When Brenda came downstairs at seven-thirty the next morning, the guest room was empty.
The bed was made, tight and square, the way her father had made his bed every morning since the Army in 1958. His good hat was gone from the hook. His Bible was gone from the nightstand. His cane was gone from the corner.
On the kitchen table, under the salt shaker, there was a note in his big, careful handwriting.
Gone to get Daisy. Took the bus. Don't worry. Love, Daddy.
Brenda stood in the kitchen and read it three times.
Then she grabbed her car keys and ran.
The Greyhound left Columbus for Lexington at six-fifteen in the morning. The ticket agent at the station downtown remembered him. An old man with a cane and a hat and a Bible, who paid in cash and asked if the bus stopped anywhere near Sorghum Creek, Kentucky.
"It doesn't," the agent said. "Lexington's as close as it gets. He said that was fine. He said he'd figure out the rest."
Brenda got back in the car and drove south on I-71 faster than she had driven in her life.
She called Velma from the road.
"Miss Velma, Daddy's on his way. On the bus. He'll be in Lexington by noon. Is Daisy still there?"
"She's still here, honey," Velma said. "I took her water and a bowl of food. She drank the water. She won't eat. She won't let me near her feet. She just lies there with her nose against the door." Velma paused. "Brenda, the young couple came out this morning. The ones who bought it. They're over there now. Measuring the kitchen."
Brenda reached Lexington at eleven-forty. The bus had come in at eleven-thirty.
Her father was not at the station.
She found him twenty minutes later at a truck stop on the edge of town, sitting at the counter with a cup of coffee, talking to a cattle hauler in a feed cap who was on his way south with an empty trailer.
"Brenda," Odell said, when he saw her come in. He did not look surprised. "This is Dewayne. He hauls for the stockyards in Somerset. He was fixing to give me a ride."
The cattle hauler looked at Brenda, and at the old man, and stood up and put two dollars on the counter.
"Ma'am," he said. "I'll leave him to you. Good luck with your dog, sir."
Odell watched him go. Then he looked up at his daughter.
"I wasn't going to let her lie on that porch alone," he said quietly. "Not after two hundred miles. Not after what she did. You can be mad at me, Brenda. I'd have done it for you."
Brenda sat down on the stool beside him.
"I know you would, Daddy," she said. "Get in the car."
They drove the last ninety miles together, through the hills, through the bare November woods, with Odell in the passenger seat with his hat in his lap and his Bible on his knee, not saying a word.
At two-fifteen, Brenda turned onto the gravel road that ran past the farm.
There was a silver SUV parked in the yard. A young couple was standing on the porch steps, a man and a woman in their thirties, with a tape measure and a notepad. And at their feet, lying flat against the front door with her nose pressed to the crack at the bottom, was a thin black-and-white dog.
Brenda stopped the car.
Odell opened the door before she could help him. He got out slowly, with his cane. He walked across the yard, one careful step at a time, on his healing hip.
He did not call her. He did not have to.
At the bottom of the porch steps, he stopped and whistled. Once. Low and short. The same whistle he had used to send her around the cattle for ten years.
Daisy's head came up.
She looked at him for one long second.
Then she was off the porch and across the yard, limping on her torn feet, and Odell Puckett was on his knees in the gravel with his cane thrown aside and his arms full of dog, and his good hat had fallen off, and he did not care.
The young couple came down the steps slowly.
Their names were Josh and Amber Mullins. Josh was thirty-four and taught agriculture at a high school in Lexington. Amber was thirty-two and a vet tech. They had saved for six years to buy a farm, any farm, and this was the first one they could afford.
Amber knelt down in the gravel beside Odell. She looked at Daisy's feet. All four pads were cracked and torn, two of them down to the raw. She looked at the dog's ribs, showing through her coat.
"How far did she come?" she asked.
"From Columbus," Brenda said. "Two hundred miles. In three weeks."
Amber looked up at Josh. Josh looked at the old man on his knees in the yard, holding his dog, with tears running into his gray stubble.
"Mr. Puckett," Josh said slowly. "Your daughter told us you might want to sell the cattle separately. And we said we didn't want a dog." He stopped. "We didn't know about this dog."
Odell did not look up.
"She'll go with me," he said into Daisy's neck. "Wherever I go. I'll figure it out."
They stood in the yard for a long time. The November wind came down off the ridge. Across the road, Velma Combs was watching from her porch.
Then Amber Mullins said something quietly to her husband. Josh nodded.
"Mr. Puckett," Amber said. "Josh and I don't really know what we're doing. We've read every book. We've never run cattle a day in our lives. We don't know your fences or your water or which pasture floods in the spring."
Odell looked up at her.
"There's the little house," Josh said. "Down by the creek. The tenant house. The realtor said it's been empty since the 1970s, but the roof's good. We were going to tear it down." He looked at Brenda. "If it's all right with your family, we'd like to fix it up. And we'd like you to live in it. And your dog. And teach us how to do this right."
Brenda put her hand over her mouth.
Odell looked down at Daisy, lying in his lap in the gravel with her eyes closed and her torn paws stretched out in front of her.
"Daisy," he said quietly. "You hear that?"
The dog's tail thumped once on the ground.
They closed on Friday, as planned.
Brenda and Ron spent Thanksgiving weekend helping Josh paint the little tenant house by the creek. Velma brought a pie. By the first of December, Odell Puckett was living in it, with his Bible on the table and his good hat on the hook by the door and a woodstove in the corner.
Daisy's feet healed by Christmas.
On the first cold morning in January, Josh Mullins came out to the barn at six-thirty to feed the cows, the way Odell had told him to, and found them already gathered at the gate, waiting.
An old man in a hat was leaning on the fence with a cup of coffee. A black-and-white dog was lying at his feet.
"Morning, son," Odell said. "Let's start with the gate."