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Still watching him, she took a piece of food from my hand and swallowed it. Her next mouthful took it all.
She hadn’t eaten for days and if she wolfed this down, I was afraid it would come right back up.
Altogether, I’d probably given her about a sixth of Shadow’s daily intake. He’d had about the same. All extra for him, but he wasn’t complaining.
****
“What are you doing?” Tom’s warm voice made up for the cold of the phone near my ear.
“I have the dogs out for last call.”
Even here in town, stars glittered so sharply against the depthless dark of the sky that I found myself holding my breath, waiting for it to shatter like a frozen pond.
“How’s Suzie Q doing?”
“She’s better, I think. No. For sure. She’s definitely better. She’s eating a little. She followed Shadow outside just fine.”
“But...” he prodded.
“But she’s so sad.”
“Uh-huh.”
Two syllables that said that was to be expected, that the grieving process took time, that perhaps it was even harder on an animal who could not apply the band-aid of justice for the dead to the wound of loss.
“She has that routine with the fence...”
He knew what I meant. He’d seen it the first time we’d let her outside while we waited for Richard bringing Wendy.
Suzie Q stood and stared at the fence for the longest time. After she did her business, she walked along it, circling one way, then the other, while Shadow sniffed and explored all over the yard.
Again this time, she made her circuits and stared at the fence like it was as unexpected and unwelcomed as an alien spaceship, but she couldn’t work herself up to really care.
I sighed. “I hope she’ll get past this.”
“She might not. She’s no puppy,” he said. “And she’s used to a certain kind of life. Can be hard on an animal adding that kind of change to what she’s already gone through with Keefe being gone.”
That kind of change meant my little house in town and its fence.
We’d agreed that trying her at the ranch house was a non-starter. Tom wasn’t there enough to watch her, while having Zeb and Iris next door here as backup was a godsend. Not to mention Shadow.
“Not going to solve it tonight,” Tom said. “Get some sleep.”
We said our good-nights.
Not a lot later, as I was drifting toward sleep, I heard his voice in my head, as I often did.
Not going to solve it tonight... Did he mean only Suzie Q’s situation?
He was right, whether he did or not.
DAY SIX
SUNDAY
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“You got another dog?” my neighbor Zeb Undlin called over from his driveway.
