Chapter 4 #2
“I’m not touching patients. I’m doing paperwork.” I let that sit a second. “I’ve been doing a lot of paperwork, actually.”
“Okay.” Careful now, hearing something in my voice he couldn’t name yet. “Can we talk? Properly, I mean, not like this. I can be there in twenty minutes.”
“You can talk now.”
“Della, come on.”
“You had forty-one minutes,” I said, “between when they wheeled me back and when you checked in at Oakwood. Not an emergency. Forty-one minutes, door to door, which I checked, because I had the time to check things this week.” I heard him start to say something and kept going, because if I stopped I wasn’t sure I’d start again.
“And I found the Cubs game. And the Thursday lunches. Two years of them, Grant. And last year’s little celebration when she closed Ashford, the night I made dinner. ”
The silence on his end went on long enough that I checked the call hadn’t dropped.
“That’s not,” he started, “it’s not what it looks like, all of that is just — Sloane and I have worked together for fifteen years, Della, there’s a shorthand there, it doesn’t mean—”
“I’m not asking if you slept with her.” My voice came out steadier than I expected, steadier than I felt.
“I know you didn’t. That was never the question.
The question is where my forty minutes went, every single week, for three years, and I already know the answer, so you don’t actually have to explain it to me. I did the math myself.”
“Then let me fix it. Tell me what you need and I’ll do it, I’ll clear my whole week, I’ll—”
“I don’t need you to clear your week, Grant.
” I closed the laptop, finally, gently, the way you close a folder on a decision you’ve already made and don’t need to keep staring at.
“I needed you in a recovery room four days ago. That window’s closed.
I don’t know what the next one looks like yet, and neither do you, and I’m not going to figure it out with you on the phone while I’m sitting in a supply closet. ”
“So what, you’re just — you’re staying there? At the clinic? Della, come home, we can—”
“No,” I said. “I’m staying right here to finish paperwork on an actual colic case, which is, this week, the closest thing I’ve had to a problem with a clean answer.
” I paused. “Do you remember a Thursday about a year ago when I called you about feeding the cats? You said you couldn’t talk, you’d call me back. ”
“Della, I get a hundred calls like that in a week, I don’t remember every—”
“I know you don’t remember it. That’s the point. I remember it, because I decided not to be annoying about the cats. You don’t remember it because you were at lunch.”
He went quiet, and this time I let it sit.
“I have to go. Marisol needs the office.”
I hung up before he could answer, which felt less like courage than it probably should have, and more like simple exhaustion — the kind that comes from holding still exactly as long as a thing requires, and not one second longer.
The excuse I’d given Grant was that Marisol needed the office.
The real reason was that I needed somewhere to put what had just happened, and a supply closet with a chair in it wasn’t going to hold it.
Instead of sitting back down at the laptop, I walked out to the barn.
We had a mare in for laminitis observation, patient and miserable in equal measure, and I stood at her stall door with my arms folded on the top rail the way I do when I’m working through something I already know but haven’t said out loud yet.
“Three years,” I told her. “He didn’t even argue the number.”
She flicked an ear at me and eased her weight off the sore foot, unimpressed, which was somehow the exact response I needed from another living creature right then.
“I keep expecting to feel something bigger than this,” I said.
“Angrier. Sadder. Something with more furniture in it.” I reached over and rubbed the flat of her nose, mostly for my own benefit.
“Instead I mostly feel like I finally read the chart correctly. That’s supposed to be the good part of my job.
It doesn’t feel like the good part right now. ”
She leaned into my hand and offered no opinion on any of it, which is the single most reliable thing about horses, and part of why I’d built a career on patients who never have to perform being fine for anyone’s benefit.
Then I went back inside.
Marisol found me there an hour later, the office dark except for the laptop screen, and didn’t ask what I’d been looking at.
She’s known me eleven years; she has a good clinical instinct for when a question will help and when it’ll just make someone say something they’ll regret having said out loud too early.
She put a cup of the terrible break-room coffee down next to my elbow and said, “Bramble’s eating again. Full flake, no coaxing.”
“Good,” I said, and meant it, grateful for one uncomplicated piece of good news in a day that hadn’t had much of it.
She studied me a second too long, the look she gets when something in front of her doesn’t add up and she’s decided not to say so yet. “You want to tell me why you’ve been staring at that laptop like it bit you?”
“Not yet.”
“Fair enough.” She topped off my coffee anyway, though I hadn’t touched the first cup, which from Marisol is as close as she comes to saying she isn’t going anywhere.
Marisol lingered a moment before actually moving to close up, arms crossed, weighing something. “You want my opinion, or you want me to just close up?”
“Give me the opinion. I’ve had a rough enough day that one more thing probably won’t tip it.”
“I think you already know what you’re going to do about all this.
I’ve watched you diagnose enough hard cases to recognize the look.
You get quiet exactly like this right before you tell an owner something they don’t want to hear.
” She shrugged, not unkindly. “I’m not going to guess what you’re going to do about it.
That’s yours to say, not mine. I just wanted you to know I noticed the look. ”
“Can I push back on one thing?” she said, before I could answer. “You’ve given me maybe six sentences about any of this. I don’t actually know what he did. For all I know he forgot an anniversary.”
“It’s bigger than an anniversary.”
“I believe you. I’m just asking if you’re sure the math means what you think it means, or if you’ve had four days alone with a spreadsheet and no sleep.”
“Both,” I said. “It’s both of those things. That’s what makes it hard to argue myself out of.”
“Okay,” she said, and didn’t push further, which told me plenty about how much she trusted my judgment, even without hearing the whole story.
She was right, though it would take me another day to admit it even to myself.
I’d carry that exchange with me longer than I expected to.
Marisol had a gift for saying exactly enough and no more, for trusting me to do the rest of the work myself instead of doing it for me, the way I’d spent eighteen years doing it for everyone else — Eleanor managing what I could handle, Grant unconsciously waiting for me to manage him.
Marisol did neither, and I found, sitting with that difference, that it was the first genuinely respectful treatment I could remember getting from anyone in longer than I wanted to calculate.
“You want me to close up?”
“Yeah.” I closed the laptop. Some things, once you’ve seen them clearly, you don’t need to look at again to know they’re true. “I’ve seen enough for today.”