WATSONVILLE >> Cheryl Pettigrew called out to 100 Canadian geese at Pinto Lake like a mom calling her kids for dinner.

“Robbie, is that you?” Pettigrew said. “Come here goosey goose.”

From the middle of the gaggle, one goose stuck its neck up straight, began honking and ran over. To understand their connection, one first needs to know their history.

Pettigrew took Robin in almost five years ago when the goose was days old and had lost its mother. Pettigrew said she helped teach Robin to fly. Robin, meanwhile, was a companion to Pettigrew when the 56-year-old Corralitos woman underwent four brain surgeries for a tumor and infections. The goose often sat outside Pettigrew’s window when Pettigrew lay in bed while her husband was at work.

Robin disappeared more than a year ago, Pettigrew at one point feared the goose had been taken by coyotes or migrated elsewhere, until the two were reunited a month ago at Pinto Lake, north of Watsonville.

“I was praying she’d come here,” Pettigrew said. “This is the only place I knew she’d be safe.”

Though she kept the goose for years, even allowing it to lay on her pillow and nestle in her hair, Pettigrew always planned to set Robin free. The woman who has rescued everything from horses to dogs would run up and down her country driveway, flapping her arms like wings, a human trying to show a bird how it was done.

Eventually, Robin learned to fly and would go for air laps, then land again at Pettigrew’s feet. In the spring, when a gaggle would fly over the Pettigrew’s property, Robin would honk. The other geese would honk back, then land and visit, but Robin would stay.

A few days before Thanksgiving two years ago, Pettigrew found out she had a non-cancerous brain tumor the size of a tangerine. It took one surgery to remove it and three more for infections. Part of her skull eventually had to be replaced by plastic.

With her four kids not home and her husband, David, 65, at work as an artistic concrete layer, Pettigrew would be left alone except for the family ducks, dogs, horses, and, of course, Robin.

“Everybody would be gone and she was my company,” Pettigrew said.

Last summer, things got worse when David injured his leg in a motorcycle accident. Pettigrew, a corporate travel agent who works from home, began taking care of her husband while still recovering herself.

They had to sell their 5-acre property and find something more manageable. A few weeks before they left, Robin went missing.

“I was really distraught when we lost her,” Pettigrew said. “My brain was still healing, so I’d get kind of emotional.”

Pettigrew went by Pinto Lake and called for Robin. Nothing. She even had David take her out in a boat.

“I rowed all over the lake and she’s calling that damn goose,” David said said. “And everyone is looking at us like we’re crazy.”

A few weeks ago, Pettigrew returned to the lake. After no response, she turned to leave, but called again. Then she heard a familiar honk. In a moment, Robin was snuggling up to her.

“It was just a really good sign with my wife’s brain tumor, my broken leg,” David said. “Kind of a shining light at the end of the story.”

Now, Pettigrew comes to see Robin once a week, or if she’s having a bad day. And Robin is not alone anymore. She’s found a mate, or, as Pettigrew calls him, a husband.

“It’s hard to explain the relationship I have with that goose,” Pettigrew said.