Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Finch
“Another one?" I slapped a hand over my weary eyes. My sweaty skin still bore the faint waft of tequila even after a shower, three bracing cups of coffee, and a fresh pair of scrubs. I’d only gotten home a few hours before the start of my shift. Peeling my thirty-year-old ass out of bed after a big night out suddenly felt dramatically different than it did at twenty-nine.
Dove's voice sighed over the radio. "Yep."
I swigged back another giant gulp of coffee and vowed to myself I was instituting a midnight curfew from now on. I held the radio to my lips. “I thought you candled all the eggs?” I asked my little sister.
"I did!" Dove screeched. I’d bet she was stomping her foot indignantly judging by the parrot squawks in the background.
Obviously, she did not candle all the eggs. Or she missed one. Or the macaws secretly laid another egg while she wasn’t looking and hid one from the previous clutch—not an impossibility. Even after all her years of experience as a bird keeper, Dove wasn’t infallible, none of us were, though she’d have my head for saying so. There was no point starting a fight over the radio, and our mom would blame me for it anyway.
Annoyed, I rubbed my eyebrow and stared up and the fluorescent lights above my desk. Without looking, I reached for my sunglasses and found them haphazardly placed among my disorganized stacks of paper. I put them on, darkening the too bright hospital lights.
"All right," I said, even though I wanted to say, “Fuck no! No more baby birds!” I skulled the rest of my coffee. This was a five-cup kind of morning. "I'll get the incubator set up and will meet you in Ward B.”
"Roger," Dove replied.
I thought I'd made it to the other side of another baby bird season but no! We had four different breeding pairs of macaws at Prickle Island Zoo, and our military macaws had just decided to hatch their secret baby a week before the start of summer.
This breeding pair were the world's worst parents, though, and their chicks would need to be hand-reared. Their progeny was destined to go off to a breeding program in Costa Rica, and their offspring’s offspring would one day be flying through national parks all throughout Central America. Our zoo was very proud to be a part of their numbers growing, but it meant at least another month of no sleep for me.
These chicks needed to be crop-fed every few of hours through the night for the first few weeks of their lives. They were worse than human babies, temperamental, needing just the right mixture of food and warmth and attention as they went from little pink blob to prickly teenager to fully-fledged parrot in a matter of months. I knew all of my zookeeper siblings would pitch in, each taking a shift, but since I now lived above the vet hospital, I always took the most ungodly hours so my siblings didn't have to wander through the zoo at 2 am.
Ugh. I stretched my arms above my head and then beelined to the break room to make another pot of coffee. Honestly, the zoo should’ve been sponsored by a coffee roastery for all the caffeine the Lachlan family drank.
Springtime was chaotic with all of the baby animals, but at least the zoo was closed to visitors so the workload wasn't as intense as in the summer. I scheduled a lot of my annual work to be done in the summertime because the visitors liked to observe all of the animal checkups from the other side of the floor-to-ceiling glass. But a baby macaw meant a full day and night schedule, and that was before I factored in the inevitable emergencies that always reared up when you worked with wild animals. It would be a lot, even for me.
I set the coffee brewing and swung my arms back and forth like I was hyping myself up to start a breakdance battle.
I loved my job. It was my entire life. My family, my legacy, my identity was wrapped up in: Goldfinch Lachlan, Head Veterinarian at Prickle Island Zoo.
But this summer would definitely put a damper on my abundant sex life. Say goodbye to all the summer parties I normally threw, all the zoo staff I normally wooed, all the summer island residents I normally hooked up with . . . I thought about that Portuguese yoga instructor from last year. Well, I could probably do a little bit of both.
That reminded me I still need to get my “work hard, play harder” tattoo. I was saving a spot on my ribcage for it.
My brain was still so foggy, I barely registered Mom walking in with an armful of fancy towels.
"Donations from the Johnson estate,” she said, dumping the towering pile of monogramed towels into the washing basket.
There were three things a vet hospital could never have enough of: towels, bowls, and pens. Some of the island estates changed over their guest towels after practically every use and donated them to the wildlife hospital. It meant we had an odd mishmash of surprisingly high-quality linens and shit-stained, ripped, old ones. The hospital patients would certainly be sleeping in luxury tonight.
"You got home late last night,” Mom said, folding her arms and leaning against the doorframe. "Or should I say early."
She gave me a side eye, that knowing Evelyn Lachlan look that made me groan. How did she do it? Seven kids and she managed to keep tabs on all of us. Even now that my sister, Lark, had moved with her boyfriend to New Zealand, Mom still knew everything that was going on in her life.
“It wasn’t that late,” I muttered, pulling out the shredded recycle paper from a bucket under the steel bench top.
Mom’s eyebrows lifted into her hairline as I placed the shredded paper into a plastic bowl. “Oh really?”
Technically, I got a ride out with Petey. He'd taken up fishing in his semi-retirement and was up at crazy early hours even for us. I'd hoped I'd been stealthy enough that none of my family would’ve noticed I'd been gone all night . . . but when you lived in a place covered in security cameras, people were bound to find out.
“Okay, fine. I had a date," I finally relented, and Mom gave me a victorious nod.
I’d sort of had two dates if you counted that run-in with the blonde bombshell named Frankie. I'd spent the rest of the night with a British flight attendant, but we’d just ended up talking in the bar until closing time. I had lost all my mojo after the eventful start of the evening. It’d still been Frankie's face that had kept flashing through my mind as Petey and I had ridden across the choppy waves back to the zoo. I hoped she was doing okay. I hoped she’d find someone better than that loser, someone who cherished her.
But I wasn't about to tell my mother—and boss—any of that, especially not when she was giving me a knowing look.
"Finch . . ." She drew out my name in that warning tone of hers.
"I know, I know!" I threw my hands up.
I hated the way she worried about me. There was really nothing to worry about. Sure, I had a work-life balance that was skewed heavily toward work, but when I had free time, the last thing I wanted was a serious relationship. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to let off some steam. I wanted to unwind after a stressful day with people who didn't know me . . ..
Yeah, there was no way Mom would understand that.
It had been love at first sight for my mom and dad. Even thirteen years since his passing, Mom was still the ultimate romantic. She was the sort of person who felt completed by a relationship when I knew I would only feel trapped by one. What I needed even more, though, was to find a way to get her off my back. The second I’d turned 30, it was like all the alarm bells had started going off in Mom’s brain.
Luckily, I was saved from whatever Mom was going to say by my older brother, Hawk, on the radio. “Carnivores to home base.”
I lifted my radio before he even stopped talking. “She’s with me,” I answered, holding the radio between Mom and me for us both to listen. “Go ahead.”
“Hey, boss,” Hawk said. “You've got someone at the front office saying you've got a nine o’clock meeting?"
"Oh shoot," Mom said, looking at her watch. "The new chef is here. I gotta go."
Saved by the bell, thank God.
As Mom left, Dove entered holding a towel-swaddled chick the size of my thumb. She frowned at me when she realized I hadn’t prepared much of anything yet.
"Sorry, I was being lectured by Mom," I muttered as I quickly started getting the heating pads out.
Dove’s purple dipped hair spilled across her face as she bent down and retrieved a nesting basket. “About your date last night?"
"Ugh, not you too."
“Just guessing.” Dove shrugged, adjusting her wire-rim glasses. "No judgement."
"You'd think having Hawk and Lars happily coupled up would make Mom ease off. Two siblings out of seven is plenty.”
"Evelyn Lachlan doesn't know how to ease off,” Dove countered, setting the chick into the plastic bowl filled with shredded paper to weigh it. "Ever since we signed that contract for the Deacon Harrow movie, she's been showing everyone photos of us when we were kids and saying, 'How cute, maybe they'll rekindle their romance.' Gag."
"Gag," I echoed mockingly. "To have dated a movie star. Sounds awful.”
"We were ten years old!" Dove exclaimed. "We didn't date ! We were just friends. Also, he's a literal movie star now. He dates models."
"Models are boring," I said, waving my hand. "Trust me, I know."
Dove fished out her phone. "Maybe I can bribe Hannah into having a baby just so Mom will leave us alone."
Hannah, the newest keeper at the zoo, was a chaotic ADHD tornado with zero impulse control who could probably be swayed into it by her best friend, Dove. Hawk and Hannah had been together for only a year, but it was already abundantly clear that they were endgame. Though, perhaps encouraging them to have children just so we could redirect our Mom’s attention wasn’t the best plan of attack.
I hastily plucked the phone from my little sister’s grip. "I like the way you're thinking, but let's get this chick set up first."