Chapter 30: Open Doors

I didn't eat first.

I unfolded it beside my eggs.

It was a page off Lucille's yellow legal pad, the same kind the ranch hand had signed.

At the top, in the kid's careful capitals, it said:

WE ARE THE STRAYS OF THIS VALLEY. WE ASK TO BE COUNTED AS RUTLEDGE PACK.

Under it were names.

Sixty-eight of them, in pencil and ballpoint and one in green crayon.

The old trucker's signature took up three lines by itself.

The motel sisters had signed side by side and drawn a heart between them.

The old woman from exam room one had made a shaky X, and somebody had printed her name beside it.

The ranch hand.

The man with the riding mower.

At the very bottom, in a hand that made its R's like a pretzel, was Lucille's name.

Under hers was one blank line.

I looked up.

Lucille was scraping the pan and not looking at me.

"Thirty years I never asked anybody for anything," she said to the pan. "Thought I'd try it once."

"Whose line is that?"

"Yours, dummy."

"I'm going to be his mate. That makes me pack."

"That makes you his." She turned around. "This makes you ours. Sign it as a stray, or don't sign it."

I held out my hand.

Stellan put a pen in it without a word.

I signed my name on the last line, as a stray.

Stellan read the whole thing twice.

"I can't sign this," he said. "It has to go to the Council."

"We know," Lucille said. "That's why it's on paper."

He folded it carefully and put it in his shirt pocket, over his heart.

"Then I'll carry it."

The stray wing opened on the first Monday of November.

The pack had rebuilt the basement down to the concrete.

New walls.

Four exam rooms, not two.

A real pharmacy with a lock that worked, and the tech from the tack room behind the counter.

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