woodpile and left him sliding.
The pile had moved from the front door to the rug by the stove, where they slept now. It held a dish towel, the fish pot holder, a pine cone, a chewed tennis ball from somewhere, and, on top as usual, Juno’s rope. Owen didn’t put anything back anymore. When he needed his slipper, he went to the rug and took it.
On a Saturday in late January, the plow didn’t go by. It stopped. Owen heard the engine drop to an idle at the end of the driveway, and he went out onto the porch in his socks with both dogs ahead of him.
Dale climbed down from the cab slowly, one hand on the grab bar. He stood at the gate with his hands in his coat pockets. Wren reached him first, as she reached everything first now, and planted her front feet on his knees. Tug arrived a second later and began searching Dale’s coat for anything worth taking.
“Well,” Dale said. He crouched slowly and put a hand on each of them. “Well, look at that.”
He stayed about ten minutes, because he had the rest of the route. Wren leaned against his shins the whole time. When he climbed back up into the cab, he sat for a moment with the door open and looked at the two of them in the snow. Then he lifted a hand and pulled away down Burnt Creek Road, leaving a fresh-cut lane behind him.
Owen had a recheck with Sam at ten. He pulled on his boots, got his keys, and went to the truck with the dogs in a tangle at his knees. He opened the back door.
“Load up,” he said.
Tug jumped in at once. Wren set her front feet on the running board and looked back at him over her shoulder. Owen put a hand under her hips and lifted her the rest of the way. When he came around and opened the driver’s door, Tug shot past his knees and up the porch steps, through the door Owen had left open. He came back with Juno’s rope, scrambled across Owen’s lap and over the console, dropped it on the seat beside his sister, and lay down along her side.
Owen waited until both of them were settled. Then he backed out and followed the plow’s clean lane into town.