19. Brendan
Brendan
Tasha called because she had given me exactly one day, which was, by her standards, extraordinary restraint. “Talk,” she said when I picked up. Not “Hello” or “Hi, puddin’,” as she sometimes did. Just “Talk.” It was a command. Woe be unto those who refused a Tasha missive.
“Good morning,” I said, toying with fire.
“It’s seven-fifteen. I’ve been patient since Sunday. Talk or I will drive to the clinic and enlist recruits.”
Dear God, that couldn’t happen. My clinic team was already up my ass about everything.
I’d arrived at the clinic early that morning.
The building was quiet in the way it always was before Hurricane Marcus arrived and started aligning things.
I had been looking at the tapir imaging and possibly thinking about other things, which was new.
Complicated cases usually had my full attention.
This particular case was sharing my mental capacity with a man, which was also new.
“We had lunch,” I said. “On Sunday.”
“I know. Alan told me.”
“How does Alan have your number? Jesus, is he a walking phone book now?”
“Alan has had my number for two years, but that’s beside the point.
You’re not going to distract me, Dr. Evil.
I’m focused.” A brief pause. “He said you invited someone over and grilled out. He said he found out from Marcus, who found out from your credit card statement because you bought a significant amount of groceries on Saturday afternoon.”
I groaned into the ceiling. “Marcus is monitoring my credit card statements now?”
“Marcus monitors everything. He runs your office, practically your life, which is your office, by the way. You know this. It’s incredibly sad.” I heard her moving around her kitchen, the familiar background sounds of a typical Tasha morning. “How was it?”
“Good.”
“Brendan.”
“It was good, Tash. We talked. We ate. Mofongo and Puck sorted out their diplomatic situation.”
“And after lunch?”
I said nothing.
“Brendan.”
“It was a good afternoon.”
She made a clucking sound I hadn’t heard from her before. It was small and satisfied and completely undentist-like.
“Okay,” she said. “And now?”
“Now it’s Tuesday, and I’m looking at the insides of a medium-sized mammal.”
“Are you going to see him again?”
“Saturday. He works Saturdays.”
“Seeing him at his place of work no longer counts, not after a first date that was likely followed, well, by dessert you have yet to describe in sufficient detail. Are you seeing him again before Saturday?”
“We’re texting.”
“How often?”
I looked at my phone on my desk. There were already four messages from Adrian, the most recent one a photo of something that had gone wrong with the sourdough starter with a caption in Spanish that I hadn’t yet run through the translation software I downloaded for Adrian’s random Spanish messages, most of which he didn’t even realize were in Spanish until after hitting send.
“Fairly often,” I said.
“Do you want to see him before Saturday?”
This was the question beneath all the other questions, and Tasha knew it, which was why she’d taken twenty minutes to arrive at it.
I thought about Sunday, about standing in my kitchen at four twenty-three in the morning on Monday with my hair doing whatever it wanted, and I thought about him holding a mug with both hands like it was the only thing keeping him upright.
Adrian had been fully dressed and already thinking about bread.
He had looked at me with the particular warmth of someone who found what they were seeing genuinely worth looking at, which was either very good or the kind of thing you told yourself that turned out to mean nothing. It was far too early to know which.
“Yes,” I said. “But it’s early. It’s too soon to hope or think or feel or whatever.”
“I know it’s early.”
“One Sunday doesn’t mean anything definitive.”
“Nobody said it did.”
“I’m not going to read into it more than it is.”
Tasha was quiet for a moment. This wasn’t her ordinary contemplative quiet. This was her diagnostic one, the pause she used right before she told a patient the thing he’d driven forty-five minutes to a dentist specifically to not be told.
“Can I make an observation,” she said, which was not a question and never had been.
“No.”
She ignored me.
“You keep saying it’s early and too soon, and that you’re not going to read into it.
” I heard her set down her coffee. “You’ve said three versions of ‘let’s not get ahead of ourselves’ in four minutes, which—for you—is practically hyperventilating.
I know your tells, Brendan. I’ve been reading your face since you were twenty-two and afraid to tell your mother you’d switched your post-graduate major.
You’re not managing your own expectations here. You’re managing something else.”
“That’s a stretch, don’t you think?” I asked, a bit defensively, more to the imaging on my desk that to Tasha. The pictures offered no support whatsoever.
“Is it the guy, or is it you?” she asked.
I opened my mouth to say the guy, obviously, because that was the safe answer.
Also, I liked deflecting to Tasha the way I liked a root canal, which is to say she performed both on me regularly, and I never enjoyed either, but the words didn’t come, because it wasn’t true, and Tasha could hear a lie forming in the shape of a breath.
“Interesting,” she said, to the sound of me not answering.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You said a paragraph, perhaps a whole page. It just didn’t have words in it.
” She let that sit, then, gentler, because Tasha only ever hit you as hard as she was about to be kind, “He sounds like a good one, puddin’.
If there’s a reason you’re holding him at arm’s length, it might be worth finding out whether the reason is his or whether you brought that particular baggage with you. ”
This was the problem with keeping a forensic dentist as your closest friend. She spent all day finding the soft spot under the hard thing and had no professional hesitation about drilling.
“I have to go be a doctor,” I said.
“You have to go think about what I said, then be a doctor. In that order.” A beat, then even gentler, “Brendan, I’m not asking you to pick out curtains or decide what veggies to plant in your cute little gay garden.
I’m only asking if you want to see him before Saturday and to think about why you’re hesitating. ”
“Yes,” I said again. “I don’t know when or how yet, but I can’t stop thinking about him. Damn it. Yes, I want to see him before Sunday.”
I could practically hear her smiling through the phone.
“That’s enough for a Tuesday. Thank you for your report,” she said. “Text me after Saturday. If you see him before then, I expect another full report. Don’t disappoint me, Brendan.”
“I don’t text you after Saturdays.”
“Alan texts me after Saturdays. It’s the same result. I will haunt your dreams if you fail to comply.”
With that lovely threat in the air, she hung up.
I tossed the phone onto my desk and stared at Marisol’s imaging, and tried to find where my theory had been before the call interrupted it.
My phone chimed as a group chat creation notification popped up on the lock screen. I bit back a curse as I read it.
Alan had established a chat group and named it “Operation Get Brendan A Life” with no apparent irony, which meant he either had no irony about this particular subject or he had too much of it.
I could no longer tell the difference. There were four members: Alan, Tasha, Marcus, and me.
Marcus had sent a thumbs-up emoji at six fifty-eight in the morning, which was fourteen minutes before his scheduled arrival time.
I turned the phone face down.
It chimed four more times.
I reached for it, but left it untouched.
Thankfully, the rest of the morning ran the way clinic mornings ran. A labrador wellness check. Four cat follow-ups. Three puppies, none of whom were as cute as Mofongo.
Why I compared puppies to Mofongo was . . . shit . . . it was irrelevant, damn it.
The rabbit from the prior week returned because his owner had implemented the more-hay recommendation and wanted to report that outcomes were positive. I confirmed by examining a rabbit who required no intervention and seemed quietly satisfied about this.
Between patients, I sat at my desk and stared at the tapir’s file. Something about the imaging just wasn’t adding up. My theory had holes I couldn’t plug. My brain knew it but refused to zoom in on exactly what was going on.
Marisol’s latest monitoring reports had come in overnight. The pattern was consistent. She was having intermittent episodes with behavioral shifts in the hours preceding them, which resolved without intervention. I was starting to frame that as concerning.
The direction I had been developing was sharpening, which meant it was either right or monumentally wrong. I needed the behavioral footage from Dr. Reyes before I could determine which, so I called her at eleven-thirty.
“The monitoring footage from last Thursday,” I said. “Can you send me the two hours preceding the episode?”
“I’ll have it to you this afternoon,” she said. “Are you seeing something?”
“I’m trying to see something,” I said. “But who knows? I could be stabbing in the dark here. I don’t want to get your hopes up until I feel more confident.”
After I hung up, Diane appeared in my doorway with a sandwich and a scowl.
“Marcus called the order in,” she said.
“Did you know Marcus is in a group chat with my brother?”
“I’ve been invited,” she said. “I’m assessing before I commit.”
I covered my face with both hands and groaned.
She set the sandwich on my desk, looked at me, at the desk, then back at me. “You were humming again yesterday.”
“I don’t hum.”