🪖 PART 8 – “Visitors”
It began with a phone call.
Tom rarely answered numbers he didn’t recognize, but something about the area code—Illinois—made him pick up. Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was habit. After all, some of the dogs that needed him didn’t come with barking or pawprints. Sometimes, they came with static and a shaky voice.
“Is this… Whisper House?”
A woman. Older. Nervous.
“Yes, ma’am,” Tom said.
“I—I don’t have a dog,” she began. “Not anymore. But I think I need to visit.”
Tom paused. “You’re welcome to.”
She didn’t say much after that. Just gave her name—Elaine Burke—and a date she’d be driving up. She said she didn’t need a room. She’d sleep in her car if she had to.
Tom told her she wouldn’t.
—
Elaine arrived in the late afternoon, in a silver sedan packed to the brim with blankets, old dog toys, and a folded photo album strapped to the passenger seat with a seatbelt.
She was in her seventies. Small frame. Tired eyes. Her hands shook when she stepped out of the car, but her voice didn’t.
“His name was Barkley,” she said before even introducing herself. “We were together fifteen years. My husband passed halfway through. Barkley was with me the rest of the way.”
Tom nodded gently. “You can tell him everything here.”
She didn’t ask what he meant.
—
Elaine stayed three days.
She didn’t speak much at first. Just sat in the garden with the photo album on her lap, flipping pages slowly, whispering as if someone were listening right over her shoulder.
The dogs approached her cautiously, one by one. She had a way of holding herself—like someone who knew the value of silence, who’d already said all the hard things to say.
Clover eventually curled against her hip. Beau put his big blocky head in her lap. Even Daisy sat beside her for nearly an hour, tail resting over Elaine’s boot like a shawl.
Tom watched from the porch.
Sometimes, people needed a place to cry that wasn’t their own living room. A place not soaked in memories that hurt. A new place to miss something in peace.
Whisper House had become that place.
—
Elaine left on the fourth morning.
But before she drove off, she placed something in Tom’s hand—a single photograph of Barkley: a graying spaniel in a flannel sweater, head tilted, eyes warm.
“I know this sounds silly,” she said, “but if you ever have a dog like him… would you let me know?”
Tom looked at the photo. “I’ll remember his face.”
“You’ll know?”
“I always do.”
—
That night, he added Barkley’s name to the unofficial book—not under Rescues, but in the back section, the one labeled Echoes.
Barkley Burke
Belonged to Elaine, who needed him more than she’ll ever admit.
Liked warm socks, old jazz records, and sitting beside grief without blinking.
Tom paused. Then added:
“Some dogs never leave. They just wait until we can visit.”
—
And then came the others.
A man who lost a K9 partner in Afghanistan and never adopted again.
A woman who left her dog behind during a wildfire evacuation and never forgave herself.
An elderly couple who brought a tin full of ashes, wrapped in a baby blanket, asking if they could scatter them under a tree.
Tom said yes to them all.
Not because he had the answers.
But because dogs didn’t ask for explanations—they just showed up. So he did the same.
—
June came by in early September. She brought dog food, vet supplies, and a warm pie in a dish she insisted Tom not return.
“You ever think this place is more for people than the dogs?” she asked, watching Elaine’s ashes fall gently beneath the pine grove.
Tom thought about that.
Then he shook his head. “No. I think it’s for both.”
She smiled. “You know what it is?”
“What?”
“A chapel.”
Tom chuckled, but it stuck in his throat.
Later that night, after the last light had gone out and the wind had calmed, he wrote a new entry in the back of the journal, not under Dogs or Echoes, but a new section entirely.
He titled it:
Visitors
And beneath the first name, he wrote:
Elaine Burke
Stayed three days.
Brought a dog’s story, and left some of her pain.
Found the place where the ache finally quieted.