Part 9 — “The Elm Tree Promise”
Spring deepened.
The elm tree outside Penny’s house grew fuller, greener—its branches stretching like old arms remembering how to hold the sky. Every day, new buds opened near the place where they had buried Chance.
Penny visited it daily.
Not with tears, not anymore.
With presence.
She’d sit cross-legged in the grass and read aloud—new pages from her second notebook, letters from kids who’d heard her story, poems she hadn’t shown anyone else. Sometimes she just sat in silence, the sunlight resting on her shoulders, her hand pressed to the soil.
One afternoon, she brought a small stone she’d painted herself—blue, with a looping white line across it, like a path that never ends.
She placed it gently at the base of the tree.
“That’s for you,” she said. “So you know I’m still walking.”
The wind answered her, lifting the ends of her hair, swirling around the stone before blowing gently down the sidewalk.
That weekend, Penny and her mom planted wildflowers around the elm—milkweed and blue flax and black-eyed Susans.
“We’ll call it Chance’s garden,” her mother said softly, pressing a rootball into the soil.
Penny nodded. “He liked to sniff the violets that grew by the curb. I think he’d like this.”
She paused, then added, “I think… I think when things grow again, it means the story isn’t over.”
Her mother looked up, her hands still in the dirt.
“It isn’t,” she said. “Not even close.”
On the last day of school, Penny walked to the bus stop by herself.
No crutch. No walker.
Just her red sneakers, her backpack, and a little wooden charm shaped like a paw print tied to the zipper.
As she waited, one of the neighborhood boys—Charlie, who always wore his hoodie up—walked past with his golden retriever. He stopped when he saw her.
“You’re Penny, right? The dog girl?”
She grinned. “Guess so.”
“My mom read us your book,” he said. “At bedtime.”
Penny tilted her head. “Did you like it?”
He looked down at his dog, who sat patiently at his feet.
“Yeah,” he said. “I didn’t know stories could be sad and good at the same time.”
She smiled.
“Neither did I,” she said. “Until I met him.”
At the next Loops of Love event, Penny read a new piece:
Grief doesn’t mean it’s over.
It just means it mattered.
And when something matters, it loops.
Through people.
Through poems.
Through little dogs who walk the same path every day just so someone can learn to walk again.
Miss Jean wiped her eyes with a tissue.
Jada gave a quiet clap.
And behind them, a woman Penny didn’t recognize rose from her seat.
She was holding a small, three-legged terrier mix, its ears comically large for its head.
“I wanted to thank you,” the woman said. “My daughter’s sick. Too sick for school right now. She listens to your audiobook every night. We named our dog Loop, because of you.”
Penny stood frozen for a moment.
Then walked forward and knelt down beside the dog.
“Hi, Loop,” she said, smiling. “Welcome to the story.”
Later that night, Penny sat by the elm tree again.
A soft dusk settled in, the kind that doesn’t feel like an ending.
She pulled out her second notebook and turned to the last page.
There, she wrote:
You saved me once.
And now I save myself.
And maybe—maybe even others.
The garden’s growing.
The loop’s still alive.
She closed the book and leaned back against the tree.
The wind moved through the branches above.
A single petal drifted down and landed on her knee.
She looked up.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
And in her bones, she swore she heard a tail thump.
Just once.
Soft as a memory.