Moorings

I cannot rush the departure. Things have to be done, and they have to be done in a certain order. I stack the dirty plates and then the bowls on top of them and put them in the pan in which I've been cooking for the past 4 days. I take them to the edge of the dock and kneel down, my phone next to me. I scoop lake water into the plastic tub.

The fish arrive from the depths and circle the mooring ropes beneath the dock. These ropes keep the floating cabin in place, attached to cement blocks at the bottom, 70 feet down. The morning sun intensifies, heat on my shaking shoulders.

The phone lights up and I answer on the first ring and ask the question before my daughter speaks: “Did any of the mobile vets answer?”

“None of them,” she sobs. “Mom, what am I supposed to do?” I hear in her voice the little girl she once was. But she's also the adult, the young woman on the verge of 30. I want to protect her from this horrible moment, and I also need to lean on her.

“Keep trying. Try others. Do you want me to try calling too?”

“No,” she says. “Just come home. Come as fast as you can.”

This was our second call of the morning. In the first one, we agreed that Skye, my dog, was in so much pain, she needed to be euthanized.

Meanwhile, I scrape the little bits of food off the pan and into the water with a spatula. The sob doesn't emerge from my body until the fish open their mouths to receive the small chunks of scrambled egg and quinoa that sink down to them. The food floats down past the mooring ropes that are thick with algae. Any one grief is like that for me, attracting all other sadnesses, little tendrils swaying in the water. And now on top of that: bad mom. Bad dog mom. Bad.

Skye had been a rescue, a senior purebred collie who had been locked in a dark bathroom for years. The resulting neuroses were intense, but once she felt safe, she calmed down and loved us hard, and we loved her back. This morning, she had been alone when she slipped on the floor, couldn't get up, and my daught