Chapter 9
FINN
She's waiting at the curb in a simple blouse, jeans and sneakers, her thick dark hair up, holding a large travel mug that renders my entire coffee strategy obsolete. When she sees the donut boxes, she smiles.
It's not the teacher smile. Not the polite, bulletproof one. It's not the real one either—the one I earned three times yesterday before I blew it—the one that starts in her eyes a half-second early. This is a third smile, brand new. Small, serene, patient.
Every instinct I own checks the sky for weather.
"Good morning." She takes the donut boxes out of my hands. "I'll hold these."
"They're for sharing."
"They're for later." She sets them on her stoop like contraband and gets in the car. "Drive. I'll navigate."
"You're confiscating my diplomacy donuts?"
"Doctor's orders." She clicks her seatbelt. "You'll thank me afterward."
The clinic sits on the east edge of town, a tidy white building with a hand-painted sign and a gravel lot, and Cathy Morse is waiting on the porch with a clipboard under one arm and an unmistakable air of long-awaited delivery.
"Mr. Bardot." She shakes my hand with a grip that means business.
"Thank you for volunteering. Sundays we have no staff, and the boarders still need full care.
Feeding, water, kennel turnover, exercise, and a few items of specialized handling.
" She consults the clipboard with what I can only describe as relish.
"Happy to help. I run an adventure gear company. There's not much I haven't handled."
Behind me, Darcy makes a sound like a cough that has given up pretending.
"Wonderful." Cathy beams. "Health code requires scrubs in the kennel area. Unfortunately we're between supply orders, and the only pair in your size is from our community outreach bin."
The scrubs she gives me are pink. Not a quiet pink either. A loud, luminous, cartoon pink, printed all over with kittens wearing tiny stethoscopes. The shirt strains across my shoulders like it has doubts about our partnership.
I come out of the staff restroom and Darcy looks at me for a long, long moment.
"Go ahead," I tell her, holding out my arms. "I know what this is. This is the grand finale of a revenge trilogy. Take your shot."
"I would never." Her voice wobbles like a tightrope walker in wind. "You look very qualified."
I glance down at myself. "These kittens have stethoscopes, Darcy."
She nods, fighting laughter. "They're board-certified."
I swear under my breath and follow her and Cathy into an examination room.
The morning's first event is Cupcake.
Cupcake is an orange tomcat the approximate size and temperament of a propane tank, boarding for the week while his owner cruises the Bahamas, and he requires a pill.
Cathy demonstrates the hold. Cupcake submits to Cathy the way the sea submits to the moon.
Then she hands him to me, and Cupcake performs an honest reappraisal of the situation and files me under scratching post.
"At least he's purring," I say, optimistic, an instant before he isn't.
The next forty-five seconds are footage I'd pay real money to keep off the internet.
I've gone hand over hand across a crevasse ladder with nothing but thousands of feet of air beneath me.
I have steady nerves and fast reflexes and twelve percent body fat, and none of it matters, because Cupcake has decided to relocate to the top of my head via my chest, and he is taking the scenic route.
When it's finally over, the pill is in the cat, the cat is in the kennel, and I'm bleeding from three locations through a kitten-print shirt.
"He likes you," Cathy says.
I dab at a laceration on my forearm. Darcy’s hiding a laugh behind her hand. "This is him liking me?"
Cathy smiles. "He made eye contact. That's huge for Cupcake."
"He made eye contact with my jugular."
Darcy’s laughter escapes—a choked giggle that sounds entirely too pleased. "You did great. I particularly liked that pretzel maneuver you did with your arms when Cupcake tried to somersault off your forehead."
I give her my best glower, but it’s hard to hold when she’s on the verge of dissolving into giggles. At my expense, I remind myself, trying to feel annoyed.
"All right. Cupcake is medicated and I need stitches. Are we done here?"
"Not quite," Cathy says, with a conspiratorial look at Darcy. "Follow me."
The puppies come next, three Lab-mix brothers from the Hendricks's accidental litter.
They need exercise in the side yard, and I provide play-by-play like it's the Westminster pre-show.
The puppies are a tougher crowd than Cupcake in their own way.
They have eleven legs between them at any given moment, no brakes, and a group decision-making process based entirely on momentum.
Within ten minutes they have untied both my shoes, stolen one sock through means I cannot reconstruct, and, in a coordinated maneuver during the post-play water break, all three of them christen my sneakers in sequence, like signing a guest book.
Darcy is no longer hiding her laughter behind her hands. I can hear it over the barking and the other clinic sounds. It's the real laugh, and it's directed at me, and I stand there in soaked shoes and ruined pink kitten-doctor scrubs experiencing what I can only describe as a win.
Kennel turnover takes an hour. I scrub, hose, squeegee, and relocate bedding for fourteen animals, and I do it properly, corners and all, because Cathy inspects like a drill sergeant and because there's a version of this day that ends with someone saying the billionaire from the city did half a job, and that version doesn't get to exist.
"Last item." Cathy consults the clipboard, and something in her serenity sharpens. "Let’s go meet Winston."
Winston is a bulldog. Winston is a low-slung, wheezing gentleman of advanced years, and Winston, Cathy explains, with diagrams, requires a procedure called expressing his anal glands.
I look at the diagram. I look at Winston. Winston looks back with the weary patience of a dog who has seen many volunteers come and go.
"There are professionals," I say. "Entire professions. Of professionals."
"And on Sundays," Cathy says, snapping on gloves and holding a second pair out to me, "there's us."
Jesus Christ. I have defied death on three continents and lived to tell about it. I have eaten things in the backcountry that had strong opinions about being eaten. I once free-soloed a pitch in Utah that my own safety officer refused to film.
But I find my limit in a small white room on the east edge of Mattichogue—and the limit's name is Winston.
Cathy explains the procedure twice. I keep waiting for the part where she laughs and admits she's kidding. The part does not arrive. Even Darcy looks green around the gills as Cathy briefs me on what I’m about to do.
"You'll feel a slight resistance," she says, gloving up and nodding at the second pair, "and then expression."
I swallow the bilge that suddenly rises in the back of my throat. "Please never use that sentence again."
Cathy continues without breaking stride. "Position your thumb and forefinger at four and eight o'clock—"
"Or that one."
Winston stands on the steel table, wheezing gently, resigned. He has clearly done this before. Thank God one of us has.
Darcy slips out of the room to watch from behind the safety of a window in the hallway. Then Cathy lifts Winston’s stubby stump of a tail, guides my gloved hand into position, and the first gland expresses.
The smell arrives like a verdict.
I have smelled glacier-camp latrines at the end of a three-week season.
I have smelled durian on a hot ferry, a two-week old bear carcass in August, the inside of my own boots after Patagonia, and none of it—not one entry in thirty-two years of terrible smells—prepares me.
My eyes flood. My throat executes a maneuver I have no name for and want no name for.
The room tilts a few degrees toward the drain in the floor, which I am suddenly, vividly aware was installed on purpose.
"Breathe through your mouth," Cathy says, serene.
"That makes it a flavor."
"There's a bin to your left if you need it. No shame. You wouldn't be the first."
And that's what saves me, honestly. Not grit. Spite.
Because I will not fold myself over the drain in the floor and surrender. Darcy orchestrated this weekend—and this hideous finale—as some kind of retribution, and I won’t go down without a fight. Even if I deserve every moment of the odiferous hell I currently find myself living.
I swallow hard enough to hear it. I blink my eyes clear. I ask Winston, out loud, to bear with me, and Winston sighs like he's heard it all before, and I do the job.
Both glands. Properly expressed. To clinical standard, per the diagram, while my stomach files formal objections and the sweat runs down the inside of the kitten scrubs.
There's no showmanship available in this room.
There's just the work, and the dog, and a man discovering that pride is located considerably lower in the body than advertised.
"Adequate," Cathy pronounces when it's over. "Honestly, better than most first-timers. You didn't even use the bin."
"I want that on a plaque."
Winston forgives me instantly, because dogs are better than people, and licks my wrist above the glove line, in apology or thanks, I’ll never know.
When I come out of the staff restroom several minutes later, peeled out of the scrubs and back in my own clothes, my hands scoured to the elbow, Darcy doesn’t say a word.
No joke. No jab. Even though I’m sure I deserve it.
We walk out of the clinic under the noonday sun in silence and get into my car.
The road back into town feels endless. We don’t talk the entire way.
When we reach her place, I park at the curb and sit there for a minute.
Trying not to ask the question that’s been circling in my mind since I put my fingers on that bulldog’s anus and started to squeeze.
Longer than that. Since the auction Friday.
"Do you really hate me that much, Darcy?"
The silence changes. I feel it change, the way weather announces itself through a tent wall.
She’s quiet at first. Utterly silent. Then she draws in a soft breath. "You want to know what I hate? I hate that you need to ask that question. Like you don’t have any idea… Like you don’t even realize what your words meant back then, what they did to me—"
A falling sensation grips me at the hurt I hear in her voice. I glance over at her and find her eyes glassy with hurt. "Shit. Darcy, I didn't mean..."
"Dictionary Darcy." She says it like she's setting something heavy on a table between us.
"Do you know I still hear it? I am thirty years old.
I have a master's degree. I have taught four hundred students, and there are still mornings I walk into my own classroom—my classroom—and some part of me is suddenly thirteen years old and bracing.
" The precision in her voice is cracking now, and what's underneath is worse.
"You think it was just a nickname. It wasn't a nickname, Finn, it was a license.
You made me a punchline, and punchlines are public property.
Everyone got to take a swing. And then my father left, and they had a whole vocabulary ready for me, and where do you think they learned that I was fair game? "
Ah, fuck. Every system I have goes quiet. No jokes. No exits. Just her voice and nothing else.
"The girl who ate lunch in the library wasn't there because she loved books." Her hand is already on the door handle, ready to make her escape. "She was there because it was the one room you and your friends never came into."
"Darcy."
"Thank you for your service hours." She's out of the car. The door doesn't slam behind her. She closes it carefully, with both hands, which is somehow worse.
And she's gone, hurrying up the stairs beside the bookshop to her second-floor apartment, and I'm sitting in a Ferrari doing the one kind of math I've never been any good at.
Not the odds. The arithmetic. The actual count of it—every laugh I collected off her back at fourteen, multiplied by every kid who heard it and went looking for a target, multiplied by a father walking out on his family and a town that whispered about it.
No wonder she wanted to punish me this weekend.
Somehow, I don’t think the score will ever be even.
I sit there a long time, staring after her.
Then I put the Ferrari into gear and roll away from the curb.