The officer cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I’m going to need to see the animal. And I’m going to need proof you’re compliant with county limits. There are… regulations for multiple dogs on residential property.”
Multiple dogs.
My stomach sank.
Because he wasn’t wrong.
Tank was the only one in the house, but behind the house—past the sagging fence my dad used to patch with whatever scrap he had—there was the old barn. And in that barn were three dogs I hadn’t planned to have by now.
A skinny black mutt with a white blaze on her chest, named June, because she arrived in the middle of March and my father’s notebook said, “She looks like summer. Call her something warm.”
A red-ticked hound mix named Otis who flinched if you lifted your arm too fast.
And a little brindle bulldog thing named Mags who had one eye clouded over and the stubbornness of a boulder.
I hadn’t gone looking for them.
They’d come with the house the way dust comes with a floor that’s been lived on.
They’d come with my father’s unfinished promises.
In the first week after I moved in, I found a coffee can on top of the fridge with a wad of paper inside. All different shelters. All different counties. All different handwriting in the margins.
“He’s out of time.”
“She’s good with people, bad with loud noises.”
“Please don’t let them do it. Please.”
My father had rescued them the way some people rescue plants from a clearance rack—quietly, stubbornly, like it mattered even if nobody clapped.
And now he was gone, and all his quiet choices had landed in my lap like a weight.
I looked at the officer’s clipboard and the neighbor’s phone and felt something ugly crawl up my throat.
Not fear.
Anger.
Because Tank hadn’t even stepped outside.
Because nobody had cared when my father lived here. Nobody had cared about the barking. The scrapes. The limping dogs he carried out of his truck bed at midnight.
