My sister-in-law sent the police to my 76-year-old father’s house because she’d decided he was KILLING DOGS.
She stood at the curb with her phone up, waiting on her proof.
The officer asked for the key, and Dad put it in MY hand.
“Dennis, open that garage! The whole street knows what’s in there.”
I had one shoe laced when the shouting started.
I’d come down to Hastings for five days before my shifts at the pharmacy counter picked back up.
Mom has been gone twenty-seven years.
He’s lived in that house by himself the whole time.
The evening before, I’d watched him back his truck up the drive with a gray dog riding on the bench seat.
Old. White through the whole face.
Stiff in the back legs.
He lifted her down and carried her the last few steps himself.
Then he took her in the side door of the garage, and I heard the padlock snap.
He’d painted those windows over in March.
Brown house paint, every pane.
I didn’t understand any of it, and I said so.
“Whose dog is that, Dad?”
“Eat your supper, Shell,” he said.
That was the end of it.
Neither of us said another word about it.
Twice after dark I heard the side door.
I stayed where I was.
By seven the next morning Paula was at the bottom of the driveway, filming like she’d bought a seat.
A cruiser sat with two wheels up on the curb.
Its lights rolled red and blue over the siding.
Neighbors from five houses down had come up the sidewalk in their robes.
The talk stayed low.
A wind chime made of bent spoons kept clanking on the Pruitts’ porch.
The call had come in without a name on it.
Dad stood with his arms crossed over his flannel and yard mud on his boots.
He gave everybody the look he saves for telemarketers.
Seventy-six, still up before the paper, still fixing chainsaws for half the county.
He looked put out, like we’d all shown up late for something.
“Mr. Kopecky,” the officer said, slow and even, “we’ve had complaints.”
“Your neighbors say you’ve been taking animals out of the county pound, and then they’re never seen again.”
“And you blacked out those windows in March.”
Dad let a breath go through his nose.
“That’s what she came up with?” he said.
Paula’s phone dipped an inch.
“I’ll need that garage opened, sir,” the officer said.
“You got paper for that?” Dad said.
“We do.”
The officer took a folded sheet out of his shirt pocket.
Dad dug the key from the front of his jeans.
He walked it right past the officer and over to me.
“You do it, Shell,” he said.
The officer looked at me. “Ma’am. Right now, please.”
My fingers wouldn’t hold still on that lock.
It dropped open.
I got my hand under the handle and pulled up hard.
The door rolled a foot. Then two.
The officer ducked his head to see under it.
Then he went DOWN ON ONE KNEE on the concrete. ⬇️
Seven cushions on the concrete
He went down because of the gray dog.
She came out under that door the second there was room for her. She came low on her belly, white face first, walked straight into the officer and pressed her forehead against his chest.
He didn’t push her off. He dropped to one knee so she wouldn’t have to reach.
Then I pushed the door the rest of the way, and the whole driveway saw what was in there.
Seven dogs.
Seven old dogs on couch cushions, laid out in a row on concrete swept cleaner than my kitchen floor. They were the plaid cushions off the davenport Mom bought the year I started high school.
A box fan sat in the corner. Water stood in cake pans. A space heater was unplugged, its cord wrapped neat around the handle.
A couple of the dogs lifted their heads. One thumped a tail on the plaid. The rest kept sleeping the way old dogs sleep, like the world had stopped being their business.
The air smelled like dog and pine cleaner and nothing else.
The back wall was pegboard, the same pegboard Dad hung his wrenches on when I was little. The wrenches were gone.
Photographs were pinned there instead, top to bottom.
Drugstore prints. Pictures run off a home printer on plain paper. Dogs on porches, dogs in truck beds, a dog asleep in a recliner beside an old man in overalls.
The officer looked up past the gray dog’s ear. His eyes found the wall and stayed on it.
He stood up slow. He walked in between the cushions carefully, like a man coming down a church aisle late.
He put one finger on a picture near the middle. It was a white-faced beagle in the lap of a heavyset woman in a lawn chair, with a hummingbird feeder behind her.
“That’s my mother,” he said.
The driveway had gone quiet. Even the spoons on the Pruitts’ porch had quit.
Dad came up beside me with his hands in his back pockets.
“That’s Buster,” Dad said. “Arlene took him two summers back. He was on the list for a Thursday.”
The officer turned the picture a little on its pin so it hung straight.
“Mike Lindgren,” he said to Dad, like they’d never met. “She talks about you.”
Paula had come halfway up the drive. Her phone was down by her hip, still recording, the little red dot going.
“That doesn’t prove a thing,” she said. “Seven dogs in a garage. What about the ones you don’t see? Ask him about the ones you don’t see.”
Lindgren didn’t turn around right away.
When he did, he didn’t look at her.
“Mr. Kopecky,” he said. “The caller said you’d been out back after dark with a shovel. More than once.”
Dad nodded.
“That’s right,” he said.
I looked past the garage to the row of lilacs along the back fence. Mom put them in the spring they bought the place.
The dirt under the last bush was dark in one spot. Turned.
Lindgren followed where I was looking.
“Sir,” he said, “I need to know what’s under your lilacs.”
The green notebook
Dad walked him back there himself. I went too.
Kevin had come out of his house by then in his sock feet. My brother lives two doors down, and he stood next to Paula on the driveway with his hands shoved in his jacket like he’d rather be anywhere.
Under the lilacs were stones.
Creek rocks, flat ones, each about the size of a hand. Each had a name painted on it in white trim paint, in the square capitals Dad uses on everything he labels.
Peaches. Duke. Old Man. Birdie. Rusty.
Rusty had been ours. I’d forgotten where Dad put him.
Nine stones, counting the new one.
The new one said Rooster, and the paint still had a shine on it.
“Around two last night,” Dad said. “He’d been going downhill all week.”
He bent and set the stone a little straighter with his thumb.
“I sat up with him on his cushion till he went. Then I put him under before the street woke up. I didn’t want a crowd.”
Lindgren looked at those stones for a long while. Then he asked, very polite, whether Dad kept any kind of record.
That was when Dad sent me in for the notebook.
“Top of the fridge, Shell,” he said. “The green one.”
The kitchen was the kitchen. Same yellow curtains. Same salt shaker shaped like a hen, the one Mom won at the county fair, sitting in the middle of the table.
Something white was sticking out from under the hen.
I slid it out. It was a business card from Hoffmeier Realty, with a man’s name and a phone number. On the back, in Paula’s round handwriting, it said Ready when you are. P.
I put it back under the hen exactly how I’d found it.
The notebook was right where he said, next to the flashlight and the church envelopes. It was a plain green spiral, the cardboard cover gone soft at the corners. Deb’s home number was written on the inside of the cover in pencil.
The first page was six years old. One line.
Rusty gone. Deb at county says the old ones never get picked. Took a spaniel.
After that it was page after page in the same square capitals. Each dog got a name Dad gave it, the date he brought it home and the date it left. Beside each one he’d written where it went, a person’s name and a phone number.
Buster. Arlene Lindgren, Juniata. Her number, the date and a check mark.
Forty-seven of them had gone out of that garage to somebody’s house. Nine were under the lilacs. Seven were on Mom’s cushions.
The last line was from the day before. Dolly. Gray. Card says Friday. Took her Wednesday.
On the back step I passed the three sacks of dog food I’d seen riding in the truck bed the evening before. One was already open, its top rolled down and clipped with a clothespin.
I handed the notebook to Lindgren. He read it standing in the wet grass, turning pages with his thumb, and he didn’t say anything for a long time.
When he was done he gave it back to Dad. Paula had come around the side of the house with her hand out for it, and he gave it to Dad anyway.
“Sorry about your morning, sir,” he said.
Then he backed the cruiser off the curb and was gone.
Paula’s hand stayed out a second longer than it needed to.
Kevin said her name once, quiet. They walked home, and their storm door banged hard enough to rattle.
That left Dad and me in the garage with the dogs.
The gray one, Dolly, had gone back to her cushion. She watched me with her chin on her paws.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said.
He was filling a cake pan from the hose.
“You’d have told Kevin,” he said.
The card under the salt shaker
Before supper I asked him about the windows.
He was on the back step with his coffee, Dolly lying across his boots.
“March,” he said. “Paula come over to talk about the house again. I wasn’t answering the door, so she went around and stood at the garage and rapped on the glass with her ring. Took pictures through it with her phone.”
He drank some coffee.
“The dogs went crazy. There was an old shepherd in there then, Duke. He quit eating for two days after. Wouldn’t come off his cushion.”
“So I painted it,” he said. “They sleep now.”
They came at six, with a hot dish.
Paula carried the casserole. Kevin carried a blue folder under his arm, and he set it next to Dad’s plate like a napkin.
Tater tot hot dish. Dad’s favorite. She’d thought about it.
She served him first. She sat down across from him and folded her hands.
“Dennis,” she said, “I know you’re mad at me. I’d be mad at me too.”
Dad ate.
“But this morning scared me,” she said. “It scared all of us. You’re seventy-six years old. You’re out there at two in the morning digging holes. What happens the night you go down in that garage and nobody finds you until the mail piles up?”
“The dogs’d find me,” Dad said.
Kevin laughed, then stopped when Paula looked at him.
She opened the folder. The brochure on top said Cedar Ridge. Those are the apartments out by the hospital with the covered parking.
“Ground floor,” she said. “Right by the door. There’s a garden plot. They run a van to the grocery store on Wednesdays.”
“I put five hundred dollars down to hold it,” she said. “From our own checking. You’d be in by the first of the month.”
“Paula,” I said.
“I’m talking to your father, Shelly,” she said.
She turned back to him.
“The house is too much house. The street thinks you’ve lost it. Marv Pruitt told Kevin he’s been hearing dogs through the wall of that garage since Christmas. And the county’s going to be watching you now whether you like it or not. You want to live like that?”
Dad pushed the folder back across the table with two fingers. It stopped against the salt shaker.
“I live fine,” he said.
“You’ll say yes, Dennis,” Paula said. “It’s just a matter of when.”
She stood up and gathered her dish, though there was half left in it.
On the way past she touched the hen with one fingertip, the way you’d touch something already yours.
Moose, due Friday
Friday I rode along to the pound.
It sits out past the fairgrounds, a cinderblock building with a chain-link run down one side. Deb Sorensen was at the front desk. She’s older than me and younger than Dad. She wears reading glasses on a beaded cord and has the kind of face that has said a lot of hard things kindly.
She saw Dad come in and took the glasses off.
“Dennis,” she said. “I was going to call you.”
He stood at the counter with his cap in his hands.
A woman had phoned the pound Thursday afternoon, she said, a few hours after the police left his drive. She hadn’t given a name either. The director had put a hold on releasing anything to Dennis Kopecky until somebody looked into it.
“And how long’s that?” Dad said.
“I don’t know,” Deb said. “I asked. I couldn’t get anyone to give me a date.”
Dad nodded like she’d told him it might rain.
“Who’s on the list?” he said.
Deb didn’t want to. She put the glasses back on and turned the clipboard around anyway.
Four names. The one at the bottom was Moose.
We went out to the runs. The noise hits you the second that door opens, a whole room of dogs all saying the same thing at once. Moose wasn’t saying anything. He was a big brindle shepherd mix with a gray chin and a gray ring around each eye, and he was lying against the chain-link with his back to the noise.
Dad crouched. Moose leaned his whole side into the fence so Dad could get two fingers through to his ribs.
“Hey, old man,” Dad said.
The card on the run door had a date written on it in marker. Friday. A week from today.
Deb stood behind us with her arms folded.
“I’m sorry, Dennis,” she said. “Friday’s Friday. I can’t move it.”
On the drive home he didn’t turn the radio on.
Around the Juniata turnoff my phone went. It was Carla, my manager at the pharmacy counter.
“You’re on the schedule Monday,” she said. “I need you there, Shelly. I’ve already covered for you twice this year. If you’re not behind that counter Monday, I’m giving your hours to the new girl and I’m not taking them back.”
I said I’d call her.
Dad kept his eyes on the road.
“Go on home, Shell,” he said. “You’ve got your own life up there.”
That evening he took the notebook down off the fridge and wrote Moose’s name at the bottom of a fresh page.
He left the date column empty.
Forty-seven phone numbers
He fell asleep in the recliner around nine with the ball game on and Dolly across his feet.
I took the green notebook to the kitchen table and opened it to the first page.
I picked up the phone on the wall, the one with the cord that reaches the stove, and dialed the first number.
A woman answered in Doniphan. I told her I was Dennis Kopecky’s daughter and I was calling about a spaniel named Pepper, six years back.
“Oh,” she said. Then she didn’t say anything. Then she said, “Pepper passed last spring. She slept on my husband’s side of the bed after he was gone. Your dad’s all right?”
I told her what the street had done Thursday morning.
She said a word I didn’t think a woman in Doniphan knew.
The second number was disconnected. The third was a man in Aurora who went to get his reading glasses before he’d talk to me, which made no sense, but I waited.
I went down the pages.
A few numbers rang and rang. A few had changed. Most of them hadn’t.
A boy answered at a farm up by Glenvil and yelled for his grandma. The grandma came on and said, “Oh, the chainsaw man.”
Arlene Lindgren answered on the first ring.
“Mike told me,” she said. “He came by after his shift and sat on my porch and didn’t say much, and Buster sat on his feet the whole time. What do you need, sweetheart?”
I told every one of them the same thing.
Sunday at four. Dad’s house. Bring the dog if the dog’s still with you. Bring the picture if the dog isn’t.
I didn’t tell them what to say when they got there.
Then I called Deb Sorensen at home, the number off the inside cover.
“I can’t change the hold, Shelly,” she said.
“Just come Sunday and see,” I said.
By the time I closed the notebook it was after one, and my ear hurt from the phone.
Saturday morning I stood out in the backyard by the lilacs and called Carla.
I’d worked that counter eleven years. I knew which regulars wanted their bags double-knotted and which ones needed the price read to them out loud.
“I’m not coming Monday,” I said.
“Then don’t come Tuesday either, Shelly,” Carla said. “Or after that.”
“Okay,” I said.
She hung up first.
I put the phone in my back pocket and went inside and opened the second sack of dog food.
Four o’clock Sunday
Paula came at three-thirty.
She didn’t bring a hot dish this time. She brought the blue folder and a white one, with the Hoffmeier man’s card clipped to the front. Kevin came in behind her.
Dad was in the recliner. I was at the table with the green notebook.
She didn’t sit.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m going to say this once, and then I’m done being the bad guy.”
“Somebody from the county called me back Friday. They’re looking at you, Dennis. The pound won’t give you another dog. Marv Pruitt wants to know what he’s supposed to tell his grandkids about the shovel. The whole street’s seen my video.”
“And you.” She turned to me. “You come down five days a year. You eat his food and you sleep in your old room and you drive back to Omaha, and Kevin and I are the ones two doors down. We’re the ones who get the call. We’re the ones who’d find him.”
Kevin looked at the carpet.
“So here’s what’s going to happen,” Paula said. “Hoffmeier comes Tuesday to walk the house. Cedar Ridge has him by the first of the month. The dogs go back to the pound where they came from, and whatever happens to them there is what was always going to happen to them. Call me cruel if you want. I’m the one in this family who can count.”
She put the white folder on the table and flattened it with her palm.
I didn’t say anything.
I opened the green notebook to the first page and set it on top of her folder, square.
She looked at it and laughed a little, through her nose, the way Dad does.
“The notebook,” she said. “Mike Lindgren was being nice to an old man, Shelly. It’s a list of dogs. Anybody can write a list of dogs.”
A truck door shut out front at four o’clock.
Then another.
Then a car, and another car, and a little white hatchback with a dog’s head out the back window.
Paula went to the front window.
They were parking on both sides of the street and coming up the sidewalk. A woman with a walker had a fat yellow dog on a leash tied to it. A farm family came with four kids and a black-and-white dog so old it walked like a table. The man from Aurora had a framed picture under his arm and no dog. Mike Lindgren was carrying a lawn chair for Arlene, with Buster riding in her lap.
Deb Sorensen got out of her car and stayed by it, arms folded, watching.
Up and down the street the storm doors opened. The same neighbors who’d stood in their robes Thursday came out onto their steps.
Dad got up out of the recliner.
He stood at the screen for a second. Then he went out on the porch. The woman from Doniphan got to him first and put both arms around his neck.
Paula turned around.
“You did this,” she said. “You called every one of these people so I’d look like—”
She stopped.
“They’re his,” I said.
She pulled her white folder out from under the notebook. She went to the table, slid the realtor’s card out from under the hen and put it in her purse.
Then she went out the back door, so she wouldn’t have to walk through them.
Kevin stood there.
He looked at me for a long time, like there was something he wanted to say, and I waited for it.
Then he went out the back door after her.
He hasn’t called me since.
The low pane
The next Friday I drove out past the fairgrounds by myself.
Dad wanted to come. I told him to stay with Dolly.
Deb was at the front desk. She looked up at me and then down at the file with the hold note in it, the one with Dad’s name.
I put my driver’s license on the counter. The address on it was still my apartment in Omaha. I’d already given notice. My things were in Dad’s truck bed under a tarp.
Deb picked up the license and looked at it a long time.
Then she slid a form across the counter to me, with a pen on a chain.
I signed my own name on the line under Moose.
He rode home with his head on my leg and his tail thumping the door.
Dad was waiting in the drive with Dolly. He didn’t say anything when Moose got down out of the truck. He went down on one knee on the concrete, the way Mike Lindgren had, and Moose put his whole head against him.
That evening I got the razor scraper off Dad’s bench.
The side door of the garage has a window in it, four little panes. I picked the bottom one, about as high as a dog’s nose, and scraped the brown off it while Dad watched from the step.
It came off in curls. It took a while.
“They’ll bark at every car,” Dad said.
“So they bark,” I said.
When I was done, Moose came over and put his nose on the clean glass, and Dolly came and stood next to him.
They stood there together looking out at the street, at the Pruitts’ spoons, at Paula’s storm door two houses down.
I left the other three panes brown.
Pass this one along to somebody whose dad still gets up before the paper does.
If you’re still in the mood for family drama, you might enjoy reading about My Youngest Sister Called Me Twenty Minutes Into The Toasts From The Legion Lot or even I Gave My Son His Key the Week We Buried His Father, and for a lighter touch of familial eccentricity, there’s always My Mother-In-Law Painted Her Name On The Mailbox Every Spring.
