Chapter 4 #2
"Honest answer? Some days, I miss her. Some days, I feel like I haven't even started missing her yet, like I'm still ahead of it.
" He was looking at Penny, not at me. "But mostly, I keep coming back to the fact that she isn't suffering anymore.
The last six months were hard. She didn't want them.
There isn't a clean way to say I'm glad they're done with, but they're done with. "
He glanced up. "That sounds bad."
"It doesn't sound bad. It sounds true."
"Mhm."
"It's what nobody tells you about loving somebody through a long sickness. The relief feels like betrayal until you understand it isn't."
He looked at me for a long beat. Long enough that I knew he'd noticed which voice that sentence came out of and which voice it hadn't.
"Yeah," he said. "That's it."
I let it sit. It was a silence Audrey would have filled. A silence Easton and I both seemed willing to let exist.
"So Hartsdale Fire?" I asked.
"Two and a half years now."
"How is it?"
He shrugged a little.
"It's good. The shifts are long. The bad calls are bad.
But you get to be the person who shows up on the worst day of somebody else's life and make it a little less worst. There are a few days a year when that means everything.
You hold on to those days while you're doing inventory on the truck.
" He looked up. "What about you? What brought you home? "
"I got married young," I said. "It didn't work out. I came home."
He waited a beat to see if there was more. There was. He could see there was, but he didn't reach for it.
"I'm sorry to hear that."
"Don't be. I'm not anymore."
He nodded once, letting it lie.
"And the plan? Now that you're back?"
"A clinic, actually. There's a space on Main I'm walking through tomorrow."
"A clinic?"
"I'm a vet."
He sat back. The smile started slowly and didn't bother to hide.
"Of course you are."
"What?"
"That tracks. With everything."
"With what?"
"I watched you work on a sparrow once."
I stared at him.
"Your front porch. For the better part of an hour. I watched the whole thing from across the street. I figured it was a goner."
I set my mug down.
"I didn't know you saw that."
It rewrote a summer. Maybe two.
I had crouched on my own porch in pigtails at fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, clocking Easton Ford coming and going from the bungalow with his friends and his secondhand truck with his laugh. I was sure he was a boy who couldn't see me. He had seen me.
I picked my mug back up to have something to do with my hands.
My eyes drifted to where Penny was lying at his feet. White muzzle, soft eyes, a body that had stopped being a young dog and started being an old one, but had stayed well-loved through the whole transition. Her coat was clean. Her nails were trimmed. Somebody had been taking care of her.
"How old is she?" I asked.
"Twelve."
"She looks great. For twelve."
"She's got good days. She's got slower days."
I set my mug down, slid off the couch, and onto the rug. Slowly. Penny lifted her head and gave me a long blink, which on a golden was practically a kiss.
"Hi, sweet girl," I said. "Hi, Penny. Hi."
I stroked the velvet of her ears.
Easton settled back into his chair for the first time since I'd sat down. He let me work. He didn't hover. He watched.
"She's about the last thing I've got of my grandmother's, when you get down to it," he said.
His voice was lower and quieter than it had been a minute before.
"When Grandma went, Pen was the one who got me through the first month.
She'd come find me wherever I was sitting and put her head on my knee.
I'd never had a dog like that growing up. I didn't know they did that."
"They do that."
"Mhm."
I ran my hand along her ribs. Good. Not bony, not bloated. I ran my hand down her spine. She liked it.
"How's she been eating?"
A small flicker behind his eyes. Like I'd asked the question he'd been carrying.
"Slow," he said. "Last two months, maybe three. She'll go to the bowl and stand at it. She'll pick up a kibble. She'll drop it. She'll eat the soft stuff. She paws at the side of her face sometimes."
I kept my hand on Penny's ribs. Felt her breathing. Steady. A little fast for resting.
"Lost weight?"
"A few pounds. I switched her to wet."
"Did you take her in for it?"
Easton's jaw worked once before he answered.
"Twice. Caldwell ran a senior panel. Said her bloodwork was clean for her age. Said she was just old."
I lifted my hand off her ribs and put it on the side of her face. Penny watched me, patient, trusting.
"Let me see your mouth, sweetheart."
I peeled her upper lip back gently along the right side.
There it was.
The upper fourth premolar. The carnassial.
The big work tooth, the one a dog did her chewing on.
The gum around it was bright red and pulled back from the base.
Tartar along the enamel like a coastline.
The tooth itself was fractured along the cusp, with a clean line across the top, exposing what should never be exposed.
She'd been hurting for months.
I let her lip ease back down. I rested my hand on top of her head.
Easton hadn't moved.
"She's got an upper carnassial fracture.
The big chewing tooth on her right side.
It's cracked along the top, and the gum around it is inflamed.
She almost certainly has an infection at the root by now.
That's why she's slow at her bowl. Chewing on that side has been hurting her, probably for three months. "
"For three months?"
"Yeah."
He didn't say anything for a moment. He looked at Penny. Penny looked at him.
"And Caldwell."
"Ran a senior panel. That checks the systemic stuff. Kidneys, liver, and blood counts. It doesn't lift the lip and look at the teeth. You have to actually look."
I sat back on my heels.
"He didn't look."
"Doesn't sound like it. Not enough to see it, anyway."
He scrubbed a hand down his face. Slowly.
"Three months. I kept bringing her in. I kept telling him she wasn't eating. He kept telling me she was old."
"Easton."
I shifted forward and sat cross-legged on the rug in front of him.
"Listen, this is fixable. Someone needs to sedate her, pull the tooth, and clean what's underneath. She'll be back at her bowl inside a week. Two on the long end. She's going to feel like a different dog."
He looked at me.
"You can do it?"
"I can't, not yet. I don't have a space. I don't have an anesthesia rig. I don't have a surgical suite or a tech on standby. By the time I had any of it up, she'd have been hurting another month, and I'm not going to make her wait."
I sat back on my heels.
"Let me write you a referral. There's a practice forty minutes south of here, off the highway.
Hudson Valley Animal Hospital. A friend of mine from vet school runs the soft-tissue side.
Her name's Dr. Cabrera. She does these extractions in her sleep.
I'll call her tonight. We can have Penny on her schedule before the end of the week. "
He looked at me for a long beat.
"That close?"
"I'll talk to her tonight, then write everything up for you for tomorrow morning. The diagnosis. What to ask for at intake. Post-op care. What to watch. You won't have to walk in there alone. You'll have a sheet of paper and a name."
He took a breath. Let it out.
"You'd do that?"
"Of course."
He sat back, finally, set his hands on his thighs, and looked at the ceiling for a beat.
"Sweet Jesus."
"I'm sorry. I know that's a lot to land at the end of a Tuesday."
"No." His gaze came back down from the ceiling. He looked at me with an expression I couldn't place. "No, Astrid. Thank you."
I smiled. "You're welcome."
He looked back down at Penny. She'd laid her chin on his bare foot.
He bent over her and put a hand on her side.
"We're gonna fix it, Pen," he said, very quietly. "We're gonna fix it."
She came back to me. I let her tongue swipe at my wrist once. I sat back.
Easton hadn't moved. He was looking at me. Not at Penny. At me.
I had seen that look once before—a man figuring out who you actually were. I felt it from Brett in the first few weeks of meeting him, before any of the rest of him walked in. I told myself I would never see it on a man's face again. I hadn't been planning on it.
I cleared my throat.
"What?"
"Nothing."
A small, almost-smile.
"Drink your coffee, Astrid."
I drank my coffee.
I drank my coffee in his grandmother's living room, on his grandmother's couch, in front of his grandmother's dog, with my own dog asleep against her ribs, with a Hartsdale firefighter looking at me like a man who had just remembered something he hadn't even known he'd forgotten.
I came back to Hartsdale to be no one's.
Audrey punctured it that morning before I had my underwear on.
I had a feeling Easton Ford was going to puncture the rest of it before Tuesday was out.