PART 9 – “The Wrong Way Home”
Summer crept in slow and golden.
At Magnolia Glen, the air buzzed with cicadas, and the gardens pulsed with marigolds and snapdragons. The scent of honeysuckle hung thick in the air—just like the day James Wilder passed.
Carol kept returning.
Not out of obligation, but out of gravity—like something unfinished still waited in the halls. Like memory hadn’t quite finished its work on her.
She found herself walking her father’s old trails every morning.
Sometimes with Gideon.
Sometimes alone.
But always with that familiar rhythm in her steps—slow, steady, as though she were retracing footprints that only her heart could see.
Gideon wasn’t like other therapy dogs.
He didn’t do tricks.
Didn’t respond to “sit” or “stay.”
But he knew when to be there.
He sat outside rooms before staff knew someone inside was struggling. He curled beside walkers and wheelchairs like he was guarding something invisible.
And always, always, he returned to the bench beneath the maple tree.
Like he was still waiting for someone.
Or perhaps still guiding someone home.
One morning, Carol sat beside him there, sketchbook in her lap.
“Did you ever really leave?” she asked softly.
Gideon didn’t look at her.
But his tail thumped once against the grass.
Carol smiled.
“I didn’t think so.”
She began to draw.
This time, it was the bench.
Two figures on it: one old man, one dog. Both facing away, both bathed in morning light.
Above them, the branches reached out like arms.
The sketchbook trembled slightly in her hands. Not from sadness—but from something gentler.
Acceptance.
That afternoon, she stopped by Etta’s desk.
“Would it be okay,” she asked, “if I started a class here?”
Etta looked up from her paperwork. “A class?”
“Memory sketching. Same as my dad used to teach.”
Etta’s eyes lit up.
“Mr. Wilder would’ve loved that.”
Carol smiled. “I think he still does.”
The first class had only four people.
Miss Alberta brought her dream journal and drew the cornbread kitchen. A quiet man named Leonard sketched the engine of a truck he’d rebuilt with his brother in 1956.
Carol didn’t draw that day.
She just watched their faces.
The way their eyes narrowed in focus.
The way their hands paused as memories caught up.
The way every line seemed to tug something deeper to the surface.
She remembered what her father once said:
“Even if you can’t remember until the pencil touches the page…
that still counts. That especially counts.”
After class, Carol walked outside to find Gideon.
But he wasn’t at the bench.
Not under the tree.
Not at the fountain.
She checked the garden paths, the side lawn, the north gate. Nothing.
She felt that familiar twist in her stomach.
The same fear from the day Shadow first vanished.
Just as she turned back toward the main building, she saw him.
Standing at the far end of the east path.
Looking back.
Waiting.
Carol didn’t call out.
She just followed.
Her steps slowed.
The wind shifted.
And for the first time in years, she let herself remember—not just the stories her father told, but the silences he never could.
The moments they missed.
The words he forgot.
The pain they both carried.
She carried it now without bitterness.
Only weight.
Only truth.
At the end of the path, Gideon sat in a patch of sun.
Carol reached him, knelt beside him, pressed her forehead to his.
“You don’t have to wait anymore,” she whispered.
He licked her wrist once.
And lay down.
The wind rose slightly.
Just enough to stir the maple leaves overhead.
One fell.
Spun.
Landed beside her sketchbook.
She picked it up.
Folded it into the last page.
And wrote beneath it: This, too, is memory.
PART 10 – “The Wrong Way Home”
The final class of the summer met beneath the silver maple.
Carol brought out folding chairs and baskets of soft pencils, thick paper, and lemon water in sweating glass pitchers. The air was warm, the kind that clung gently to the skin and made everything feel slower, softer.
A dozen residents gathered.
Some in wheelchairs.
Some with oxygen tubes.
All with stories written in the lines of their hands.
Gideon lay at the center of the circle, eyes half-lidded, ears twitching now and then as if catching echoes too old for the rest of them to hear.
Carol stood in front and opened her father’s sketchbook.
“This,” she said, “was my dad’s way of remembering. Not by dates or names. But by feelings. By places. By the sound of a tree in spring or the smell of a pencil on paper.”
She paused, holding up the page with the open gate.
“And sometimes… by the ones who walked beside him.”
They drew in silence.
Birdsong drifted down from the pines. A lawnmower hummed faintly across the street. Somewhere, someone was burning leaves. The air smelled like endings and beginnings.
Miss Alberta drew her wedding ring.
Leonard drew the curve of a baseball glove.
One woman drew a pair of dog paws resting on her lap, saying softly, “I don’t know if this really happened, or if I dreamed it.”
Carol smiled.
“Same thing, sometimes.”
She didn’t draw until the others had finished
Then she picked up her pencil.
And without looking down, began to sketch:
An old man.
A dog.
Walking down a narrow wooded path, their figures getting smaller as they moved into the light.
She added no detail.
No face.
No features.
Just shape. Just motion.
Then, beside the figures, she drew a third shape—a girl, this time. Walking after them. Not trying to catch up. Just walking because she could.
Because she knew the way.
She signed it: CW.
And tucked it between the pages of her father’s sketchbook.
That night, she sat on the bench beneath the tree.
Gideon by her side.
Sketchbook in her lap.
Fireflies floated through the dusk, blinking like thoughts she hadn’t had in years.
“I used to wonder,” she said, “if he knew how much I loved him. Even when he couldn’t remember my name.”
Gideon lifted his head.
Carol continued, voice barely a whisper.
“But now I think… love isn’t something you forget. Even when your mind goes. It just moves somewhere else. Into your hands. Into your feet. Into the dogs who walk beside you.”
She leaned down and kissed his fur.
“You carried him farther than I ever could.”
That was the last summer the maple stood alone.
By fall, Magnolia Glen had transformed the walking path into a memory trail.
Residents painted stones with names and pictures.
Benches bore brass plaques—“For Ruth.” “For Nadine.” “For James.”
At the trail’s end, a small wooden post read:
If you are lost,
walk with the dog.
He remembers the way home.
And beneath it?
A paw print.
Pressed deep into the wood.
Weathered, worn.
Still waiting.
THE END