Reba Stopped Eating, So I Asked My Sister for the $2,400

I'm Casey Mercer. I'm thirty-four, I work three days a week as a vet tech at Muskingum Valley Animal Hospital, and the other four days I'm out at my sister Dana's place — four acres off Route 60 outside Zanesville, Ohio, where she runs Second Chance K9 Rescue. I've been doing this for six years. Unpaid. I want that on the record before anything else, because it matters for what happened later.

Reba hadn't touched her bowl in two days.

She's a German Shepherd, maybe four years old, somebody's old working dog by the look of her hips. Somebody tied her to a dogwood tree by the Dollar General on Linden Avenue back in August — left her a water bowl, a collar, a leash looped twice around the trunk. Neat. Like they were doing it right. Except she was pregnant, and whoever did it just drove off.

It took her two months to trust us enough to eat out of our hands. She'd just started letting me comb the mats out of her sides when, a week before all this, she had two pups in the middle of the night. Both too small. By morning it was just Reba in the corner of the straw, and milk coming in with nowhere for it to go.

Dana crouched outside the kennel fence with a warmed bowl of soaked kibble, the kind we make for the weak ones. Reba didn't even turn her head. She lay with her muzzle pointed at the spot where the straw used to be, got up, walked the fence line sniffing the concrete, lay back down. Over and over.

"She's looking for them," Dana said behind me. "I stripped that kennel and put down fresh bedding twice. She's still smelling for them."

Rain was coming down hard enough on the tin roof over Block A that we had to raise our voices. Late October, the yard all mud, my boots making that sucking sound every time I crossed from the gate to the kennels. I'd been trying for three weeks to get Pruett's Roofing out to quote the leak over Block A — the one that drips right onto the straw — and the estimate, when it finally came, was $2,400. We had about $380 in the rescue's checking account. I know that number because I'm the one who balances it.

"She's giving up, Case," Dana said, wiping rain or tears off her face, hard to tell which. "I've seen this before. They quit eating, they lie down, and that's it."

Dana's the one who had the idea, not me, and I want to be fair about that. She stood up out of the mud and said, "What if we gave her somebody else's?"

"Somebody else's what?"

"A kitten. A puppy, if we can get one. She'll start producing for it, her body will switch over. Dogs do that. I read it."

I looked at her the way you look at someone who's just suggested something that makes perfect sense and is also completely impossible.

"Where exactly am I supposed to find you a newborn puppy on a Tuesday in October? Nobody at the shelter has whelped. It's not puppy season."

"Post it," she said. "Somebody's got a big litter, a mama who can't feed them all. It happens."

I wrote that post four times. Too clinical, then too sad, then I forgot to put my number in it at all. We finally got it up around 6:30 that evening and then checked our phones every fifteen minutes like teenagers. The comments rolled in — hang in there, sending love, poor baby — forty-one of them by midnight. Not one puppy.

The next afternoon, around four, the kennels went off like the whole place was on fire. Not the regular bark. The one they do for strangers at the gate.

Two kids stood on the other side of the fence. A boy, maybe nine, in a Steelers jacket two sizes too big with a busted zipper, and a girl, smaller, in a pink knit hat pushed sideways. Both of them soaked. Both of them crying, or close to it.

The girl had something pressed to her chest, tucked under her unzipped coat.

"Please," she said, and then just stood there a second before she could get the rest out. "Please, can you take him?"

She pulled back her coat and showed us a gray kitten small enough to fit in one hand — eyes still shut, fur matted down from the rain, making this thin, high sound that the storm almost swallowed whole.

"We found him by the dumpster behind the Dollar General," the boy said, fast, like he thought somebody would cut him off. "There was a whole box and he was the only one left. We took him home but my mom said no. My grandma lives with us and the cats mess with her breathing. That's true, I'm not making it up."

"He won't eat right," the girl said. "We tried the dropper thing and he won't take it."

The boy dug into his jacket pocket and held out a wet fist. He opened it over the fence and counted out crumpled ones and a handful of change onto the top rail.

"This is for food. I was saving it for a glove — baseball glove — but that's fine, I can wait on the glove."

Dana and I looked at each other. We were both thinking the same thing and neither of us wanted to say it out loud first, because it felt like asking for too much good luck in one week.

"Put your money away," I told him. "I mean it — it'll get ruined. We'll take him off your hands. Your little guy just might have gotten the luckiest break of his life today. He might be about to get a mom."

"A real one?" the girl asked, not buying it.

"We'll see," I said. There wasn't a single part of me that actually believed it would work. A dog taking in a different species entirely, days after losing her own? That's not the same as a story about a cat raising a puppy that gets forty thousand likes online.

"Can we come back and visit?" The girl was wiping her nose with her mitten now. "His name is Smokey. I picked it."

"With your folks," Dana said. "Not by yourselves."

We spent twenty minutes warming Smokey up by the space heater in the office — Dana laid an old receiving blanket over the vent, and I cupped him in both hands and breathed on him the way you'd warm up frozen fingers. He stopped crying and started squirming, which felt like the first good news all week.

We walked into Reba's kennel together. She lifted her head off her paws but didn't get up.

"Reba, girl," I said, kneeling right down in the straw next to her, putting my hand flat on her neck. "Look what I brought you. Just look."

She went stiff under my hand, nose working, every muscle along her shoulder pulled tight like a wire. For about ten seconds nobody in that kennel moved — not me, not Dana standing in the doorway with rain dripping off her, not Smokey, who'd gone silent in my palm like he knew better than to make a sound right then. Then Reba's nose dropped to my wrist, to the kitten, and she breathed him in one long pull, and her tail — which hadn't moved in two days — thumped the straw once.

She licked him. Not hard. Just the tip of her tongue across the top of his head, like she was checking something off a list only she could read.

By that night she'd let him nurse. By the next morning she had him tucked against her belly and wouldn't let either of us near him without standing up first to check our hands.

That part of the story is the one everybody wants. Here's the part that doesn't make it into the comments section.

After we locked up that night, Dana and I sat in the barn office with two mugs of coffee going cold, and I told her I'd called the Muskingum County Recorder's Office that afternoon — before the kids ever showed up at the gate — and pulled a copy of the quitclaim deed for this property. The one our mother's lawyer drew