Chapter 14 #2
I’ve done this a dozen times. There’s a protocol, and the protocol is the point: transition notes for every active patient, typed, alphabetized.
Flag the complicated cases. Print the handoff summaries.
Reconcile the drug log. Box the personal items, which fit, all of them, in one box, by design.
Wipe the counter. I’m a professional temporary person.
I can be gone before the leaving hurts. That’s the entire skill set. It’s on my resume in different words.
I don’t call Grady to tell him about Dr. Fenn, either. Noted for the record: he’s not the only one in this town fluent in not-mentioning. We could teach a seminar. We could co-teach it, in separate rooms.
The complications are small and everywhere, like burrs.
Janet finds reasons to be at my end of the counter all morning.
She doesn’t say anything. Janet, who has commentary for weather, for parking, for the moral character of drug reps, says absolutely nothing, and looks at me over her glasses roughly every eleven minutes, and by noon I’d confess to almost anything for one syllable of her opinion.
She brings me a coffee I didn’t ask for at two o’clock.
It’s from Peak Grounds. Black, no sugar.
I thank her, and she says, “Mm,” over the glasses, and that’s the whole goodbye.
The feed-store kid comes by for rabbit food and asks what time the clinic opens on Saturdays, “you know, in the fall,” and I hear myself say Dr. Fenn will be back before fall, and watch his serious face do the arithmetic and come up short, and he says, “Oh,” in the tone of someone updating a file he didn’t want to update.
The crayon horse comes off the fridge. It’s the only thing displayed in the entire apartment, a horse drawn like a dog wearing a hat, thank you for saving my life in a nine-year-old’s determined capitals, and taking down one piece of paper should not require sitting on a kitchen floor, and I don’t sit on the kitchen floor.
I put it in the box flat, between two books, where it won’t bend.
The dog’s water bowl says SMOKY in Keller’s Sharpie.
It isn’t mine to pack. Almost nothing here is mine to pack.
Two years of engineering my life for exactly this, and it’s all going to plan, and I keep having to stop and put my hands flat on the counter and breathe like a person who has never done this before.
Last, the whiteboard. Dr. Fenn’s return date, the contract date in blue in the corner, eight weeks of arithmetic in the middle where I kept running the numbers like the numbers might change their testimony. I take the eraser and wipe it clean in four strokes.
“There,” I say to the empty board. “The math is done arguing.”
The board, wiped, looks like every whiteboard in every clinic in every town I’ve ever left, which is the point of the system, and the system is working, and I stand there for a minute with the eraser in my hand like I’ve forgotten what it’s for.
My phone buzzes mid-afternoon.
Hanna: Heard about Colorado. Are you okay?
Four hours. The town’s intelligence network has a processing time of about four hours, and that’s with a fire to clean up after. I applied at midnight and Janet watched me carry a box downstairs at ten and the rest is infrastructure.
Me: Fine.
Hanna: That’s what I said for three years.
I don’t respond. I re-alphabetize a drawer that’s already alphabetized.
Hanna: The word you’re looking for is “terrified.” It’s okay. It sounds the same.
I put the phone face-down on the counter and look at it like it might continue without me, which, being Hanna, it mercifully doesn’t.
The suitcase comes out last. It’s been packed for eight weeks, it’s the one packing job that requires no packing, and I bring it downstairs to stage by the clinic’s back door, and that’s a mistake, because I set it down for thirty seconds to find the truck keys.
When I turn around, the dog is sitting on it.
Not next to it. On it. Forty-five pounds of editorial commentary, planted on the one object in this building that constitutes my entire exit strategy, looking at me with an expression I can only describe as: really?
“Off,” I say.
He does not get off.
“You’re a dog. You don’t get a vote.”
He yawns. It’s the most devastating yawn I’ve ever been on the receiving end of, and I once had a llama scream at me for twenty straight minutes.
The yawn says: I have seen this suitcase by the door for eight weeks.
The yawn says: you talk to steering wheels and you drank his coffee wrong on purpose. The yawn says: really.
“I fixed your skin,” I tell him. “I sat on a kennel floor for you at eleven p.m. Show some professional courtesy.”
He lies down on it. Full length. Deploys the chin.
I stand in my emptied clinic with transition notes alphabetized and a confirmation email from Colorado and a dog flattening my suitcase, and I hear it in my own voice, the sentence I said to him the first night, you’re temporary, don’t get comfortable, and it occurs to me, with clinical certainty and terrible timing, that of the two of us in this room, only one ever followed that instruction.
It was never the dog.
He comes at dusk, two days before I planned to be gone.
I hear his truck, and then the door I haven’t locked yet, and the dog scrambles up off the suitcase to greet him, tail going, loyal to us both, uncomplicated in a way I have never once managed.
Through the doorway I watch Grady crouch to meet him, one hand in the fur, easy, and then he straightens up and sees the room.
The boxes. The staged suitcase, freshly furred. The transition files squared on the counter in their labeled stacks, patient handoffs, A through M, N through Z, everything a practice needs to forget me cleanly.
He goes still. The wrong stillness, the one from the doorway of a fire.
“You’re leaving?” he says.
“You’re leaving first.”