My Husband’s Brother Told Their 89-Year-Old Mother Her Little Pomeranian Died The Week She Went Into Assisted Living. She’s Called Me “That Girl From The Hollow” For 39 Years, And On Her 90Th Birthday I Walked Into Her Party Carrying Him

The first thing my mother-in-law ever said about me, she said to her sister in the kitchen of the Cutshaw farmhouse in October of 1986, three days before I married her son. She didn’t know I was standing in the hall with a pan of deviled eggs.

“Well, she’s clean, anyway,” Nellie Cutshaw said. “For a girl from the hollow.”

I grew up in Leslie County, Kentucky, up a creek road so narrow that when the school bus came down it, the neighbors had to pull their trucks into the yard. My daddy worked in the mines until his back gave out. My mama sewed. We had an outhouse until 1973. I am not ashamed of one bit of that, and I wasn’t ashamed of it then. But I was twenty-four years old and holding a pan of deviled eggs, and I have never forgotten how those words felt landing on me.

For thirty-nine years after that, I was “that girl from the hollow.” Not to my face, usually. Nellie was a deacon’s widow and a Sunday school teacher and she had beautiful manners. She would say it to her bridge club. She would say it to my sister-in-law. She would say it, once, at Thanksgiving in 1994, to my own son, who was six and came home and asked me what a hollow was and why Mamaw said it like that.

My husband Haskell is a good man. He is quiet, the way men who grow up with a loud mother learn to be. He would squeeze my hand under the table and say, “That’s just Mama.” For thirty-nine years, that was just Mama.

We live on forty acres outside Danville, about six miles from the old Cutshaw home place. I taught fourth grade for thirty-one years. I have a garden that the county extension office once photographed for a calendar. I am sixty-three years old. And I still, to this day, catch myself checking whether the dish towels are folded right when I’m in somebody else’s kitchen.

Tater

The one thing in this world Nellie Cutshaw loved without conditions was a thirteen-pound orange Pomeranian named Tater.

She got him in 2012, the year after her husband passed. My brother-in-law Roscoe bought him for her as a Christmas present from a breeder in Ohio, and I believe it is the single kindest thing Roscoe ever did in his life, though I have since wondered whether he did it so he would not have to visit as often.

Tater looked like a dandelion that had gone to seed. He had a fox face and a plume of a tail that curled over his back, and as he got older his little muzzle went white. He slept on a needlepoint pillow at the foot of Nellie’s bed. He rode in the basket of her walker. When the preacher came to visit, Tater sat in the preacher’s lap, and Nellie said that was because Tater knew a godly man when he saw one.

He did not like me much at first. He’d bark when I came in the door. Nellie would say, “He’s particular about who he lets in,” and look at me over her glasses.

But I’m the one who drove out to the home place every Tuesday for eleven years to take Nellie to the grocery and the beauty shop and the doctor. Roscoe lived an hour and a half away in Somerset, where he owns two used car lots and a boat dealership and a house on the lake. Haskell’s sister moved to Arizona in 1999. So it was me, every Tuesday. I’d carry Tater out to the car while Nellie locked the door behind us. Somewhere along the way, I don’t know exactly when, he stopped barking at me. He started waiting for me at the door.

Nellie noticed. She never said anything about it. But she noticed.

The Fall in August

On the ninth of August this past year, Nellie fell in her bathroom at five in the morning. She lay on the floor for two hours, with Tater barking himself hoarse, until the mailman heard him and called 911.

She broke her wrist and cracked her pelvis. She was eighty-nine years old. After the hospital she went to a rehab center in Danville for three weeks, and then the doctors and Roscoe agreed she should go to Redbud Manor, the assisted living place on the bypass, “for a while.”

Roscoe had been her power of attorney since 2018. He’d insisted on it. “I’m the oldest,” he said at the time, “and I have a head for business.” Haskell didn’t argue. Haskell never argues with Roscoe. That is a whole other story.

So the day Nellie moved into Redbud Manor, Roscoe drove up from Somerset to handle what he called “the logistics.” He said he’d close up the house. He said he’d take care of Tater.

“Take him to your place?” I asked. “Or you want us to keep him? We’d be glad to, Roscoe. He knows me.”

“I’ve got it handled, Wilda,” he said. He didn’t look at me when he said it.

A week later Roscoe called Haskell. I was in the kitchen and heard Haskell’s side.

“He what? Oh, Lord. In his sleep? Does Mama know?” A long pause. “No. No, you’re right. Don’t upset her any more. We won’t mention it.”

Haskell hung up and sat down at the kitchen table and put his face in his hands. “Tater died,” he said. “Roscoe said he just went in his sleep at Roscoe’s house. He buried him under the dogwood at the home place. He told Mama this morning.”

I sat down across from him. I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I’d carried that dog to the car every Tuesday for eleven years.

A Text Message From Garnet

Three weeks after that, on a Sunday afternoon in September, my phone buzzed while I was shelling beans on the porch.

It was Garnet Pauley, who I taught with for twenty years and who now volunteers every weekend at the county animal shelter down in Pulaski County, near Somerset. She’d sent a photograph.

It was an old orange Pomeranian in a steel kennel, lying on a folded towel. White muzzle. Fox face. A little plume of a tail curled over his back.

“Wilda,” Garnet wrote. “Isn’t this your mother-in-law’s dog? I’ve seen him in your Christmas pictures. Man dropped him off five weeks ago and said he was a stray he found on the highway. Nobody’s claimed him and he’s not eating much. He’s on the list.”

I knew what “the list” meant at a county shelter.

I stood up so fast the bowl of beans went all over the porch boards. I didn’t even change out of my house shoes. I left Haskell a note on the kitchen table that said “Gone to Pulaski County, back tonight, DON’T call Roscoe,” and I drove ninety miles in an hour and twenty minutes, which is not something a retired fourth grade teacher should admit to in writing.

A $45 Adoption Fee

Garnet met me at the front desk. She walked me back to the kennel row, and I heard him before I saw him. A thin, hoarse little bark, the bark of a dog who had been barking for weeks with nobody coming.

Then he saw me, and he stopped.

I got down on that concrete floor in my house shoes and Garnet opened the kennel door, and Tater walked out slow, like an old man, and climbed into my lap and pushed his face under my chin and shook all over. I sat on the floor of the Pulaski County Animal Shelter and bawled like a baby.

“He was thin when he came in,” Garnet said quietly. “But he’s healthy, Wilda. The vet checked him. He’s just sad.”

I asked to see the intake card. Garnet wasn’t supposed to show me, but she’d taught down the hall from me for twenty years, and she did. Under “found location” it said “Highway 27 south of Somerset.” Under “surrendered by” there was just an initial, R., and a phone number. The phone number was Roscoe’s cell phone. I knew it by heart. I’d called it every time his mother needed something and he didn’t answer.

I paid the forty-five dollar adoption fee in cash. I signed the papers in my own name. I drove home with Tater in my lap the whole way, and when I pulled in the driveway, Haskell was standing on the porch.

He looked at the dog in my arms for a very long time.

“Under the dogwood,” he finally said.

“Under the dogwood,” I said.

Two Months on Our Porch

I wanted to drive straight to Redbud Manor that night. Haskell begged me not to.

“Wilda, she’s eighty-nine,” he said. “She’s barely eating as it is. If you walk in there with him, she’ll know Roscoe lied to her. You’ll break her heart twice in two months. And Roscoe will make it into a war. You know he will.”

“So we just let her think her dog is dead?”

“Let me talk to Roscoe first,” he said. “Let me give him a chance to make it right.”

Haskell called his brother the next morning. I listened from the hall. It did not go the way my husband hoped it would. Roscoe said he didn’t know what Haskell was talking about. Then Roscoe said some old lady at a shelter must have made a mistake. Then Roscoe said it was “a mercy,” because the dog was old and Mama would never be able to take care of him again anyhow, so what difference did it make. Then he said, “This is Wilda stirring things up, isn’t it? It’s always Wilda.”

Haskell hung up on his older brother for the first time in sixty-six years.

So Tater lived on our porch through September and October. He slept on a pillow I needlepointed for him, a bad copy of the one at Nellie’s. He followed me down the garden rows. He ate. He gained back a pound and a half. But every afternoon around four he’d go stand at the end of the porch and look down the road toward the home place, and I’d have to go sit by him till he gave up.

Meanwhile, every Tuesday, I went to visit Nellie at Redbud Manor. I’d bring her the church bulletin and a slice of chess pie. And I watched her fade.

She stopped doing her crossword. She stopped fussing about her hair. One Tuesday in October she said to me, staring out the window at the parking lot, “I don’t have anything to go home to now anyway.” Then she said, “Roscoe says the house is too much. He says it’s for the best.” And then, very quietly, more to herself than to me: “I’d have liked to have been the one to bury Tater.”

I went out to my car and sat there for twenty minutes before I could drive.

What Garnet’s Husband Saw

At the end of October, Garnet called me again. This time it wasn’t about the dog.

Her husband, Floyd, is a land surveyor. He’d been hired the week before to do a boundary survey on a farm off the Perryville road, for a developer out of Nashville who was buying it to put in a subdivision. Ninety-eight acres. He’d recognized the farmhouse from my Christmas pictures too.

“Wilda,” she said. “It’s the Cutshaw place. The closing’s set for December. Floyd said the seller is the son, under a power of attorney. He said the son told the developer the mother was never coming home.”

I asked her to say it again, slowly, so I could write it down.

That night I sat at the kitchen table with Haskell and laid it all out. The fall. The power of attorney. “I’ve got it handled.” Tater left on the side of Highway 27 with a lie on his intake card. Then the lie about the dogwood, told to a grieving eighty-nine-year-old woman, so she’d stop wanting to go home. And the survey crew on her land while she sat in a recliner at Redbud Manor believing she had nothing left there.

Haskell didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he got up and went out to the porch and sat down next to Tater and put his hand on the little dog’s back.

“Mama’s birthday is the fourteenth,” he said. “She’ll be ninety. Roscoe’s throwing her a party at Redbud. He’s already told everybody he’s giving a speech.”

“I know,” I said.

“I think you ought to bring a guest,” my husband said.

The Ninetieth Birthday

Redbud Manor held the party in their activity room, with folding tables and a sheet cake from the grocery store bakery that said “Happy 90th Nellie” in blue icing. There were thirty or so people. Ladies from her church. Two of her bridge club still living. Some cousins from Harrodsburg. Roscoe’s wife, Bethanne, in a sequined top. Haskell’s sister on a video call from Arizona, propped up on an iPad against the punch bowl.

Nellie sat at the head table in a lavender dress somebody had ironed for her, her hair set, her good pearls on. She looked very small.

Roscoe stood up at about two thirty with a glass of punch and tapped it with a plastic fork. He talked about his mother’s strength and her faith and her famous pound cake. He talked about how hard it had been for him, personally, to “make the hard decisions” this year. He said he had always tried to do right by her, as her oldest son. He said, “Mama, I know this has been a year of losses. But we’re all here for you.”

Then he raised his glass, and that was when I opened the side door from the hallway and walked in carrying Tater.

I had brushed him for an hour that morning. He looked like a little orange cloud. I didn’t say anything. I just walked up the middle of the room between the folding tables.

Nellie didn’t see me at first. Then one of the church ladies gasped, and Nellie turned her head.

She said, “Tater?” Just like that. A question.

That little dog came out of my arms like he’d been fired from a cannon. He hit the floor and ran the last ten feet and jumped straight up into her lap in her lavender dress, and he licked her face and whined and turned circles and lay down across her knees with his head on her good wrist, and he would not stop shaking.

Nellie put both her hands on him. She didn’t make a sound. She just held on to him and cried with her mouth closed, the way old women in my family cry.

The room was so quiet I could hear the ice machine in the hall.

“What Else Did You Bury Under That Dogwood?”

It was Nellie who spoke first. She looked up from the dog and found her oldest son, still standing there with his glass of punch.

“Roscoe,” she said. “You told me you buried him under the dogwood.”

Roscoe opened his mouth. Nothing came out. Bethanne had gone the color of the tablecloth.

“Mama,” he said finally. “This is Wilda. She’s confused you. That’s not even the same dog.”

Tater lifted his head off Nellie’s knee, looked at Roscoe, and growled. A thirteen-pound Pomeranian with a white face. It was the most beautiful sound I ever heard.

“I’ve known this dog thirteen years,” Nellie said. “I know him by the way he breathes.” She turned to me. “Wilda. Where did you get him?”

So I told her. In front of the bridge club and the church ladies and the cousins from Harrodsburg and Haskell’s sister on the iPad. The shelter in Pulaski County. The intake card and the phone number. Highway 27. Then I told her about Floyd Pauley’s survey crew and the developer from Nashville and the closing in December.

Nellie listened to the whole thing without interrupting. She has never in her life listened to me without interrupting.

When I finished, she looked at her son for a long, long time. Then she said, in her Sunday school voice, the one that used to make the whole fellowship hall go silent:

“Roscoe Edsel Cutshaw. What else did you bury under that dogwood?”

He put down his punch and walked out of the room. Bethanne followed him. Nobody stopped them.

After the Party

Haskell had made an appointment with a lawyer in Danville for the following Monday. He’d done it a week before, without telling me, which is the first time in our marriage my husband has ever made a plan behind my back. I’ve forgiven him.

Nellie revoked Roscoe’s power of attorney that Monday morning, in a wheelchair, with Tater in her lap, signing her name in that perfect deacon’s widow cursive. She named Haskell in his place. The sale to the developer fell apart before Christmas, since a power of attorney isn’t worth much once the person who gave it has taken it back and is sitting right there in the lawyer’s office telling everybody exactly what she thinks.

She moved back home to the farmhouse in January. A home health aide comes in the mornings. I come in the afternoons. Haskell put grab bars in the bathroom and a ramp off the back porch, and he painted the kitchen the yellow she’d always wanted and Daddy Cutshaw always said was too loud.

Tater sleeps on the needlepoint pillow at the foot of her bed again. He waits by the door for me at four o’clock.

Roscoe hasn’t been out. He sends a card now and then. Nellie reads them and puts them in a drawer. I don’t ask what she thinks. She’ll tell me when she’s ready, or she won’t.

The Recipe Card

In February, on a Tuesday, I was washing up Nellie’s lunch dishes when she called me into the front room. She was sitting in her chair by the window with Tater asleep in her lap and an old tin recipe box on the table beside her.

She held out an index card to me. It was her bread-and-butter pickle recipe, in her handwriting from about 1960. The one she would not give to anybody. Not her sister. Not the church cookbook. Not me, though I’d asked three times in thirty-nine years and been told it was “a family recipe.”

“You might as well have it,” she said, not looking at me. “Somebody in this family ought to know how to make them right.”

I took the card. I didn’t trust myself to say anything.

Then she said, still looking out the window, “Your mama raised you right, up in that hollow.”

That’s all. That’s the closest Nellie Cutshaw has ever come to an apology, and I expect it’s the closest she ever will. But I will tell you, I put that card in my apron pocket and went back into the kitchen and finished the dishes, and I had to dry the same plate four times before I could see it.

If you have ever been the in-law who got called names for decades and still showed up every Tuesday anyway, this one is for you. Share it with somebody who has carried that weight quietly. Sometimes the people who look down on us are the ones who need us most, and sometimes an old dog knows that before anybody else does.

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