17. Brendan #2
I opened the container. “You’re not always correct.”
“Name one time.” She blinked innocently. “Just one.”
I thought about it. “The Henderson cat. You said it was behavioral. It was dietary.”
“The Henderson cat was borderline,” she said. “And I came around to dietary within a week. Besides, that’s a veterinary question, and we’re talking about human behavior here. That doesn’t count.” She watched me eat. “Was it the puppy owner?”
I said nothing. She nodded slowly, the nod of a woman confirming a conclusion she had already reached. “The puppy owner then.”
“The tapir case is interesting,” I said.
“We’re not talking about the tapir case. We’re talking about the new puppy. And just to clarify before you correct me again, the puppy is a puppy. The owner is interesting,” she said. “I remember. He wore a slinky tank top that showed more shoulder and nipple than any garment should.”
“Diane.”
“His boobs were trying to escape from that thing like some madman locked in Alcatraz.”
“Diane.”
“I’m a professional. I can notice a tank top and still be a professional.
Besides, they’re very nice boobs. I like nice man boobs.
” She stood, dusted herself off, and turned toward the door, looking back over her shoulder as she spoke.
“I’m happy for you, Doc. You’ve been feeding that ferret and talking to that plant for too many years.
It’s time you cared for another human being for a change. ”
“Gerald is a succulent,” I said. “Not a plant.”
“Those are the same thing.”
“They are not.”
“They are.” She picked up the empty container I hadn’t finished, stared into it, then set it back on my desk.
“Eat the rest, then call your mother. She texted Marcus last week asking if you were eating. Fail to do so and I will call her. Consider this an illustration of ‘strength through superior firepower.’”
“My mother texted Marcus?” I asked, ignoring her terrible military reference.
“Your mother has Marcus’s number.”
“How does my mother have Marcus’s number?”
“Alan gave it to her,” she said. “Apparently, it takes a village.”
She left before I could respond to this.
I looked at my desk. Then at the imaging. Then I picked up my phone. There was a text waiting for me that I hadn’t noticed before.
Adrian: Dona Carmen just looked at me and said “?el veterinario?” without me saying anything.
Me: How does everyone know everything? My staff is all over me this morning.
Adrian: This is not the comfort you think it is.
Me: Dona Carmen sounds like Gerald.
Adrian: Gerald doesn’t KNOW things. Gerald just IS.
Me: That’s what I said.
Adrian: That’s not what you said at all. That’s the opposite of what you said.
I put the phone down, looked at the imaging again, and tried to remember what I’d been thinking about before lunch. My brain was mushier than whatever was left in my bowl.
The pulmonary density readings. The direction that wasn’t a theory yet. Right. Focus.
Instead, I picked my phone up.
Me: The case is getting interesting.
Adrian: Tell me.
So I typed a long paragraph, giving him the highlights, not the full picture. His replies were rapid, insightful, and asked the right questions, which both surprised and intrigued me.
Adrian: Is she eating?
Me: This morning, yes.
Adrian: Then she’s not scared yet. She’s confused. There’s a difference.
I sat with that for a moment.
Me: How do you know that?
Adrian: Animals stop eating when they’re scared. When they’re confused, they still eat. They just don’t enjoy it the same way.
I looked at the screen, then scanned the imaging again.
Me: That’s actually useful.
Adrian: I know things.
Me: You are a surprising man, Adrian Voss.
Adrian: I know bread, dancing, and a little about animals. It’s something, I suppose.
I set the phone down and went back to work.
The afternoon was filled with patient after patient.
Between my four o’clock and five o’clock appointments, I pulled up the imaging one more time.
The direction I’d identified was still staring back at me, still specific enough to feel real, yet still vague enough to be wrong.
I wrote it down, not because I was committing to it, but because sometimes writing things down made them easier to examine when the light was different and my brain was fresh.
Then I folded the paper and put it under my phone, where I’d see it when it was time to leave for the day.
Diane knocked at five-thirty. “Last patient is out. Marcus is closing up.”
“Five minutes,” I said.
She cocked her head and looked at the imaging spread on my desk, then she looked at the folded paper under my phone.
“Is she going to be okay?” she said.
She hadn’t met Marisol, had only heard about the case in the pieces I’d shared over the past week, but Diane had a way of adopting cases she considered hers by proximity, and Marisol had become one of those cases.
“I think so,” I said. “I don’t know enough yet to be sure. This is a tough one.”
She nodded. “Okay.” She picked up her bag. “Go home. Feed the ferret. Talk to the plant.”
“The succulent.”
“Whatever,” she said, and left.
I gathered the imaging, stacked it carefully, and put it in its folder.
Then I turned off my desk lamp and sat in the dark of my office for a moment with the folded paper under my phone and the almost-theory in my head and thought about an eleven-year-old who had watched a vet be matter-of-fact about kindness and decided on the spot that was what he wanted to be.
It had been our cat, technically, though Sasquatch had made his own arrangements and mostly belonged to the neighborhood.
He’d come home one afternoon and simply wasn’t moving right.
My mother drove us to a clinic that smelled like antiseptic and wet dog, where a tired man in his sixties kneeled on the floor to be closer to a scared animal instead of making the animal come up to him.
He talked to Sasquatch the entire time in a low, even voice, explaining what he was doing, as though our cat could consent.
I remember thinking that no adult had ever explained anything to me that carefully.
Sasquatch lived another six years out of pure spite, which felt, at eleven, like proof the man had worked magic.
I didn’t become a veterinarian because I loved animals, exactly, though I did.
I became one because I had watched someone be gentle and competent at the same time and understood, in the immediate and total way children understand things, that those two could be the same act, that you could fix a thing and be kind about it while doing so.
I had spent my twenty-two years since getting very, very good at the fixing half.
I was aware—dimly, the way you’re aware of a dentist appointment three weeks out—that I had possibly overcorrected and needed more work on the empathy part.