Chapter 2
Before mounting her old Schwinn Varsity road bike the following Thursday afternoon, Tess glanced at her watch.
She was forty-five minutes behind schedule.
She’d been with Kurt and Kelsey at her volunteer job working with the rescued fighting dogs all morning and had lost track of time.
The hours she spent at the private estate working with the dynamic group of rehab dogs were often the best hours of Tess’s week.
Since she was also determined to get her healthy-pet consulting business off the ground, she’d made a personal commitment to spend the second half of every day focused on it.
And while she wouldn’t trade the forty-five extra minutes she’d spent with the dogs for being on schedule, Tess needed to getting moving.
She had a meeting with the owner of Pouches and Pooches, a popular and expanding local chain of high-end stores that catered to savvy pet owners with upscale pet products, scarves, and purses.
Not only had the owner been open to meeting with Tess, when she’d spoken on the phone with him earlier in the week, but he’d also sounded excited about the services she hoped to offer.
A win today would give Tess a much-needed confidence boost in her business model. From sales calls to drop-in visits at dozens of area stores, she’d not yet had the best of receptions. And Tess’s only paying client to date had resulted in a loss.
In hopes of making up for lost time, Tess pedaled hard in between stoplights.
One of these days, she needed to force herself to get to the DMV to renew her expired license.
She’d not driven since before she left for Europe.
Even though biking and taking public transportation were tedious at times, she experienced tiny waves of panic whenever she gave serious consideration to getting behind the wheel of a car.
She’d never been in a car accident, and she wasn’t entirely sure why the thought of driving had become intimidating, even if she’d never been crazy about it.
She suspected her hesitation had something to do with not fully getting over her dad forcing her to learn to drive using a stick, coupled with the fact that he’d coaxed her into turning down a busy street at rush hour her second time behind the wheel.
She still remembered the angry looks on some of the other drivers’ faces as she stalled out time and again.
Tess’s dad was a good-hearted man but also a very black-and-white one.
He was the kind of father who’d scoffed at training wheels and tossed her into the pool before she was a confident swimmer.
Maybe this was why Tess had chosen to stay with her grandmother ever since she’d gotten back from Europe a month ago.
Tess’s parents had worked so much when she was growing up, her grandparents had all but raised her.
Tess’s other siblings, one brother and one sister, were twelve and thirteen years older and had left home when she was little.
Another reason Tess hadn’t moved in with her parents after returning from Europe was that, a year after Tess’s high school graduation, they had moved away from the Hill, the Italian American St. Louis neighborhood, a tourist attraction and hub for a wealth of independently owned Italian restaurants packed into a single square mile.
The Hill was also where Tess had lived all her life until she’d left for college.
Tess’s parents now lived, as Nonna put it, a “difficult” twenty-minute drive away in South County.
At her parents’ new house, Tess had a bedroom that she’d never spent enough time in for it to feel like hers. Still, it had a newer, more comfortable bed than the worn-out spring mattress at Nonna’s, as well as a full-size closet that could be just for her.
But Tess suspected that even if her father had been a more nurturing man than he was, she’d still live with Nonna.
If she added up all the weekends and holidays and summers she’d slept over at Nonna’s ever since she’d been born, it was no wonder the thousand-square-foot, century-old house felt like the natural place to be.
Her grandfather not being around anymore was still taking some getting used to though.
He was the real reason she’d come home from Europe as abruptly as she did.
Just a month ago, back in early October, Tess had been finishing transient work with a grape harvest on a small farm in Switzerland. She’d had a considerable stash of Swiss francs saved from a summer spent working in terraced fields overlooking Lake Geneva, the Alps in the distance.
Before she’d gotten the call about Nonno’s heart attack, she’d been making plans to backpack into Belgium.
A friend, a Spanish girl she’d worked with earlier in the year, promised a few months of work in one of the most picturesque towns in the world—Bruges, Belgium.
As one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval towns, Bruges received floods of winter tourists and promised backpackers like her an opportunity for temporary work in a new and remarkable corner of the world.
As she cycled into the outskirts of the Hill, Tess remembered back to a few hours before she got the news about her grandfather.
Nonno had been in critical condition but was awake and alert.
It was time to get home, her dad had said.
Using nearly every franc she’d earned over a long, hot summer, Tess packed up her belongings and flew out of Geneva International Airport on the first open flight.
He died when she was somewhere over the Atlantic.
Her dad met her at the airport in St. Louis, smelling of cigarette smoke and looking thinner and older than her sixteen months away warranted.
“He was glad you were coming home,” her dad had said.
Now that Tess was home to stay, she was determined to make a success of the business she’d dropped out of vet school for two years ago.
Tess didn’t need to become a skilled surgeon to help animals the way she wanted to help them.
Holistic animal therapy was an emerging and exciting field.
From therapeutic massage to essential oils to natural foods and products, Tess had become a believer in natural healing for pets.
Not finishing vet school didn’t make her a failure.
If only her track record for not sticking with things wasn’t so long.
Or something her big, loud, and vivacious extended family had a knack of reminding her about.
Like the fact that she’d quit ballet in preschool or gymnastics in kindergarten.
Soccer was a second-grade failure; scouting, a fourth-grade one.
She’d dropped out of yearbook in the tenth grade.
She ended it with her first serious—too serious—boyfriend during junior year and her second one as a senior.
She’d left the Catholic Church in undergrad.
Tess was pretty sure grumblings over that one had been heard in Argentina.
Most recently, she’d walked out of vet school her second year.
That had been the breaking point. Right after that, she quit the biggest, most important thing of all—her family—and took off for Europe.
Narrowly missing the overturned trash can as she pedaled into Nonna’s driveway, Tess reminded herself that what she was doing now was different from all those other things.
She was good with dogs. Dog training was the one thing she’d been introduced to as a kid that had stuck with her. And she’d been more than good at it. Her mentor, Rob, had told her so often enough.
Tess had been ten when she’d been allowed to shadow him for a day—several years younger than Rob was comfortable taking on, but he’d made an exception when he’d heard how dog crazy she was.
According to her mom, Tess’s first word after mom had been daw for dog, and her first animal sound had been ruff.
Over several years of shadowing him whenever she could and trying out what she’d learned on her extended family’s pets, Tess had become a skilled trainer.
She’d learned how to read most dogs simply by studying them.
It was a language that was hard to put into words, but she picked up on their movements, their body stance, the energy in their eyes and in their bodies, the position of their tails and the way they held their heads and ears.
It all melded together into a dynamic picture, and she was usually good at communicating back.
The suitcase Tess took along on the business calls she’d been making the last couple of weeks had a binder full of her training success stories: dogs who’d been hard-core counter surfers and dogs who’d all but refused to potty train until Tess had figured out how to reach them.
These sort of training behaviors tended to be relatively easy successes for her.
Figuring out why dogs were scratching off the hair behind their ears, why they didn’t sleep comfortably through the night, or why they were biting incessantly at their feet were harder questions to answer but didn’t always require the costly services associated with vet visits.
And deciphering these sorts of problems had become Tess’s passion.
Remembering a few of the amazing dogs she’d worked with over the years helped Tess’s start-up doubts slip away. She parked her bike and hung up her helmet, ready to head back out soon, catch the bus, and make a success of her biggest business opportunity to date.
* * *
Two and a half hours later, Tess stepped out of the old brick warehouse that was a couple of blocks from the Red Birds’s stadium in downtown St. Louis and tugged her jacket closed.
The thick, dark blanket of clouds overhead was growing more ominous by the minute.
She had several blocks to walk to reach the bus stop that served the line with the most direct route back to the Hill.