Part 2: My Eight-Year-Old Daughter Set Up a Lemonade Stand to Save a Pit Bull at the Shelter Nobody Wanted to Operate On. She Made Eleven Dollars on the First Day. On the Third Day, the Town Showed Up — and So Did a Man Nobody Knew.
Wren spent Tuesday night, Wednesday night, and Thursday night planning the lemonade stand.
She has a small wooden desk in her bedroom that her father built for her in 2021. She sat at it every night that week from after dinner until I told her to brush her teeth. She made a list. She made a price chart. She made signs.
She made the price chart by herself. Small cups were one dollar. Big cups were two dollars. A small cup plus a homemade cookie was three dollars. A big cup plus a cookie was four dollars. Donations of any size for Bruno were accepted in a mason jar she labeled BRUNO FUND with a red marker.
She made four signs. The big one for the front of the table said HELP BRUNO. The smaller signs said LEMONADE $1 / COOKIES $1 / ALL MONEY GOES TO BRUNO’S SURGERY.
She drew a picture of Bruno on the bottom of the HELP BRUNO sign. She drew it from memory. She got the folded ear right. She got the white chest right. She did not get the mass — she had not drawn the mass. I asked her why. She said: “Because that’s the thing we’re fixing. So it doesn’t go on the sign.”
I made the lemonade with her on Friday night. We squeezed nine lemons. We used a cup and a half of sugar and a gallon of water and ice from the freezer. I helped her carry the pitcher out to the card table on Saturday morning at nine thirty.
It was a hot day. Eighty-eight degrees by ten o’clock. Our driveway sits on the corner of Cedar Street and Sixth Avenue. It is a corner with some traffic, but not a lot — most of it is people heading to the grocery store on Highway 38 or to the small park three blocks over.
I told her, before I went back inside, that I would come check on her every twenty minutes. I told her not to leave the table. I told her that if anyone made her uncomfortable to come get me.
She said, “Mom. I’m fine. Go work.”
I went inside and started a load of laundry. I tried to read. I did not read. I sat at the kitchen window where I could see the end of the driveway and I watched my eight-year-old child sit in a folding chair behind a card table with a pitcher of lemonade and a sign that said HELP BRUNO and I tried not to think about what was going to happen at the end of the day when she had not made four thousand seven hundred dollars and she had to decide how to feel about it.
There is one thing I am going to tell you now, because it matters at the end.
On Friday night, after Wren had gone to bed, I had taken a photograph of her lemonade stand with my phone. The HELP BRUNO sign. The price chart. The mason jar.
I had posted it on Facebook to my own page, which has about three hundred and forty followers. Mostly people from Tipton. Mostly people who had known Wes.
I had captioned it: My kid is trying to save a dog at the shelter tomorrow. Stop by if you can. Cedar and Sixth. 9 a.m.
I had not expected anything to come of it.
I went to bed at eleven. I did not check the post again.
I should have.
Part 3
The first customer on Saturday morning was our neighbor Don Wessel, who is seventy-six years old and walks his Schnauzer past our house every morning at nine forty.
He bought a small lemonade. He paid with a five. He told Wren to keep the change.
The second customer was a woman I did not recognize, in a green Subaru, who pulled up at nine fifty-three and rolled down her window and asked Wren what the sign was about. Wren explained. The woman gave her a twenty-dollar bill. She did not take any lemonade. She said: “Tell your mom Marcy from book club says hi.”
I watched all of this from the kitchen window.
By ten thirty, Wren had made forty-three dollars.
By eleven, she had made eighty-one.
By noon, she had made one hundred and seventeen.
I went out to check on her at twelve fifteen. There were three cars in our driveway and two people standing at the table. A man in a Cedar County Sheriff’s Department uniform was crouched down beside the table, looking at the picture of Bruno that Wren had drawn. He was holding a five-dollar bill.
I had not seen him pull up.
Wren said, “Mom. This is Deputy Henley. He wants to talk to me about Bruno.”
Deputy Henley stood up. He was probably forty, with a sunburned neck and a small soft belly and the kind of mustache men in this part of Iowa have been wearing since 1986. He said, “Ma’am. I’m Mike Henley. I work patrol. I saw the post.”
I said, “Saw the post?”
He said, “Your post about your daughter’s stand. It came up on my wife’s Facebook. We came down.”
He said, “Some of the guys at the department are coming down too. There’s about twelve of us off shift this afternoon.”
He paused.
He said, “Your daughter’s stand is on Facebook in three different counties right now, ma’am. I just thought you should know.”
By two p.m., I had refilled the pitcher of lemonade six times.
By three p.m., I had run out of cups and Wren had asked me to drive to Walmart and buy more, but I had not wanted to leave her, so my mother, who lives three streets over and is sixty-two years old, drove to Walmart in my place and brought back four sleeves of paper cups.
By four p.m., the line at the end of the driveway was eleven cars long.
By five p.m., the local news had shown up. Not a real news station. A two-person crew from KCRG out of Cedar Rapids who said they had seen the story on a Facebook page called Iowa Kindness, which apparently has eighty thousand followers, and had driven over to do a “feel-good piece.”
By six p.m., Wren had made one thousand four hundred and forty-six dollars.
She was sitting in her folding chair behind her card table. She had a sunburn on her nose. She had not stopped smiling all day.
I went out to the table at six fifteen and I sat down on the grass beside it and I said, “Wren. Honey. We’re going to have to start packing up soon.”
She said: “Can I do tomorrow too?”
I said yes.
I did not know yet what tomorrow was going to be.
Part 4
Sunday was bigger than Saturday.
By eight in the morning, before Wren had even set up the table, there were two cars parked across the street with people inside them drinking coffee, waiting. By nine, the line down Sixth Avenue was already four cars long. By ten, Marlene from the Tipton Conservative had pulled up in her old red Civic with a notebook, and the news crew from KCRG was back with a second crew from a Quad Cities station, and somebody — I do not know who — had set up a card table next to Wren’s card table with a hand-lettered sign that said EXTRA COOKIES — FREE TO BRUNO SUPPORTERS and a tray of homemade snickerdoodles.
The cookies, it turned out, had been baked at two in the morning by a woman I had never met named Esther Doyle, who is seventy-one and lives on Cedar Street four houses down. She had seen the post on her granddaughter’s phone the night before.
By eleven a.m. on Sunday, Wren had made four thousand and twelve dollars.
I sat on the porch and I cried in a way I had not cried in public since Wes’s funeral.
A retired farmer named Earl Petersen walked over from the Casey’s gas station with a glass jar full of crumpled bills. He had been collecting it on the counter at Casey’s since Saturday morning, he told me, after the woman who works there had taped a photo of the lemonade stand to the register. The jar had three hundred and forty-eight dollars in it.
A teenage girl I did not recognize rode up on a bike with a Ziploc bag of quarters. She said her grandma had told her to bring them. She did not stay for lemonade.
A man in a black F-150 rolled down the window and handed Wren two hundred-dollar bills and drove away without saying anything.
By one in the afternoon, Wren had made five thousand and forty-eight dollars.
She had passed the goal.
She did not stop the stand.
She kept the stand open. She kept selling lemonade. She kept taking the donations. She told a woman from KCRG, who interviewed her at the table with a small black microphone, that any extra money was going to “the next Bruno.”
I watched my eight-year-old daughter say that on television.
I thought, then, that the story was almost over.
That all that remained was for me to drive to the shelter on Monday morning with five thousand dollars in a manila envelope and to call the surgeon and to schedule Bruno’s procedure and to take Wren in to pet him afterward.
I thought that was the ending.
The ending was a man named Roy.
Part 5
A white Chevy Silverado, probably ten years old, pulled into our driveway at three forty-five on Sunday afternoon.
The driver was a man in his mid-sixties. He was tall. He was wearing a faded blue work shirt with no name tag and the kind of jeans men in this part of the country wear to do real work in. He had a manila folder in his right hand and a thin leather wallet in his left.
He got out of the truck slowly. He walked up to the card table. He stood about three feet back from it.
Wren said: “Hi! Would you like some lemonade?”
He said: “Are you the young lady who started this for Bruno?”
She said: “Yes, sir.”
He said: “Bruno the Pit Bull at the Cedar County Humane Society?”
She said: “Yes, sir. He has a thing on his side. We’re getting him the surgery.”
The man — his name was Roy, I would learn later — looked at the HELP BRUNO sign. He looked at the picture of Bruno that Wren had drawn. He looked at the white chest. He looked at the folded ear.
He set the manila folder down on the card table next to the mason jar.
He said: “Ma’am. I think this is my dog.”
I had been standing on the porch. I came down off the porch.
I said, “Excuse me?”
He said: “My name is Roy Vandersteen. I live out on County Road F66 in Lowden. I had a dog named Bruno. Pit mix. Four years old. Folded ear. White chest. He got out of my yard on the eighteenth of May. I have been looking for him since. I did not know he was at the shelter in Tipton.”
I said: “Mr. Vandersteen. The shelter said he was a surrender.”
He said: “I’d like to look at the dog, if you don’t mind. I have my paperwork.”
He opened the manila folder.
Inside were three things. A photograph of Bruno — folded ear, white chest, four years old, on a porch I did not recognize. A vaccination record from a vet in DeWitt, dated 2021, with the dog’s name on it. And a single sheet of paper that was a printed-out missing-pet listing he had posted on a Lost Dogs Iowa Facebook page on May 19th — the day after Bruno had gotten out.
In the photograph, Bruno did not have the mass.
Roy looked at the picture. He looked at Wren. He looked at me.
He said: “I don’t know who surrendered him to your shelter. I did not surrender him. He has had that growth for nine months. The vet in DeWitt told me last year it was benign and it could wait. Then he got out. He got out of my yard on May eighteenth. I’ve put up signs. I’ve called every shelter in three counties. I did not know to call Tipton.”
He took a long breath.
He said: “Ma’am. I would like to come to the shelter tomorrow morning with you. If it’s him, I would like him back.”
He paused.
He looked at Wren.
He said: “If it’s him, I will pay back every dollar this young lady raised.”
Part 6
I am going to skip over the next eighteen hours because most of them were on the phone.
I called the Cedar County Humane Society on Sunday night and left a message. I called them again at seven a.m. on Monday morning when they opened. I spoke with the shelter director, a woman in her fifties named Dawn Aiello, and I told her what had happened on our driveway.
Dawn was quiet for a long time on the phone.
Then she said: “Caitlin. The person who surrendered Bruno was not the owner.”
She said: “The person who surrendered Bruno was a neighbor.”
The neighbor was a man named Greg Tatum, who had lived two houses down from Roy Vandersteen on County Road F66. He had found Bruno wandering in the gravel by his mailbox on the morning of May 19th, the day after Bruno had gotten out. He had not, apparently, called Roy. He had not looked for tags — Bruno had been wearing a collar with a tag, but the tag had come off during the eight hours Bruno had been loose in the corn rows behind their houses.
Greg had driven Bruno to the Tipton shelter that afternoon and told them it was a stray.
He had signed the form.
The shelter had logged Bruno as a surrender because they assumed Greg was the owner.
Dawn called Roy at nine a.m. on Monday from her office. Roy drove to the shelter in Tipton. Dawn took him back to the last kennel on the right.
Bruno stood up the second he saw Roy.
He did not bark. He did not whine. He walked to the front of the kennel and he pressed his head against the chain-link and he closed his eyes.
Roy crouched down on the concrete floor of the shelter and he stayed that way for a long time.
When he came out of the back office at ten thirty, he had the discharge paperwork in his hand and Bruno on a leash he had bought at the Casey’s gas station on his way into town. He stopped in the lobby. He looked at me.
He said: “I’m going to use the money. For the surgery. He is overdue.”
He said: “I will return every dollar of the rest. To your daughter. In cash. Today.”
I said: “Mr. Vandersteen. She raised that money for Bruno. The town raised it for Bruno. Use it for him.”
He shook his head. He said: “It is not mine to keep. He is my dog. I will pay for him. The rest of the money belongs to the next dog like him. The young lady said so on the television.”
I drove home.
Roy drove to DeWitt with Bruno for a pre-surgical exam.
He brought Wren a bouquet of yellow roses on Tuesday afternoon and a card he had written by hand thanking her for finding his dog and a check for two thousand four hundred and ninety-six dollars — the difference between what Bruno’s surgery had cost and what Wren had raised.
Wren did not understand, at first, why he was paying her.
I explained.
She said: “Mom. I don’t want it for me. Can it go to a different Bruno?”
Part 7
The Cedar County Humane Society opened a new fund on the fifteenth of June.
The fund is called the Bruno Fund. It is run by Dawn Aiello. The starting balance was two thousand four hundred and ninety-six dollars, contributed by my eight-year-old daughter Wren Boudreau and a sixty-four-year-old roofer named Roy Vandersteen from Lowden, Iowa.
The fund pays for surgeries that the shelter’s normal operating budget cannot cover.
Since June, it has paid for: a leg amputation on a Golden Retriever puppy named Theo, a tumor removal on a fifteen-year-old Beagle named Otis, and a foreign-body extraction on a one-year-old Lab mix who had eaten a baseball.
The fund is not large. It is a small-town fund. It pays for one or two surgeries a year.
Roy comes to the shelter every Saturday with Bruno, who is now five years old and tumor-free and has a small scar on his right flank you can see if you part the fur. Roy walks Bruno through the kennels. They visit the dogs who do not have visitors. They sit, sometimes, on the bench by the front door.
Wren visits the shelter every Sunday after church.
She is nine years old now.
She does not have a dog.
She has told me she is waiting for the right one.
Part 8
There is one detail I have not yet written down.
On the morning Roy brought Wren the yellow roses, he stood on our porch for a long time. He had Bruno with him on a leash. Bruno sat at his feet. Wren came out of the house in bare feet and a pink T-shirt that had a unicorn on it.
She did not, at first, hug Roy. She had only met him once.
She knelt down. She put both her arms around Bruno’s neck. She put her face against the side of his head. She closed her eyes.
She stayed like that for about thirty seconds.
She did not say anything to Bruno.
She did not say anything to Roy.
She let go. She stood up. She took the flowers. She went back inside.
Roy stood on the porch for a minute longer. Then he led Bruno down the steps and into his truck and he drove home to Lowden.
Wes, if you can hear me — and I have decided you can — your daughter saved a dog this summer.
She drew his picture from memory.
She got the folded ear right.
She got the white chest right.
She left out the part that was hurting him.
She said that was the part we were fixing.
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