15. Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Fifteen
CALEB
She’s early. I hear the truck before I see it, the diesel rattle of her old Ford coming up the track, then the door, then her boots in the dirt. Bear’s ears go up. His tail moves once against the workshop floor.
He’s not scared. That still gets me.
I hang my tools on the workshop wall and head out to meet her.
Regan’s already hauling her bag out of the bed, hair pulled back, a flannel rolled to the elbow.
The evening is cooler than others this week.
There’s woodsmoke somewhere down the valley and the first yellow coming into the hickories along the treeline. September, leaning toward October.
“Evening,” she says.
“Evening.”
That’s the whole conversation most days. It used to be the only thing I wanted from her, but now for some reason it isn’t enough.
She doesn’t need to wait for Bear to come to her anymore. As she crosses the clearing, his head lifts and he barks. It’s friendly, not the low bark-growl he uses with most people. She laughs, sits on the ground beside him, and he rests his head in her lap.
“Hey, buddy,” she says, low. “Look at you.”
Seven months ago this dog wouldn’t take food off a stranger’s open palm. He’d wait for it to be thrown, take it from the ground, then back into the trees and watch you the whole time he ate.
He leans his whole weight into her shins and groans.
I crouch a few feet off and watch her work. She runs her thumbs down his spine, presses at his belly where the swelling used to sit hard.
“Both sides are down,” she says. “Feel that.” She takes my hand without asking and sets it under his belly. “There. That’s what normal feels like. That’s what we’ve been after.”
Her fingers are cold. Mine aren’t. Bear’s pulse ticks along under both of them, steady, slow, a dog with nowhere he’d rather be.
“He’s eating,” I say.
“Course he’s eating, look at the size of him.” She sits back on her heels and pushes a piece of hair off her face with her wrist. “Caleb. This is the good version. This is the dog responding. Couple more weeks on the tablets, one clean panel, and I’m out of your hair.”
She says it like it’s a gift. But if it’s a gift, it’s the unwanted sweater your half-blind aunt knits you for Christmas.
Fewer visits. That was the whole point of the meds. That’s what better is supposed to look like, a dog who doesn’t need a vet and a clearing that goes back to being quiet and mine.
I don’t say anything.
“You went quiet,” she says, not looking up.
“I’m always quiet.”
“True.” The corner of her mouth moves. She catches it before it gets anywhere, and so do I, both of us professionals at putting things back behind the door. “Roll him for me. I want the spot under his leg, where the needle’s been going.”
Bear’s already half over, like a puppy happy to show its belly. This is not the Bear I know. The playfulness he’s giving Regan feels unfair. He’s known her weeks, while I’ve spent months earning his trust. I reach to stroke him. Regan reaches for the same patch of fur. Our hands collide.
The feel of her skin runs through me like I grabbed the truck battery with both hands. I don’t pull back. I should. I don’t.
She’s gone still, just like Bear goes still at a strange sound. Her eyes stay down on the dog. Her thumb stops moving. She’s holding her breath in a way I’d clock at fifty yards in the dark, and I know, sure as I know the weight of my own hands, that she felt exactly what I felt.
That’s worse than if she hadn’t.
I take my hand off the dog. I stand. My knee cracks, and I’m glad of the noise, glad of anything that isn’t the quiet in the clearing.
“He looks good,” I say. “Thanks for coming out.”
My voice sounds flat. The voice I use on a man who’s run his engine dry and wants me to tell him it’ll buff out. Regan looks up at me, and whatever was on her face vanishes.
“Two weeks,” she says, getting to her feet. She shoulders the bag. “I’ll call first. Tablets morning and night, with food.” She rubs Bear’s ear. “You’re doing right by him, you know.”
“He does the work.”
“No.” She looks at me, level. “You both do.”
She walks to the truck and Bear walks her there, leaning into her leg the whole way like he’s seeing her off the property, which he does for nobody, not even me. She scratches under his chin and doesn’t look back at me on her way to the cab.
The Ford rattles off down the track. The dust climbs and hangs and settles. A horse blows somewhere past the trees. The radio’s still going in the workshop, playing to no one, the way I like it.
The clearing’s quiet again.
It’s what I built the place for.
Dark comes early now. I bank the fire and bring Bear in because the cold gets into his hips, and he turns his two circles and drops onto the mat against my leg with the groan of a much older man.
The Airstream holds the day’s heat for about an hour, then it lets it go. I lie in the dark with a hand on the dog and listen to him breathe. Even. Easy. Six months ago he wouldn’t sleep unless his back was to the wall and he could see the door.
I get it. Some nights I still can’t.
I should sleep. Instead, I reach down and find the phone on the floor, and the screen lights the curve of the ceiling, and my thumb finds it without being told.
Three taps. The same three taps, on every phone I’ve owned since I was eighteen.
You carry it from one to the next the way you carry a round in your pocket on leave.
Not because you’ll need it. Because you can’t make yourself put it down.
The photo.
Grainy. Dark. A parking lot under a sodium light that was already dying, ten years gone.
Her in the green dress I could still mix the exact color of with my eyes shut.
A man’s arms around her. Her face turned up into his neck.
Both of them lit up like somebody just handed them the rest of their lives.
This is what I look at when I start to forget.
She did this.
I say it the way I always say it. Flat, filed, settled a long time ago, no different from the weight of a wrench or the number of ways out of a room.
It’s supposed to put the evening back where it belongs, the cold fingers and the warm fur and the sound of her saying you’re doing right by him like she meant every word.
It doesn’t work.
I look at the photo and I see a dark lot and a green dress and a man I can’t bear to look at, but the anger doesn’t come like it usually does.
There’s a half-second where it should be right there in my chest and it isn’t.
It comes eventually, it always will, but half a second of peace is better than no peace at all.
Bear shifts and pushes his spine harder into my shin, handing me his whole sleeping weight, asking for nothing, trusting the worst man he could’ve picked to trust. I keep my hand on him in the dark and don’t let myself think about the obvious thing.
A sick dog who got better because somebody steady showed up and helped us.
Two weeks. Then she stops coming.
That’s the good news.
I lie there and wait for it to feel like good news. It doesn’t come either. And for the first time in ten years, I’m not lying awake scared of the dark or the door or the thing the photo proves.
I’m scared it’s stopped proving anything.