Chapter 7 #2
“He sounds like he knew what he was talking about.”
“He usually did. Infuriating, some days, being married to a man who was right that often.” A real smile now, the first one since I’d arrived. “You’d have liked him. Everyone did.”
I thought about that on the drive back to the clinic: the particular grief of loving someone who was, by every account, easy to love, and losing him anyway.
Reyna had built a whole life on the other side of that loss, forty broodmares and three grown children and a breeding program that would outlive her, without once, as far as I could tell, needing anyone to witness the doing of it.
She looked at me for a second longer than the moment strictly required, the way people sometimes do when they’re about to say something they’ve been thinking for a while and finally decide the opening is good enough to use. “You look tired, Della. Everything all right at home?”
Small towns. Horse country especially, where everybody’s business travels faster than the roads would suggest. I didn’t ask how much she’d heard. I assumed the answer was some version of everything, filtered through however many people it had passed through to reach her.
“It’s been a complicated month,” I said, which was true and also the least I could possibly say and still be honest.
“Well.” She got to her feet, brushing grass off her jeans, nodding once at the colt, who had wandered a few feet off to graze like a horse who’d never had a single dramatic hour in his life.
“Whatever’s going on with you, it hasn’t touched what you do out here.
You’re still the best vet in three counties. That hasn’t changed.”
I called the university clinic from the truck before I’d even reached the end of Reyna’s driveway, canceling the standby, and the resident who picked up, a young woman who’d clearly been pacing near a phone expecting the worst, sounded almost disappointed the way vets get disappointed when a case resolves itself out from under a surgery they’d already mentally scrubbed in for.
“No torsion, false alarm on the surgical side?”
“Not a false alarm. Just a good outcome instead of a bad one. Those aren’t the same thing.
” I said it more sharply than I meant to, an old irritation surfacing at the assumption, common enough among residents fresh out of school, that a case only counts as real if it ends on a table.
“I’ll send the full workup over for the file either way, in case he ever colics again and somebody there needs the history. ”
“Copy that. What’d you end up doing out there, just walking him?”
“Walking, mostly, and watching his gums and his gut sounds closely enough to know when fifteen more minutes was worth the risk and when it wasn’t.
That’s most of this job, if you want the truth of it.
Anybody can walk a horse in a circle. Knowing exactly when to stop walking and load the trailer instead is the part nobody can teach you out of a book. ”
“Appreciate it, Dr. Marchetti. Nice work.”
I hung up and drove the rest of the way with the radio off, replaying the whole ninety minutes the way I do with every hard case.
You don’t get to use the ending to judge the beginning.
I’d made the right calls with the information I had, and that, more than the good outcome itself, was the part I let myself actually feel proud of.
I drove back to the clinic with the windows down, even though it was cold enough that it didn’t entirely make sense to, because I wanted the specific clean feeling of having done one thing, start to finish, correctly and completely, with nothing left unresolved at the end of it.
It had been eleven days since the surgery.
It was the first time since then I’d gone a full hour without thinking about Grant at all, and I noticed the exact moment it ended, pulling back into the clinic lot and seeing his truck parked in the visitor spot.
He didn’t get out. I could see him through the windshield, both hands on the wheel like he was still driving somewhere, watching me cross the lot toward him.
He had no plan for this either, I could see that much walking closer — he’d driven here on the same kind of instinct that had made me drive past our house two weeks earlier, before the thinking part of him had caught up enough to talk him out of it.
I stopped a few feet from the driver’s door instead of getting close enough to make him roll the window down. “You’re not supposed to be here in the middle of a workday. Doesn’t the company fall apart without you for an hour?”
“I don’t know,” he said, and the flatness of it — the total absence of his usual quick answer — was the first thing he’d said to me in two weeks that didn’t sound rehearsed. “I’ve never actually tried leaving to find out.”
“What made you leave today?” I asked, because I actually wanted to know, not as a test, just as a plain question between two people trying to figure out what was happening to them.
He looked down at his own hands on the wheel, like the answer might be written there if he looked hard enough.
“Sloane asked me, this morning, in a meeting, whether I was actually planning to fix things with you or whether I was just going to keep sending objects at the problem until it got tired and went away on its own.” A short, humorless laugh.
“I didn’t have a good answer. I’ve been sitting with not having one all day, and around two o’clock I just got in the truck.
I didn’t call ahead because I didn’t trust myself not to talk myself out of it if I gave myself time to think about what I’d say. ”
“You still don’t have anything to say.”
“No. I really don’t.” He finally looked at me instead of the wheel.
“I keep reaching for the thing that usually works, the plan, the gesture, the fix, and there isn’t one this time.
I don’t know how to just be a person standing in a parking lot without a plan.
That’s apparently a skill I never built. ”
“Most people build it by the time they’re twelve.”
“I was building a company by the time I was twelve.” He said it without self-pity, just fact, the same flat register he used for everything that actually mattered. “I’m aware that’s not an excuse.”
“I didn’t say it was an excuse. I said it was true.”
I didn’t have anything else ready for that, so I said nothing more, and we stood there, him in the truck and me in the lot in clothes that smelled like a colicking horse’s sweat, for longer than either of us seemed to know what to do with.
“I’m not here to fix anything today,” he said finally. “I just wanted to see the building. See where you’ve been.”
“Okay,” I said, and let him look at the building a while longer before either of us said anything else.