Part 10 – “The Warmest Seat”
The waiting room never went back to what it was.
Not entirely.
Wednesdays still brought limping dogs and coughing cats, tired rabbits and cautious reptiles. But now, people came earlier. Stayed longer. They brought stories and folded sketches. One woman started knitting small blankets “for the ones who wait.”
And no one sat in the corner without noticing the towel and the faded yellow collar placed neatly on the bench.
Margaret returned every week.
Not out of obligation.
Out of something gentler—something like gratitude.
Sometimes she came just to sit.
Sometimes she read aloud from the journal, which now lived in a woven basket near the front desk with a note:
“The Waiting Room Book — read, remember, or write your own.”
People did.
One man scribbled a thank-you to his golden retriever who waited with him through chemo.
A teenager wrote a song lyric beside a pawprint drawing.
Danny, now a little older, added a page titled “Vet School, Someday.”
Even Milo, with Doris’s help, scratched in one last message:
“Still waiting, Junebug. But we’re okay now. – M.”
That spring, something unusual bloomed in the tiny strip of garden outside the clinic window.
A sunflower.
Tall, defiant, growing from soil too shallow and weather too cruel.
It leaned toward the building like it was watching.
The staff said it must’ve blown in. Margaret had other thoughts.
She placed a small wooden sign beside it one day. No flourish. Just truth:
“You waited well.”
One morning in April, a little girl came in carrying a rescue mutt—not much larger than Junebug, all ears and nervous eyes. She sat in the corner and whispered, “Is this seat okay?”
Margaret smiled from across the room. “That’s the best seat in the house.”
The girl nodded, then pulled a crumpled paper from her coat and gently placed it on the bench beside the collar.
It read:
“Please wait with me. I’m scared too.”
The pup laid its head on the towel and exhaled, long and slow, like someone who’d found what they were looking for.
Margaret closed her eyes and let the room hum around her—breathing, remembering, welcoming.
She imagined Junebug there, just behind the front desk, watching like she always had.
Still silent. Still present.
Still waiting… for the next soul who needed time.
THE END
In loving memory of all the quiet animals who waited beside us — and taught us how.
