Chapter 10 Tessa
Three days after, a woman came in at nine at night with a four-month-old shepherd in a laundry basket. She said the words nobody wants, he's throwing up and there's blood in the other end. Parvo, positive in minutes.
Then she said the second thing nobody wants, there's five more at home.
We got four of the five. I ran that ward from nine at night until nine the next morning, Marisol until two and then Eli after that.
Eli was not a tech. He was a bartender who did the runs on Wednesdays.
He stood in isolation in a gown and gloves at four in the morning holding a bag of fluids up because the pole was taken.
"You have one pole," he said.
"I have three poles."
"You have three poles and four dogs, Tess."
"Then you're a pole."
"I want that on my headstone."
At six he pulled the gown off and said, "You look terrible," with a great deal of love. He went home to sleep four hours before his shift.
All four lived. It cost $1,100, which went on the card that was for emergencies and by then had two other emergencies on it.
Then a litter came in on a Sunday. Five, three weeks old, found under a deck in Wheat Ridge. That meant bottle feeding every three hours, which meant somebody slept in the building.
The second graders named them. Luna and Gump and Dryden had gone to homes by then. So, we got a Hasek, a Brodeur, a Plante and a Parent. The last one they insisted on calling Mister Tony, after a goalie I was told was actually named Tony.
Roy stayed. Nobody adopted the little gray one and I did not push him. I did not look too hard at why.
Violet took the midnight feeds. I took the threes. Eli took Tuesdays and complained in a way I've come to understand is his love language.
"He bit me," Eli said at three in the morning, about a kitten with no teeth.
Violet had theories.
Week one it was that I was overworked. Week two it was that I was overworked and something else. Week three she came in with two coffees and said, "I'm going to say a name."
"Don't."
"I haven't heard the name in three weeks, which is how I know. Normally I'd hear it once, in a complaint or in a passing remark about a dog's hips. And I've heard nothing. So, either nothing happened, which I do not believe. Or something happened, which I very much do."
"Nothing happened."
"You said that with your whole chest and it was extremely convincing," Violet said, "which is the other reason I know."
I did fine so hard I think I strained something. Marisol said, in front of a witness, "You've been in a good mood." I said, "I've been in a normal mood." She said, "That's what I said."
And on a loop underneath it, all day, in whatever room I happened to be standing in… he chose the ice once. He would choose it again. He was on a one-year deal and he would be somewhere else by spring. This was the natural and correct outcome. I got out of it with a night and no damage.
I told myself that so many times it got a rhythm, like a song I didn't like.
The man from Apex came on a Tuesday at ten-thirty, which was the smartest thing he did all day. At ten-thirty in the morning I was between appointments and could not get away.
He wore a quarter zip and nice shoes for a building with a hose in it. He had a folder and a smile that came out of a training module.
"Dr. Reeves. Grant Fessler. I've left you a few notes."
"You've left me nine."
"That sounds about right," he said, cheerfully, like we were friends about it.
Margaret came down off the file cabinet and sat a few feet from him. He didn't notice.
"I'll be direct, because I've been told you appreciate that. Apex bought the land for this side of the block in September. That includes this lot."
I did not move my face. That was a skill and I had it.
"Congratulations."
"We're not in the business of pushing anybody out.
That's the opposite of the business we're in.
" He turned the folder around so it faced me.
"We'd like to bring Reeves into the group.
You keep the name over the door and clinical autonomy.
We take the billing, the purchasing and the HR.
Those are all the parts of this that I'd guess are currently being done by you at eleven at night. "
"And the number's inside."
"The number's inside."
I read it in seconds, because there were two lines that mattered and I knew where they lived.
It was a serious number for a building and a client list. It was a joke as a number for the ground my mother stood on in 1998. She signed a lease she could not afford, in front of a man she paid cash to hang letters crooked.
"That's forty percent low."
"It reflects the equipment financing," Fessler said, still perfectly pleasant, "and the state of the lease. And, candidly, that you're a single-doctor practice, which is a risk. If you're out for six weeks, the value of this is a building."
"And if I don't come into the group."
"Then the lease renews next August," he said, "and that's a conversation for next August."
Margaret got up on the counter, walked the length of it, and pushed his pen off the end.
He laughed. He thought it was funny.
"She doesn't like most people," I said.
"I've got two cats at home."
"She'd know."
I was tired in a way that did not track.
I knew tired. I've been tired since 2016.
This was a different animal. This was falling asleep sitting up on the stool at four in the afternoon between a nail trim and a lump check.
This was standing in the treatment room with the chlorhexidine open, the disinfectant I've smelled every day of my adult life.
I had to put my head out the back door for a second.
I filed it. Parvo ward, bottle feeds, Apex, no sleep since spring. Any one of those would make a person tired and I had all four.
The recheck was a Wednesday, four weeks out, four-thirty.
Of course he kept the paper. He came in and put it on the counter, folded in quarters, soft at the folds the way paper gets when it's been carried. Marisol said, "Oh, you don't need to bring that, we have it in the system." He said, "I know," and took it back.
Then I had to stand in an exam room and read a chart I wrote at dawn as an excuse to get out of a room.
"Weight's the same," I said. "That's what I want. Hips are hips. He's using the left better. Are you doing the morning dose?"
"On the bad days."
"How many bad days?"
"Two a week. Three last week, it got cold."
"That's about right for October."
I looked at the chart. There was nothing else on the chart. I had written the chart.
"Kidney numbers are holding. Phosphorus is up two points, which is nothing, but I'd rather see it flat. So go back to the daily binders. You'll run out around the 20th."
"I have a second box."
"Of course you do," I said.
He stood on the other side of the exam table with his hands on the edge of it. I stood on my side with a clipboard. There were about thirty inches of stainless steel between us and neither of us moved for a second.
"How's the season?" I said.
"Nine and six."
"That's good, right?"
"It's fine."
"That's a word, Beckett."
"It's fine," he said. "It's good. Yeah."
"Your father."
"Same."
"Beckett."
"He's exactly the same," he said. "That's the one thing about him."
Bear stood up on the mat and walked around the end of the table. He put his whole head against my leg, which was not helpful.
I bent down and put both hands on the sides of his face. I told him he was a very good boy in a voice reserved for animals. When I stood up Beckett had come around the corner of the table to hand me the leash.
He was about a foot away, maybe less. The leash was out and his hand was open. I could see the tendon on the back of it and the freckle below the second knuckle. My hand was already going.
I took the leash by the loop at the far end.
"Thanks," I said.
"Sure."
He stepped back first and I hated it. I had no right to hate it.
"Four weeks," I said, to the chart.
"Four weeks. Marisol will book it."
He stood there another second. I turned around and opened a cabinet I did not need anything out of. By the time I closed it the door was shutting.
Two days later a supply van pulled into the lot with eleven boxes.
"I don't have an order," I said.
"It's paid," the driver said, and turned the tablet around. It said Paid.
Four cases of the recovery diet. Two cases of IV fluids. Three hundred needles. Kitten milk replacer, $9 a can, forty cans a season. And a pallet of the mid-grade puppy food that was the difference between a good month and a bad one.
Marisol came out and said, "Oh my God," in three syllables, then looked at my face and stopped.
"It's a mistake," I said. "It's for somebody else."
"It's got our name on it eleven times."
"Then somebody made a very thorough mistake."
I called Violet.
"Don't do this," Violet said.
"Foothills has forty animals and two paid staff. Adams County took eighty-one dogs off a hoarding case in September. They can use it."
"Tessa Anne."
"It goes out today."
"You think it's from him," she said, "and you'd rather give away $900 of food than owe a man a thank you. And I want you to hear how that sounds coming from a woman with $141 in her operating account."
Eleven boxes went out of my lot that afternoon in a borrowed van. I kept the kitten milk replacer, because there were five three-week-olds in the building and I was not insane.
The milk replacer was the exact size of the compromise I could live with. I kept it because it wasn't for me.
Violet cornered me in the break room on a Thursday.
"You've looked green for a week."
"I've looked tired."
"Green," Violet said. "Tessa, I've watched you drink four cups of coffee a day since we were nineteen. You made a cup on Monday and put it down. It was still there on Tuesday. I know because I threw it away and it had a skin on it."
"I've been off coffee."
"Since when?"
"Since it stopped tasting right. It's the parvo ward and the litter and the man from Apex. I've been up every third night since September."
"Okay."
"Violet."
"I said okay."
"You didn't say it like okay."
"I said it exactly like okay," Violet said. She looked at me a second too long, got her keys and went to Arvada to look at a rash.
I stood in that break room by myself for a minute. There was a couch in there my mother bought in 2003. There was also a shelf of fleece blankets, rewashed and refolded and put back on the wrong shelf. I could not make myself move them.
I closed up at ten-forty on the last Thursday in October. Runs, overnights, incubator. I bottled the three-week-olds at ten and set an alarm for one. I turned off the lobby lights.
The remote was still on the counter. It never went back in the drawer.
And I stood in the dark in my own building and did a thing I'd been describing inaccurately to myself for a while.
I got out my phone and opened the calendar and went backwards.
The parvo night was a Tuesday. The litter came the Sunday after. Apex was two Tuesdays after that. And the Thursday of the home opener, the Vegas game, was there in the middle with nothing written on it at all. I did not put anything in my calendar that I would have to look at later.
I counted backwards from there. Then I counted forward.
Then I put the phone face down on the counter next to a bowl that said World's Okayest Doctor. I told the empty lobby, "You're tired."
And I went out through the breezeway to my mother's house and got in bed with my clothes on.