The Widow I Met At Grief Group Said We Could Move In Together As Soon As I Rehomed My Late Wife’s Old Dog. On The Drive To His New Family, He Dug Something Out From Under My Truck Seat That She’d Been Asking About All Week

My wife Nola picked Tinker out of a cardboard box in front of the feed store in Ponca City, Oklahoma, in the spring of 2014. I was against it. I said we were too old for a puppy, and that an Australian shepherd needed a job, and that I was retired and did not intend to give anybody a job ever again, including a dog.

Nola put him in my lap in the truck and said, “Orval, look at his eyes.”

One of them was pale blue, like a winter sky. The other was brown as a pecan. He was a blue merle, gray and black and white all swirled together like somebody had stirred him with a spoon, and he looked up at me with those two different eyes and I was done for. Nola knew it. She laughed all the way home.

For nine years that dog went everywhere she went. To the post office, to the beauty shop, to her sister’s in Blackwell every Thursday. He rode in the middle of the bench seat of my old pickup with his chin on her shoulder. When she was working in the garden he lay at the end of the row and watched her like he was guarding the tomatoes from the federal government.

Nola died in February two years ago. It was her heart, in her sleep, with no warning at all. I woke up at six and she didn’t, and Tinker was lying across her feet on top of the quilt, and he would not move when the men from the funeral home came. I had to lift him off the bed myself. He did not fight me. He just went stiff and quiet, and he stayed that way for about a month.

So did I.

I am seventy-three. I ran the grain elevator in Ponca City for thirty-one years. I know how to fix a pump motor and how to read a moisture meter and how to tell when a man is lying about the weight of his load. I did not know how to be a widower. Nobody teaches you that.

Tuesday Nights at the Church

It was my son Tillman who talked me into the grief group. He lives in Tulsa with his wife and two boys and sells commercial insurance, and he called me every Sunday after Nola died and got a little more worried each time.

“Dad,” he said one Sunday that fall, “you sound like you haven’t talked to another human being all week.”

“I talked to Tinker.”

“That’s what I mean.”

The bereavement circle met Tuesday nights in the fellowship hall of the Methodist church downtown, in a room that smelled like burnt coffee and floor wax. There were usually eight or nine of us in folding chairs. A retired nurse named Cleta ran it, and she had a way of letting a silence sit until somebody filled it.

I went three times without saying a word. The fourth time, I talked about Tinker lying across Nola’s feet, and I cried in front of strangers for the first time since I was a boy. Afterward a woman came up to me by the coffee urn and touched my arm.

“That dog,” she said. “That’s the part that got me. My Burley had a dog like that.”

Her name was Starla Duquesne. She was sixty-six, with soft silver hair cut short and a voice like warm honey. She said she had lost her husband to cancer three years before and moved to Ponca City from Texas to be “near the water.” She laughed when she said it, because the nearest lake is Kaw Lake and it isn’t much. She said she didn’t care. She said she just needed somewhere nobody knew her as a widow.

I understood that. I understood that completely.

The Kind of Attention a Lonely Man Notices

I am not going to pretend I was a fool about women. I was married to Nola for forty-four years and I wasn’t looking. But I was lonely in a way I didn’t know a person could be lonely, and Starla made it easy.

She brought a pecan pie to my house the second week. She came by with a casserole when I had a cold. She sat on my porch swing in the evenings and listened to me talk about the elevator and the wheat harvest of 1982 and the time Nola ran over the mailbox three times in one summer. She laughed at the right places. She asked the right questions. She told me I had kind hands.

Tillman was thrilled. “Dad, that’s great,” he said on the phone. “You deserve somebody. Mom would want you to be happy.”

Everybody kept telling me what Nola would want. Nola would have wanted me to get my cholesterol checked and stop eating gas station burritos. I don’t think she had an opinion on Starla.

Tinker did, though.

The first time Starla came to the house, he walked out onto the porch, looked at her, and walked back inside. That was it. He didn’t growl. He just left. The second time, he went and lay under the bed in the back room and wouldn’t come out until her car was gone.

“He doesn’t like me,” Starla said, smiling, but her eyes didn’t smile.

“He doesn’t like anybody,” I said, which wasn’t true, and we both knew it. Tinker loved the mailman. He loved Tillman’s boys. He loved Cleta from the grief group, who came by once to drop off a book and ended up sitting on the kitchen floor scratching his ears for half an hour.

He would not ride in the truck when Starla was in it. I tried twice. He jumped up on the seat, smelled the passenger side, and jumped right back down and sat in the driveway and stared at me.

A Fresh Start

By the next summer Starla was at my house four nights a week. She started talking about the future. She said she was tired of paying rent on her little apartment by the hospital. She said my house was too big for one man and too full of memories. She said it was like living in a museum.

“You need a fresh start, Orval,” she told me one evening on the swing. “We both do. No ghosts.”

I didn’t like the word ghosts. I didn’t say anything.

In September she started talking about a condo in Tulsa, near Tillman, she said, so I could see my grandsons more. She’d found one. Two bedrooms, a pool, a clubhouse, no yard work. She showed it to me on her phone. It was nice. It was very clean. It looked like nobody had ever cried in it.

“There’s just one thing,” she said, and she put her hand on my knee. “They don’t allow dogs over twenty pounds.”

Tinker weighs forty-eight.

“And honestly, honey,” she said, “I think it would be good for you. That dog keeps you stuck. Every time you look at him you see her. I see how sad it makes you. I can’t compete with a dead woman’s dog.”

I want to tell you I got up and walked away. I didn’t. I sat on that swing for a long time. She was not entirely wrong. Every time I looked at Tinker I did see Nola. I just had never thought of that as a bad thing before.

What Tillman Said

I called my son. I thought he’d tell me not to do it. He didn’t.

“Dad,” he said, “I hate to say it, but she might have a point. Tinker’s eleven. He’s set in his ways. Maybe a family with a big yard and some kids would be better for him than you sitting alone with him in that house. And Starla’s good for you. I haven’t heard you laugh like this since Mom.”

I knew what Tillman wanted. He wanted his father to stop being a problem he worried about on Sunday nights. I don’t blame him for that. I’d want the same.

So I put up a notice at the vet’s office. Within a week a young couple called, the Guidrys, from out past Newkirk. They had forty acres, two little girls, and an old heeler who’d just passed. They wanted a grown dog who already knew what he was doing. The wife cried on the phone when I told her about Tinker’s eyes.

We set it for a Thursday night in October. Seven o’clock, at their place. Twenty-five minutes north on Highway 77.

Starla was overjoyed. She hugged me in my kitchen and said, “You’re doing the right thing, Orval. You’ll see.” Then she said, “Oh, and honey, if you find my little black zipper case, it has my reading glasses in it. I think I dropped it in your truck Sunday. I’ve looked everywhere.”

That was the third time that week she had asked me about the case.

Twenty-Five Miles North

I packed up Tinker’s things on Thursday afternoon. His bed, his bowls, the orange rubber ball with the bite marks Nola used to throw for him in the backyard. I put Nola’s old gardening sweatshirt in the box too, the one he slept on. I wasn’t sure why. I just thought he should have something that smelled like her.

He knew. Dogs always know. He watched me fill that box from the doorway and wouldn’t come into the room.

At six thirty I opened the truck door and said, “Load up, buddy.” For a second I thought he wouldn’t. Then he jumped up onto the bench seat and sat in the middle, right where he used to sit next to Nola, and looked straight ahead out the windshield like he was being driven to his own hanging.

It was full dark by the time we got out on 77. Flat country, no moon, just the dash lights and the white line and now and then a farmhouse light way off across a field. I had the radio off. I couldn’t stand any noise.

About ten miles out, Tinker started acting strange. He got down off the seat into the passenger footwell, which he never does, and started digging. Pawing hard at the gap under the bench seat, whining, shoving his nose in there.

“Tinker, quit,” I said. “There’s nothing down there.”

He kept digging. He got his whole head under the seat. I heard something scrape against the metal seat track. Then he backed out, and in his mouth was a little black zipper case, about the size of a paperback book.

He didn’t bring it to me. He dropped it on the floor mat and growled at it. In eleven years I had never once heard that dog growl.

What Was in the Case

I pulled over onto the gravel shoulder by an empty grain bin and put the hazards on. I turned on the dome light. My hands were shaking a little, and I told myself it was just the cold.

There were no reading glasses in that case.

There was a second cell phone, a cheap prepaid one, switched off. There was a folded church bulletin, the kind they hand out at funerals, from a Baptist church in Perry, Oklahoma, about forty miles south of me. The front had a photograph of a heavyset old man in a fishing hat holding up a catfish. His name was Gaylord Nesbitt. Born 1949, died fourteen months earlier. On the inside, under “survived by,” it said: his daughter Marcella, two grandsons, and “his devoted companion, Starla.”

Not Burley. Not a husband she lost to cancer three years ago in Texas. A man named Gaylord, in Perry, fourteen months ago.

Behind the bulletin was a business card from a title company in Ponca City. On the back, in Starla’s neat round handwriting, was my address. Underneath it she had written: “Quitclaim. Add S.D. to deed. Fri 11/14 10 a.m.”

The next morning. She had made an appointment to have my house put in her name the morning after I gave away my wife’s dog.

Under that was one more thing. A photocopy of a cashier’s check for $86,400, drawn on a bank in Perry, from Gaylord D. Nesbitt to something called S.D. Holdings LLC. Dated eleven days before his funeral.

I sat there on the shoulder of Highway 77 with the hazards clicking, and Tinker climbed back up onto the seat and laid his chin on my shoulder, the way he used to lay it on Nola’s.

The Daughter in Perry

I did not drive to Newkirk that night.

I called the Guidrys and told them I was sorry, I’d made a mistake, and I would explain someday. The wife said, “Mr. Pickett, I could hear it in your voice on the phone. It’s all right.” I still send those girls a Christmas card.

Then I turned the truck around and drove home, and at nine forty at night I looked up a phone number for a Marcella Nesbitt in Perry, Oklahoma.

She answered on the fifth ring. She sounded tired and suspicious, the way you sound when a stranger calls late. I told her my name and that I was a widower from Ponca City and that I was holding her father’s funeral program, and that I had found it in the possession of a woman named Starla.

There was a long silence. Then Marcella Nesbitt said, very quietly, “Is she wearing her hair short now?”

She talked for almost an hour. Her father had met Starla at a grief support group at their church after Marcella’s mother died. Starla had moved in within six months. She had convinced him he was “living in a museum.” She had convinced him to sell his house and put the money in an “investment” for their retirement together. Then her father had gotten sick, and gone fast, and when Marcella went to settle the estate there was nothing left. The house was gone. The savings were gone. And Starla was gone too, two days after the funeral.

“The police said it was all legal,” Marcella said. “He signed everything. He was a grown man. They said there was nothing they could do.”

Then she said something that made the back of my neck go cold.

“Daddy had a dog. A little beagle mix named Doodle. He’d had him twelve years. About a month before she got him to sell the house, she talked him into giving Doodle away. She said Doodle kept him stuck in the past.”

Ten O’Clock Friday Morning

I did not sleep much that night. At six in the morning I called Tillman.

I told him everything. I read him the back of the business card. I read him the date on the cashier’s check. I read him the “survived by” line from the bulletin. For a long time he didn’t say anything at all.

“Dad,” he finally said, and his voice cracked. “I told you to give away Mom’s dog.”

“You told me what you thought was right,” I said. “So did I. We were both wrong. Tinker wasn’t.”

Tillman drove up from Tulsa that morning. He was at my kitchen table by eight thirty with his laptop open. By nine he had found S.D. Holdings LLC on the Oklahoma Secretary of State’s website, registered to a post office box in Oklahoma City. By nine fifteen he had found two more grief-group widowers’ obituaries from the last six years, one in Enid and one in Ardmore, that listed “his devoted companion, Starla.”

Marcella drove up from Perry. She brought a folder of her own. Bank statements. A copy of her father’s sale contract. A photograph of Doodle.

And at nine thirty a deputy from the Kay County Sheriff’s Office sat down at my kitchen table, along with a quiet woman in a blazer from the elder financial abuse unit at the Oklahoma Attorney General’s office, whom Tillman had reached through a man he went to college with. She looked at everything on my table for a long time. Then she said, “Mr. Pickett, would you be willing to keep that ten o’clock appointment?”

The Title Company

The title office was in a little brick building on Fifth Street. I walked in at five minutes to ten with my son on one side of me and Tinker on a leash on the other. The deputy was already inside, sitting in a side office with the door open a crack. The woman from the Attorney General’s office was sitting in the waiting area reading a magazine like she was waiting on her own closing.

Marcella waited out in her car.

Starla came in at ten on the dot. She was wearing a new blue dress and pearl earrings. She saw me and smiled. Then she saw Tinker, sitting at my left knee, and the smile stopped like a clock.

“Orval,” she said. “What is he doing here? I thought he went to that family last night.”

“He changed his mind,” I said. “So did I.”

She laughed, a little too high. “Honey, we talked about this.”

“We did,” I said. “Starla, I found your reading glasses case.”

I took it out of my coat pocket and set it on the counter between us.

She looked at it for a very long time. The title clerk, who had no idea what was going on, looked from her to me and back. Starla’s hand went to her purse and then stopped.

Then the front door opened behind her and Marcella Nesbitt walked in holding a framed photograph of a little brown and white beagle.

Starla turned around. She didn’t scream or run. She just stood there in her new blue dress and said, very softly, “Marcy.”

The deputy came out of the side office.

What Happened After

It took most of a year to sort out. I am told it is still being sorted out. The Attorney General’s office found five men in all, across Oklahoma and north Texas, going back nine years. Every one of them a recent widower. Every one met in a church grief group. Every one convinced to sell his home or sign over a deed. And in four of the five cases, a family dog given away a month or two before the paperwork.

The investigator told me that wasn’t an accident. She said that a dog who doesn’t trust someone keeps a lonely man watching. It keeps him tied to his old life. It keeps him from being entirely alone with her.

Starla’s real name is not Starla. I won’t print the one they found. She pleaded to several charges in the end, and Marcella got back a portion of what her father lost. Not all of it. You don’t ever get all of it back.

Marcella and I still talk on the phone. She found Doodle, by the way. A retired couple in Guthrie had him. He’s fifteen now and mostly deaf, and they let her come visit him every month. She sends me pictures.

I still go to the grief group on Tuesday nights. Cleta asked me to help her with it, so now I set up the folding chairs and make the burnt coffee. I keep my eye on the coffee urn when new people come in. I don’t know what I think I’m going to see. I just watch.

Tinker comes with me. He lies under my chair through the whole meeting, and once in a while, when somebody new is crying, he gets up and goes and lies across their feet.

The Middle of the Seat

Tillman brings his boys up every other weekend now. He calls on Wednesdays as well as Sundays. He told me last month he’s sorry he pushed me. I told him to quit apologizing, he was trying to help his old man, and that’s all a son can do.

But I’ll tell you what I didn’t tell him.

That night on Highway 77, with the hazards going and that little black case on the floor mat, I sat there for a long time before I turned around. And I talked to Nola. Out loud. I hadn’t done that since the funeral.

I said, “I almost gave him away, Nola. I almost gave away your dog and your house in the same twelve hours, and I’d have thanked her for it.”

Tinker put his chin on my shoulder. He’s twelve now. He still rides in the middle of the bench seat, right where she used to be, and he still won’t let anybody else sit there.

I have quit trying to make him.

If you know someone who has lost a husband or wife recently, and a new friend is suddenly in a hurry to clear out the “ghosts,” please share this with them. And if their old dog doesn’t like that new friend, tell them to pay attention. Sometimes the dog is the only one in the room who isn’t lonely enough to be fooled.

Now Trending:

• My Daughter’s Boyfriend Showed Up At My Late Husband’s Lake Cabin With A Realtor And A Power Of Attorney He Said I Signed. My Old Setter Wouldn’t Let Them Off The Dock, And Then The Realtor Asked If My Husband’s Name Was Truett
• 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
• My Granddaughter’s Husband Posted A Video Of Himself Rescuing A “Starving, Abandoned” Old Pointer From A Ditch And Raised $61,400 In Nine Days. The Dog Was Ours, And The Ditch Was At The Back Of Our Hayfield

Please let us know your thoughts and SHARE this story with your Friends and Family