Duke — The 7:40
Two years, and four hundred miles, and nobody believed Duke would still know her. Alma kept his collar oiled anyway, the way you keep a lamp trimmed against somebody’s return.
A trucker had found him at a highway rest stop, half starved, and kept him kindly at the depot, and called him by another name. What brought him home was a vet’s scanner, a chip, and one phone call.
The 7:40 sighed into the little station, and its doors stood open on strangers. Then a man she had never seen stepped down, holding a rope, and on the rope a grey-muzzled shepherd who did not look at her at all.
Two years is a long time to be somebody else’s dog. Alma put two fingers to her lips, and whistled the two notes she had whistled over one farm fence for ten years of mornings.
His head came up. The rope went tight, then slack, then trailing in the dust of the platform. And he ran the way he had run as a young dog: all heart, and no dignity at all.
The train pulled out, and the platform emptied, and under the one lamp it was only the two of them. He had known her before he ever saw her. Some things, a dog keeps deeper than memory.