Chapter 12
Easton
Duke didn't open with anything.
No Ford. No brother. No apology for the timing. Just a beat of breath on the line and then his voice, flat in a register I hadn't heard since a structure on Pine Street last winter when we'd pulled a man out who didn't make it.
"It's Penny. You need to come now."
"Duke."
"She's on the rug by the back door. She's breathing. She's not right. I called Caldwell's emergency line. He's at his daughter's in Albany. Said get her to Hudson Valley."
"How long has she been like that?"
"Don't know. I came in twenty minutes ago. She didn't get up."
I was already on my feet.
"I'm coming."
"Drive carefully. She's stable for now. Don't put yourself in a ditch."
I shut the phone.
Duke had texted me at six. He'd been at the pinball machine in his basement for two weeks running, finally cornered the right flipper coil, and he wanted to come grab the soldering iron off the workbench in my garage.
I told him to let himself in. He had a key for that kind of thing. I had one of his for the same.
Duke
Out where, brother? he'd written back.
Easton
Out, I'd told him.
Duke
Out where, Ford?
Easton
Diner. Astrid.
He sat on it for thirty seconds and sent back:
Duke
Took you long enough. I'll be in and out. Won't bother your girl.
I left it.
That was six-fifteen. By eight, Duke was supposed to be back in his basement with my soldering iron and a beer he'd have lifted out of my fridge on the way through. He wasn't supposed to be sitting on the floor of my kitchen with my grandmother's dog dying under his hand.
Astrid was on her feet beside me. She had her coat buttoned before I had mine in my hand. She didn't ask what it was. She'd heard enough of the call.
"Penny," she said.
"Yeah."
"Let's go."
We went down the inside of the tower fast. I had the truck started before she shut her door. I drove with one hand on the wheel and one on the gear shift. Somewhere along the second mile of Route 23, her hand came across the console and landed on my wrist.
She didn't grip. She rested it there.
She kept it there the whole way.
I kept seeing Penny on the rug when I left tonight. Chin on her paws. Eyes on me while I put my boots on. She hadn't gotten up to say goodbye at the front door, and I'd registered it, and I hadn't stopped on it.
She'd been quieter at dinner on Friday. She hadn't finished her bowl.
She's an old dog, I'd thought. This is what an old dog looks like at the end of a week.
I gripped the wheel.
Astrid's thumb moved once along the inside of my wrist.
Duke had left the back gate open.
I cut the engine in the driveway and was through the gate before Astrid was out of the passenger seat. The kitchen light was on. The back door was unlatched. I came up the back step into the kitchen, and Duke was on the floor next to her, back against the cabinet, hand flat on her side.
He was talking to her.
"Old girl. Hey, old girl. He's coming. He's coming, Pen. You hang in there."
He looked up when I came through the door. His face was what twenty-eight minutes alone with a dying dog does to a man when the person who needed to be there finally walks in.
"Ford."
"Duke."
"I'm sorry, brother."
I put my hand on his shoulder. He covered it with his own for a beat, then slid out of the way.
I went down on my knees on the rug.
Penny lifted her head a quarter inch off the floor when she saw me. The tail moved once against the wood. Her gums were the color of paper. I put my hand on her side. Her ribs went in and out under my palm too fast and too shallow, the breath of an animal whose body was running on what it had left.
Astrid came through the door behind me.
She was on the floor at Penny's hip in two steps. Her hand was on Penny's belly first. Then her gums. Then she lifted the soft fur behind the ear and pressed two fingers under the jaw for a pulse I could already see in the side of Penny's throat from where I was kneeling.
She looked at me.
She wasn't a vet for that second. She was a woman who'd kissed me an hour ago, and she was telling me what she had to tell me without making me ask her to say it out loud.
"Her belly's distended. Her gums are white. She's bleeding internally. It's a tumor on the spleen. They rupture. It's what takes old goldens. She wouldn't have known until today. None of us would have."
"How long?"
She didn't answer right away. Her thumb stayed against the soft fur at Penny's ear.
"Astrid. How long?"
"Minutes."
I closed my eyes.
"Hudson Valley is forty minutes. Even if Sof opened the surgical suite for us tonight, it's forty minutes. The shock would take her before we cleared the bridge."
I opened my eyes.
"I'm so sorry."
Penny was looking at me. Her eyes had the same soft brown they always did.
Twelve years of brown, the same brown she'd looked at my grandmother with, the same brown she'd looked at me with the first morning I walked into the kitchen after the funeral and didn't know what to do with my own two hands.
I slid my arms under her.
"C'mere, Pen."
I lifted her into my lap. She weighed less than she should have.
She'd been losing weight all week, and I hadn't seen it.
I sat back on my heels with her in my lap and got her head settled against the inside of my elbow.
Her tail thumped against my knee one time. She let out a breath against my chest.
"Hey, old girl."
She watched me.
"You did so good, Pen. You did everything right. You took care of her, you took care of me, you did the whole job. You hear me? You did the whole job."
The tail moved a quarter inch. Not a thump. Just the intent of one.
Astrid had her hand on Penny's flank. Her other hand came to the back of my neck. I felt it land. I didn't lean into it. I didn't have to. It was there.
"You're a good girl, Pen. You're the best girl. You were Grandma's best girl, and you were my best girl, and there isn't gonna be another one of you. Not in this lifetime. You hear me?"
Her breath went out.
She didn't take the next one.
I held her against my chest with my hand at the soft spot behind her ear where she'd liked it her whole life. I held her there a long time after the last breath, because no part of me was willing to be the man who set her down first.
Astrid's hand stayed on the back of my neck.
I didn't know how long we stayed on that floor. Long enough that the kitchen went from the yellow of the overhead light to something quieter. Long enough that Duke, who hadn't said a word since he'd stepped back, got up at some point and went out to the garage without being asked.
I heard the garage door. I didn't move.
He came back with the spade from the wall hook where my grandmother kept it for forty years.
He looked at me once. I nodded toward the yard.
The roses were the spot.
My grandmother planted them the year my mother sent me up here for the first summer. She told me, when I was eight, that they bloomed blue if you fed the soil right and pink if you let it go alkaline, and that hers had been blue for thirty years because she paid attention.
She paid attention to a lot of things.
Duke dug under the biggest one.
Astrid held the flashlight.
I went inside.
My grandmother's quilt was on the back of the couch. She'd pieced it together herself out of old flannel, a quilt for the winter she stopped going out as much. Penny slept on it as a puppy. Penny slept on it last week.
I lifted it off the couch.
I knelt on the kitchen rug, wrapped her in it the way my grandmother wrapped me in it on the couch the summer I was nine and had the flu.
Tucked it around her shoulders, around her tail.
Lifted her, quilt and all, against my chest, and carried her out into the backyard the same way I'd carried her in from the truck the first night she was my dog and not my grandmother's.
The hole was deep enough.
Duke stepped back from it.
I went down on one knee and laid her in.
I stayed there a beat.
Astrid was behind me with the flashlight on the ground at her feet, the beam pointing up at the underside of the rose leaves so the light came down on us softly. Duke had the spade upright in the dirt, both hands at the top of the handle, head down.
I put my hand on the quilt at the top of her head one more time.
"Bye, Pen."
Nobody moved. Duke's head was still down. Astrid hadn't shifted the light. They were giving me the moment the way good people gave you a moment, without making you ask for it or feel watched while you had it.
I stood up.
Duke filled the hole. He did it in slow, careful shovels. When he was done, he tamped the dirt down with the back of the spade and laid a flat river stone on top of it.
He set the spade against the side of the house, brushed his hands on his jeans, came over, and put his arm around the back of my neck. The grip a man uses on another man at a thing like this. He didn't speak. He squeezed once. He let go.
"You good for tonight, brother?"
"Yeah."
"Call me if you're not."
"I will."
He looked at Astrid. He looked at me.
"I'll get the back gate."
He went around the side of the house. The gate latch clicked behind him. His truck door. The engine started. We heard the sound of him pulling out of the driveway, turning down Maple, and then he was gone.
Astrid hadn't moved.
The flashlight was still on the ground between us. The beam was still pointing up at the leaves.
"Do you want me to go, too?" she said. Quiet.
"No."
We went inside.
I put the back door's deadbolt across and stood at the kitchen sink. Penny's rug was by the back door. Empty. The spot where she'd been every day for as long as I'd lived here was now the spot where she wasn't.
Astrid was at the counter.
"Come here," she said.
I came over.
She took my hand. She led me out of the kitchen, into the living room, and sat me down on the floor with my back against the couch. She sat down next to me. Her shoulder against my shoulder. Her hip against my hip.