39 Xavier
39
XAVIER
I T WAS 11:00 a.m. the day after the funeral. I was on the phone with Samantha in the clinic helping Maggie with a blood draw on a very lethargic senior dog, back in Minnesota where it was minus eighteen outside.
Samantha had just gotten me caught up.
“I’m too exhausted to even know how I feel about it,” she said. “I think my brain needs to pick and choose its battles right now.”
“Let’s start with the nursing home,” I said. “What did everyone decide?”
“We’re going to try the part-time home care and sleeping pill thing we talked about. I’m gonna make calls today to the doctor and an agency to see what’s available.”
“I think that’s a good start,” I said.
“Yeah.” She went quiet. “I hate it when Tristan is right. It’s like he’s some deranged Gen Z prophet.”
“What else has he been right about?”
“That you’re totally obsessed with me and faked a veterinary conference to take me on a date.”
I paused. “Maybe he is a prophet.”
She laughed tiredly.
We finished the blood draw and I gave the dog a pat.
“I’m kind of nervous about today,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve ever been home alone with Mom. I mean, I’ve been alone with her while Grandma took a nap or something, but it’s just me.”
“When in doubt, put food out,” I said, lifting the dog into the kennel.
“I can’t believe how much that actually works,” she said.
I latched the cage. “Everyone and everything is better fed.” I leaned on the counter. “How do you feel about your dad dating?” I asked.
“I don’t know. If you would have asked me six months ago, I would have told you he should burn in hell. But now? I’m beyond judging how anyone deals with any of this.”
She sighed. “I have to go. I have a conference call with Murkle’s at nine to discuss second quarter plans—I’m doing a new campaign with twenty-five mustard recipes. The slogan is ‘use Murkle’s unless you want it to suck.’”
I chuckled at it and looked at my watch. “Call me when you get your lunch break,” I said.
“I will. I miss you.”
I smiled. “I miss you too.”
“It’s seventy-one here today,” she said.
“Now you’re just rubbing it in.”
She laughed and hung up.
I took out my earbud and looked around the back room, already feeling the dip in mood I got when I hang up with her.
I usually didn’t mind being alone, but after almost two weeks with Samantha and her family, my threshold for companionship had changed.
I hated that I would go home to an empty apartment tonight. That I would eat dinner alone, make food for no one. Sleep in an empty bed. Not being with her and her family was wrong and distressing.
I felt a homing response in her direction. A constant pull to the west. It got stronger every time I went there.
I wondered what would come of that. How much I would suffer six months from now, a year from now, two, not being there.
I tried not to think about it. There was nothing I could do to change it. But the dread of it existed in my peripherals every minute of every day. It was coming, and I knew it.
The old dog whimpered in his kennel.
I crouched to scratch his ears through the bars.
He had people who loved him. He didn’t want to be here any more than I did. He wanted to be home with his family. I felt the same way.
We were both in cages. Only I’d made mine.
Someone knocked on the doorframe. I looked up to see Hank shuffling in.
“Hi!” he said. “Maggie’s having me fill out some paperwork for my file. I don’t think I’ve had an employee file in, well, half a century.”
I laughed a little and stood. I hadn’t seen him since the day he came to ask for a job.
“How was California?” he asked.
“Good.”
“Better weather than here, I’ll tell you that much,” he said, taking off his jacket. “Sometimes I think I’m bonkers staying here in the winter instead of hunkering down in Florida like everyone else my age.” He hung his coat and put hands on his hips. “What you have going on today?”
“Nothing. Lethargic senior. I think he’s got Lyme disease. Two Dalmatians here for the day for vaccinations and a Lab that ate a Christmas bulb.”
“How you treating it?” he asked.
“The bulb? Just observing.”
“Take an x-ray—if the bulb is intact, make him puke it up. It’s a Lab—it’s probably intact. They don’t chew, they inhale. If it’s broken, then give him cream-soaked bread balls.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Do what?”
“They roll through the intestines, grab up all the glass. How much does he weigh?”
“Sixty-five?”
“’Bout seven or eight balls should do it. Have the owners keep an eye out for tarry stools and he’s good to go home.”
“Really…”
“Oh yeah. You won’t have any problem getting him to eat the balls either, he is a Lab.”
I scoffed.
“Thank you. I’ll try it,” I said.
He smiled at me. “Well, I better get to it,” he said, turning for the office.
One of the Dalmatians made a pitiful wailing noise from his cage. Hank stopped and nodded to the two dogs in side-by-side kennels. “Brothers?”
“Yeah.”
“Any reason why they’re not in the same cage? Diarrhea? Contagious? Aggressive?”
“No. I like to keep patients separated,” I said. “Safer.”
It’s how I had been trained.
“They’ll be happier together,” he said. “Less stressed, better outcomes. Bonded pairs suffer apart.”
I nodded slowly. Yes. Yes, they do.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out to check it. Samantha. “Excuse me,” I said, answering it. “Hey, I thought you had a conference call?”
“Xavier…”
Her voice immediately put me on alert. “What happened?”
“I just got fired.”
“Slow down, tell me what happened,” I said.
She was inconsolable.
“They said they were consolidating marketing teams,” she said, hiccuping. “That they were going to stick with the Heinz staff because it’s bigger. They already changed the log-in info. They fired my assistant too. It was like a three-minute Zoom and it’s all over, four years with them like nothing!”
“Did they give you a severance?” I asked.
“Three months. And I get to pay a million dollars for CObrA to keep my health benefits. I can’t even afford it.”
I was pacing. “You’re going to be okay. You’ll find something else—”
“I don’t want something else. I want my job.” She broke down.
It took everything in me not to walk out of the clinic and go straight to the airport right then and there. But I couldn’t. I’d wiped my savings on the last visit. I just got back.
I could hear Lisa in the background. She was asking where her mom was.
“She’s at the store,” Samantha said, crying.
“Listen, you can’t be upset in front of her,” I said gently. “You’ll get her upset and it’ll make everything worse. You’re there alone, and you don’t want her having a meltdown.”
I could picture Samantha nodding.
“Here’s what you’re going to do,” I said. “You’re going to put headphones in. You’re going to take your mom and go to the backyard.”
“The backyard?” She sniffed.
“Yes. It’s nice outside there. Seventy-one, somebody told me.”
She let out a laugh-sob.
“Put Lisa in the gazebo. Make a short playlist, something calming, both earbuds in. You’re not going to look at your phone, you’re not going to check email. You’re going to look around and you’re going to see all the things you’re always too busy to see. Check the plants for fruit. Pick some flowers, feed the fish in the pond, take a leaf from the lemon tree and break it in half and smell it. Walk the whole yard. Can you do that?”
“I can’t think of songs,” she said pitifully.
“Do you want me to pick them?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I’ll make another playlist and I’ll send you the link. Stay on the phone with me while I do it.”
When I was going through my music, Lisa asked again where her mom was. Samantha answered. A moment later Lisa asked again. Samantha answered again. And again. And again.
I could feel Samantha eroding on the other end of the line. Telling her mom the grocery store lie with a little more hysteria around the edges every time.
Lisa had asked for her mom when I was there too, but not like this. Everyone had been home, the boys were running around, she had her husband—it was distracting. With just Samantha there and the house empty the way it usually was during the week, she was noticing her mom missing.
It was only 9:15 in California. Nobody would be home to take over until at least five. Even if I were in the car on the way to the airport now, I couldn’t get there faster than that.
I had never felt so helpless. The distance had never felt so big.
Samantha had just lost her grandmother, she hadn’t rebounded yet, she wasn’t okay, and now this.
“There,” I said, finishing the compilation. “I sent it. Both earbuds.”
“But I won’t be able to hear Mom—”
“You need to de-escalate yourself before you can do anything for her. Okay? You put the oxygen mask on yourself first. She’s used to the yard, she’ll be okay in the gazebo.”
She sniffed. “All right.”
She hung up with me.
I texted the family group chat, minus Samantha and told them what happened, asking if anyone could get home early. Tristan said he could. He wasn’t exactly gentle, but his direct delivery had a way of bringing his sister back from a nosedive, so this might actually be the best-case scenario.
Then I ordered her favorite iced coffee to be delivered to the house.
I went to Murkle’s on Instagram. The last graphic was a retro-looking picture of a smiling couple holding corn dogs with a yellow mustard squiggle on them. The text read, “ This could be us but you only like ketchup. ” The last thing she posted.
I unfollowed the page.
And that was it. That was all I could do. I couldn’t hold her. I couldn’t help her.
We were a bonded pair, separated by cages two thousand miles apart.