“Say, stay with me, Beau,” Janine whispered, like she was afraid the words might break before they reached him. I looked at the dog, then at
the traffic, then at that gray cloth hanging loose around his tired mouth.
“Stay with me, Beau,” I said, keeping my voice low. “I’m right here.”
For the first time since I had stopped, Beau stopped watching the road. His eyes moved to mine, slow and uncertain.
Then his whole body seemed to give up all at once, not from fear, but from finally being allowed to. He lowered his head onto my boot, and the wallet slid from beneath his paw like it had finished its job.
Janine made a sound on the phone that was not quite crying and not quite breathing. “Only Walter could calm him that way,” she said.
I untied the cloth carefully. Beau flinched at my fingers, but he did not pull away. There was a red mark around his muzzle, nothing deep, just enough to tell me he had fought it.
“Do you know Walter’s son’s number?” I asked, though I already knew I did not want the answer. Janine went quiet so
long that I heard cardboard scrape against the guardrail.
“Derek called me last night,” she said finally. “He said Beau ran off at a rest stop.” Her voice changed when she said it, as if she had been trying to believe it.
I looked at the motel receipt again, at the time printed near the bottom, 11:43 p.m. There was no rest stop listed there. Just a cheap motel eight miles back, the kind with outside doors.
“Maybe he panicked,” Janine said, but it sounded like she was talking to herself. Maybe was a soft word. It covered ugly things for a while, but not forever.
I told her I was taking Beau to the nearest animal clinic, and she gave me the name of one in Danville.
When I lifted him, he barely weighed what a golden retriever should. His ribs pressed through his dusty fur. Still, he twisted once in my arms and looked over my shoulder toward the highway. That broke something small in me.
“It’s okay,” I told him, though nothing about it felt okay. “He isn’t coming back that way.” Beau did not understand the sentence, or maybe he understood too much. His
head sank against my chest. Inside my truck, the air smelled like warm vinyl, old coffee, and fear. He kept one paw pressed over the wallet the whole drive.
At the clinic, the receptionist looked up, saw Beau’s face, and stood without asking any questions. A vet tech brought a bowl of water, but Beau waited until I said the sentence again.
Stay with me, Beau. I’m right here. Only then did he drink, careful and polite, as if he were still trying not to trouble anyone.
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