I stood behind my father in his room at the county nursing home, looking down at the cowlick in his still mostly black hair. It whorled on the back right side of his head, the same place as mine, though my hair is reddish blonde. I didn’t need to look at his face to know his eyes were closed and his lips clenched in a grimace. I’d seen it plenty during previous bandage changes.

We had the male nurse this time, wearing dark blue scrubs. He knelt on the white-and-beige tile floor in front of my dad’s wheelchair, laying out the instruments of torture: scissors, antiseptic, gauze, bandages, and tape. The regular floor staff in their light blue scrubs took care of my father, looked after him, and set aside the softest blanket for him. I never asked what the scrub colors signified.

Dad was parked in the narrowest part of his dimly lit pink room. My big old dog, Joey, sat on his left, where there was more space. I stood with my right shoulder up against the cool painted cinder block wall. I held Joey’s worn black leash in my left hand; the connection calmed me.

“You’re doing great, Dad,” I said, even though nothing had happened yet.

Joey’s head shifted side to side by an inch or two as he panted, staring up at my father. At seventy-five pounds and fluffy, he panted a lot, even in his sleep. Dad lifted his shaking left hand and set it on Joey’s big black head. Joe closed his mouth and went still.

“Are you ready?” The nurse shoved the hem of my dad’s tan pants up to his calf, revealing his pale, bony shins.

The old man flinching in the wheelchair in front of me wasn’t my father, not anymore. My Dad was active, always doing something—right up until his afternoon nap. He built our childhood desks and beds, changed the oil on the cars, and went for a walk every night. When he was out and about, he took the stairs, even when an escalator or elevator was more convenient. The week after he retired, he started working part-time at Ace Hardware; he couldn’t stand the thought of just sitting around. A bout of sepsis in his mid-seventies began his fade into this eighty-one-year-old semblance of my father. Every now and again, I had a few moments of My Dad, a particular tone of voice or the way he raised his eyebrows to let me in on his dry, ironic humor.

“I’m right here, Dad.” I set my hand on his shoulder. He reached up and took it. His left hand rested on Joe; his right hand held mine.

The nurse blew his shaggy brown hair out of his eyes as he wrestled off one of my dad’s black sneakers.

Dad sucked in air, a reverse hiss.

The nurse grabbed the other shoe without giving him a moment to breathe.

This boy-nurse hardly looked old enough to shave his own pale and pimply skin. What could he know of time, of the gift of a few seconds, of the preciousness of even these difficult moments? My father was dying. I knew that. We weren’t yet to the Hospice phase. I didn’t know that it was only weeks away.

“Squeeze, Dad.” I leaned forward, right next to his face. “As hard as you need to.”

He opened his eyes, blue irises foggy behind his thick glasses. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

“As hard as you need to,” I said again. “On my hand, not on Joe.”

He turned toward me, overgrown eyebrows low. “I wouldn’t squeeze Joey.”

Those last few years, especially after the sepsis, my father’s once-tough skin deteriorated. Like mine, his skin was marked with freckles, coffee-brown moles, and assorted other spots, but the texture more resembled the brittle outer film of an onion than the flesh of a peach. His skin was so thin that any touch might draw blood. Even so and despite spending the last year under the fluorescent lights of the nursing home, he still sported a farmer’s tan, as if all those weekends outside coaching our soccer teams and doing yardwork stayed with him.

Though there wasn’t a schedule, I tried to be at the nursing home for these bandage changes. When I wasn’t there, I imagined he held tight to the fleece- lined blanket on his lap, the only one that didn’t irritate his skin. I liked to think that I was a comfort to him. I knew Joey was. When I came alone, my dad asked for him.

“Where’s Joe?” he’d say, holding out his hand as if to pet the dog who wasn’t there.

“I’ve got to run errands after this,” I’d say.

“I wish you brought him.” He’d set his hand back on the armrest and close his eyes.

But for this bandage change, he had both Joey and me, one on each side, all the comfort I could offer.

The nurse cleared his throat. “This may sting a bit.”

My father sniffed and winced.

The alcohol smell of antiseptic tickled my nose, like the tingling before a sneeze, but no sneeze came, just a persistent tickling that I couldn’t snort or shake away.

We quickly eclipsed the reverse hiss level of pain and entered the moaning phase, long and low at first. Dad’s grip was still strong, still sure. My fingertips tingled. This was the man who—when I was younger—walked off the nicks and scratches of life.

I closed my damp eyes. I wished like hell that Dad could still take the stairs, that his legs would still hold him, that he was still My Dad. Then I could grab him out of the wheelchair, and we could run down the hallway to the stairs and take them two at a time out into the autumn day. Then he could walk off all of the pain.

“Almost done,” the nurse said, smiling, “with this leg.”

I stretched and relaxed my fingers in my father’s grip. His left thumb rested unmoving just above Joey’s brown eyebrow as if drawing strength from my big old boy.

A couple of years earlier, I found a tumor near the pads of Joey’s front left paw. He’d been licking it a lot, and when I turned it over, I thought he’d stepped on half a Snausage, one of his favorite treats. I slid my fingertips between the rough black paw-pads. It was not a Snausage, but a smooth, oily growth firmly rooted in his paw. I felt like I’d been thrown into ice water.

I wonder if in my father’s dim room, Joey remembered his long recovery from the “Snausage tumor” removal. I wonder if he remembered the many vet visits, several times a week for a month or more, when they took him into the back without me. While I sat in the cold, beige exam room alone, wrapping and unwrapping a tissue around my fingers, the vet techs changed his bandages, removed stitches, added new stitches, and used laser treatments to encourage healing.

I wonder if Joey remembered the appointment maybe three weeks after his surgery when he was particularly fussy. The technician brought me back into the treatment area to comfort him. I squinted in the fluorescent-lit, white walled space. The stainless-steel treatment tables stood empty. On a plastic pallet against the back wall, Joey’s favorite vet tech lay on top of him, her brown ponytail coming loose. Another technician waited with scissors and a threaded needle. A young man from the kennel staff held onto Joey’s shaved leg as Joe yanked, yanked, and yanked it away.

“What can I do?” I asked, my voice tight at the sight of this pile of caregivers in their pale blue scrubs on top of eleven-year-old, seventy-five-pound Joe.

“Just look in his eyes,” his favorite vet tech said, the one he greeted with his panting smile and a wagging tail even on the third wound-care appointment of the week.

I folded myself down onto the white tile floor, put my face right up to his, my hands holding either side of his round head, and looked into those big brown eyes. By then, I knew that the tumor with its tendrils snaking up his leg was not cancer. By then, amputation was off the table. By then, all that remained was his long recovery.

“You’re doing great, Joey,” I said. “That’s my Oafie,” I said. “I love you,” I said.

“Okay, Ed,” the nurse said without even looking up at my dad, “this is the big one.”

“It’s Ted,” I said, emphasizing the T. I wanted to rip this guy’s head off. My father deserved to at least be called by his preferred name. I wanted to unleash the friction of my grief, helplessness, and rage. It wouldn’t change anything, wouldn’t make him any gentler with my dad. It might make things worse. A guy like this didn’t understand empathy, not yet. It might be satisfying for me to yell at him, to see his eyes go wide and blink too fast. But the last thing I needed was guilt over my temper twisting in my stomach and keeping me up at night. Nothing would bring My Dad back.

The nurse didn’t respond, didn’t correct himself, didn’t even look up or acknowledge I’d spoken, just peeled away the bandage on the worst of my dad’s wounds, the large one on his left heel where his sneaker had rubbed open the tight, frail skin.

I’d seen this sore during my last visit; it still haunted me. I swallowed and swallowed again, tasting bile. This was the sore that—in a few weeks—would prompt Hospice to tell the nursing home to stop putting his sneakers on. Then to stop getting him dressed. Then to stop taking him out of bed.

I never thought to question why a man in a wheelchair needed sneakers. I never suggested he wear slippers instead. If I had, maybe these memories wouldn’t still stab like an icepick in my left temple.

“Ooooooh,” my dad moaned, his grip so tight that my fingertips tingled. “Oooh.”

Joey answered with something between a bark, a sneeze, and a harumph.

“That’s right, Dad,” I said, leaning down close again. “Just squeeze.”

Despite the sour stench of my father’s unwashed hair, I took a long breath, gave his hand a tug, and closed my eyes. When I was growing up, he had a standing haircut every other week with Angelo at the Golden Scissors. He often showered twice a day. But in the nursing home, he flinched if I combed his hair. It left my fingers tacky when I smoothed his cowlick down. I had to wipe my fingertips on the back of my shirt so that he couldn’t see, wouldn’t see.

The nurse turned my father’s foot.

“Oooohhhhhh.”

Joey responded with a sound that I can describe only as a long mooooooo.

I opened my eyes.

Joey was not a dog who howled or whined; he barked. He might occasionally huff, but certainly nothing like a “moo.” I expected to see Joey’s head back, lower jaw extended, like a wolf in mid-howl. Instead, his black nose tipped up just barely toward my dad’s wrist.

The nurse leaned toward me, one blue-gloved hand raised, as if my mooing dog might suddenly lunge at him.

“He won’t bite,” I said.

“Yes, I will,” Dad said, his old humor back for a moment. His voice was gravel, like he’d been up all night. Across the room, the blinds above his bed were closed, but the sun swelled between the metal slats. On his closet door hung the Chicago

Blackhawks jersey my sister gave him, Scott Darling, the goalie they’d cheered for together.

The nurse glanced at me, then at Joe, before he started wrapping my father’s heel in gauze.

Dad sucked in again, sharp enough that I felt it in my throat.

“Mmmmooooooo.” Joey’s eyes were mostly closed, as if my dad’s hand was a great weight.

I buried my face in my upper arm to keep from laughing aloud. I don’t know how a dog even makes that kind of sound. What could I say in response to my normally goofy dog who was sitting so very still and—somehow, some way— mooing?

If my father had been himself, if he hadn’t been in so much pain, he would’ve had a perfect response: “You were saying?” or “Nobody asked you, Joe.”

“All done!” the nurse-boy announced like it was a triumph.

But we weren’t done. He still had to put clean socks on. And those damned sneakers.

“Oooohhhhhh,” my father moaned, loud, all stoicism spent. He never received laser treatments for his wounds, even though my dog got them two years earlier. Maybe Dad’s skin was too frail for the healing light.

Joey leaned toward my father like this new sound was a bubble that could ease all pain. “Mmmmmooooooooooooooooo.”

My silent laughter shook the wheelchair. This was the sort of thing that I would openly laugh about in the elevator on our way out, in the car as I drove home, and in all my retellings, giving Joey a good scratch on his head as I imitated his sound.

But I didn’t laugh out loud in front of my dad, not while he was in so much pain.

The nurse stopped trying to shove my dad’s foot into his sneaker and stared up at me.

“Joe’s trying to help you, Dad,” I said.

My father opened his eyes, turned just a little to the left, and patted Joey’s head with clumsy, stiff fingers. “Good boy.”

Meri Johnston lives in Massachusetts where she works in Product Stewardship and writes fiction, essays, and even the occasional poem. Her work has appeared in Potpourri: A Magazine of the Literary Arts, Paragraph Planet, and Windy City BMW Breeze, where for several years she wrote a recurring column about cars, dogs, life, and anything that could be metaphorically related to driving. (Nearly everything can be metaphorically related to driving.) She was selected for a residency at Atlantic Center for the Arts with Mentoring Artist Pam Houston. Meri’s sporadic blog about whatever inspires her (dogs, hope, and finding enough beauty to get through the day) can be found at merijohnston. com/blog.