Chapter 2 #3
“Forty-two, resting.” He rattled it off fast, like something he’d actually studied — which, it turned out, he had. Dawson kept his own binder of case notes copied out of my charts, in handwriting too careful to be anything but hopeful. “I checked her incision at eleven too. Looked clean.”
“Keep checking it every four hours. Call me if her temp climbs past one-oh-two, or if she goes off feed again.”
“Did you give her the second dose of banamine?”
“Eight o’clock, like the chart says. She’s due again at four — I set an alarm.”
“Good man.”
“Dr. Marchetti.” He said it the way you’d talk a spooked animal down off a fence line. “I’ve got her. You had surgery today. I don’t need you supervising me supervising a horse.”
It was a reasonable thing for a nineteen-year-old to say to his employer. It still took more effort than it should have to let it stand unargued.
“Fine,” I said. “But I’m awake if you need me.”
“You won’t be awake in twenty minutes,” he said, sounding entirely too confident for someone who’d clearly clocked how tired I looked. “No offense, Dr. Marchetti.”
“None taken.”
He glanced at me sideways, the particular careful look of a kid who’s heard some version of the gossip and doesn’t know if he’s allowed to mention it. “You doing okay? Not — I mean the incision. Obviously the incision.”
“The incision’s fine,” I said, which was mostly true, and let the rest of his actual question sit there unanswered, because I didn’t have anything I was ready to hand a nineteen-year-old at two in the morning, and because he’d had the grace to let me choose which question to answer.
“You still thinking about applying this cycle?” I asked, because it was easier than thinking about anything else, and because I’d already seen the binder.
He went red to the ears. “You know about the binder.”
“I know about the binder.”
“I’m not trying to be weird about it. I just figured if I was going to ask you for a letter eventually, I should probably actually know what I was talking about first.”
“Ask me now. Save yourself a year of copying my handwriting into a notebook at two in the morning.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’ll write it this week.”
“You don’t even know where I’m applying.”
“Wherever it is, I’ll say you’re the best overnight tech I’ve ever had, which is true, and that you diagnosed a twisted colon at nineteen before I got out of the truck, which is also true, and let the admissions committee do whatever they want with that.”
“That actually happened once.”
“It happened exactly once, and I’ve been telling that story for two years because it’s the best one I’ve got.”
He didn’t say anything right away, and for a kid who usually filled every silence within two seconds, that told me more than if he’d said thank you five different ways.
I stood at Bramble’s stall a few minutes, watching her doze standing up, weight shifted off her surgical side the exact way I’d want to see it, her lower lip gone slack and loose the way a horse’s only goes when nothing in the world is currently asking anything of her.
I envied that, standing there in a borrowed T-shirt with my own incision aching in time with my pulse.
I would have traded quite a lot, right then, for ten uninterrupted minutes of a body that had simply stopped keeping score.
“She likes you better than she likes me,” Dawson said from his bucket, not looking up from his book. “Vitals are always better on the nights you’re in the building somewhere. I used to think that was a coincidence.”
“It’s a coincidence. Horses don’t know who owns the practice.”
“The last three papers I read said different.”
“Then you’re reading the wrong papers.”
He laughed, quiet enough not to spook anything, and went back to his book.
“You want me to walk you back up?” Dawson asked, already half out of his seat again.
“I’ve got it.” I managed a real smile for him, the first one all day that didn’t cost me anything to produce. “Go back to your book. And Dawson, thank you for being the kind of overnight guy I don’t have to think about.”
“Dr. Marchetti.” I stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “There’s protein bars in the break room if the ones in your go-bag are stale. I restocked a few weeks back. Figured somebody should, eventually.”
I told him I’d remember that, and meant it more than the sentence probably deserved.
“Who’s covering days tomorrow?”
“Already handled. Marisol swapped the schedule around before she called you, probably around the same time she was yelling at me to double-check Bramble’s fluids.”
“She does not yell.”
“She yells with her eyebrows. It’s worse.”
“Go to bed, Dr. Marchetti.”
“Bossy.”
“I learned from the best.”
He looked pleased and embarrassed the way nineteen-year-olds manage both at once, and I went back up the fourteen stairs slower than I’d come down them.
I lay back on the bare mattress in my going-home clothes, shoes still on, both hands finally free to just rest on my stomach instead of holding anything up, and looked at the ceiling of a room I owned and had never once, in nine years, needed the way I needed it that night.
Somewhere below me, the refrigeration unit hummed, steady, indifferent, the most reliable sound in my life. I matched my breathing to it, and at some point I fell asleep.