Chapter 3
The first relief shift was in Waconia and it went fine, which was how she got the idea that this was going to be fine.
Nine hours, a full board, a practice short a doctor since March.
Vaccines, two ear infections, a lab retriever with a foxtail in his paw, an old cat who had come to the end of it and whose owner needed forty minutes and a box of tissues and somebody to tell her she had done everything.
Kristin could do all of that. She had been able to do all of that since she was twenty-six.
She drove home at seven with the windows down and the June smell coming off the sloughs and thought, for about nine miles, that she had this.
Then there was Thursday.
Thursday was a small practice in Chanhassen and a nine-month-old orange cat named Rocket who did not want a blood draw.
Nobody's fault. He was a good cat having a bad opinion. The tech had him in a towel and Kristin had the vein and she went to hold the leg the way she had held ten thousand legs, thumb across, three fingers under, and the three fingers were two.
He came out of the towel like water out of a bucket.
He was on the counter and then on the floor and then under the cabinet, and the tech went down on her knees after him saying okay, okay, okay, and Kristin stood there with a needle in her right hand and a spot of blood on her sleeve and her whole left hand open like she was waiting for change.
"Sorry," she said. "That was me."
"That was him," the tech said, from under the cabinet.
"It was me."
They got him. It took nine minutes and a second towel. The tech was maybe twenty-four, ponytail, a stick-and-poke tattoo of a rabbit on her forearm, and she was kind about it in the specific way that goes through you like a skewer.
Later, at three, Kristin was clipping a mat off a shih tzu's hip and the clippers turned in her hand.
Not dropped. Turned — rolled a quarter turn against the two fingers that could not close on them, and stopped, and the dog jumped, and the same tech came around the table and took the clippers out of her hand and said, "I've got this one, you want to grab the chart? "
And Kristin said, "Sure."
And that was it. That was the whole thing.
Nobody said a word about her arm all day.
Nobody looked at it. At four o'clock the tech brought her a Diet Coke she hadn't asked for and set it down and went away again, and Kristin stood in a treatment room in Chanhassen holding a can of pop and understood that she had been handled.
She drove home. She did not cry.
She got as far as the Waconia turn and then pulled onto the shoulder and sat with the flashers on for six or seven minutes, which was not crying, and then drove the rest of the way.
The thing nobody tells you is that it is not the big list. She had made peace with the big list in March, sitting in a paper gown while a surgeon in Edina used the words ulnar and permanent in the same sentence and then apologized for saying them so fast. No more soft-tissue surgery.
Probably no more orthopedics. She had heard all of that and gone out to the parking ramp and been fine, in the sense that she had driven home.
It was the small list that got her. It was a nine-month-old cat named Rocket. It was a tech twenty-four years old deciding, on her own initiative, without malice, having known Kristin for six hours, that the doctor could not be trusted with the clippers.
That was the shape of the rest of her life if she let it be. A room full of people quietly working around her and never once saying so.
She had lived in a house like that for eleven years. She was not doing it again in a job.
She got Tilly up the stairs and fed her and did the putty at the window — twenty, rest, twenty — and looked at the road, and then she got out her father's day-books and read three years of them straight through sitting on the floor with her back against the wall, which took until two in the morning.
Arden Hovde had written down every single thing he ever did.
He had also, four or five times a year, written down what he couldn't. Couldn't get her up.
Lost him. No adjectives. In the spring of the year Kristin was six he had written, under a farm called Sundquist and the word mare, three letters: n/g.
No good.
She sat with that for a while.
Then she went to bed, and lay there, and at some point she said out loud to the ceiling, "So do the other thing."
The other thing was that a hand which cannot close on a pair of clippers can still go into a cow up to the shoulder.
She thought it through over four days with a legal pad, which was the most Ellison thing she had done since she left, and then threw the legal pad out and made two phone calls instead.
The first was to a mixed practice in Delano that had been advertising for relief coverage since Christmas and had gotten no answer, because there are about four large-animal vets left in that county and all of them are sixty.
"You're small animal," the man on the phone said. Not unkind. Just reading the résumé.
"I'm Arden Hovde's kid."
There was a pause of about two seconds, and something in it turned over.
"Out of Brainerd."
"Out of Brainerd."
"Huh," he said. "Well. I'm not going to pretend I'm in a position to be choosy."
The second call was to Brynn, who said, "You're going to do what," and then, after Kristin explained, "Okay, but you understand that's a hundred and forty pounds of arm work."
"Some of it."
"And you can't hold a cat."
"A cat's a hundred and forty pounds of arm work," Kristin said. "A cow just tells you about it in advance."
Brynn laughed so hard she had to put the phone down.
She went out with them for three weeks and mostly carried things.
That was fine. That was correct, actually — she had not touched a cow professionally since school and she knew it and said so on the first morning, and the man from the phone, whose name was Dale Prewitt and who was sixty-four and had a bad hip, said, "Then you'll open gates for a while," and she opened gates for a while.
She learned what she could do. It turned out to be more than she thought and less than she wanted.
She could not one-hand a halter. She could not hold a twitch and do anything else at the same time.
She could not carry a full bucket in the left, which meant every job was two trips, which meant she was always the last one back to the truck.
But she could palpate. She could suture, right-handed, better than most people with two hands.
She could get an arm into a cow and read what was in there with her eyes shut, and the first time she called a pregnancy off feel alone Dale Prewitt looked at her over the rail and said, "Huh," in exactly the tone he had used on the phone, and that was the highest praise she got in three weeks and she thought about it for a week.
She also found out she was strong. That surprised her.
Eleven years of galas and she had gotten thin in a way the lake approved of, but underneath there was still the woman who had spent her twenties wrestling retrievers onto tables, and by the end of June her forearms hurt in the good way and her jeans did not fit and she did not care.
Prewitt asked her exactly one personal question in three weeks.
It came on a Tuesday, in the truck, between a herd check and a lame steer, forty minutes of gravel and neither of them talking, which was the natural condition of that truck and suited her fine.
"You're the one out at the point," he said.
"I was."
He drove another mile.
"My wife reads the paper," he said. Which was the closest thing to an apology available in that county.
"It's all right."
"I don't have an opinion about it."
"Everybody has an opinion about it."
"Ya," Dale Prewitt allowed. "I don't have a useful one."
And that was the end of it, and he never brought it up again, and Kristin sat in the passenger seat looking out at corn and felt something in her shoulders come down about an inch.
The lake, meanwhile, had opinions in volume. Brynn brought them up the stairs on Wednesdays with a grocery bag and delivered them whether Kristin wanted them or not, which she did not, and did.
The version going around was that Kristin had had some kind of breakdown after February and left.
Nobody was unkind about it. That was the thing — it was said with enormous sympathy, in the tone people use for a woman who has been through a lot, which meant nobody had to say the word affair out loud and nobody had to say the word letters at all.
Adrienne had not made a single call. Adrienne had not needed to.
"Nan Petree told me you're seeing somebody," Brynn said.
"A therapist or a man?"
"She left it open. That's how she does it."
"Tell her both," Kristin said. "Tell her I'm seeing a very tall man and a very short therapist and neither one of them can get me to talk."
Brynn put her head back and howled. Then she stopped and said, "You know he hasn't said one word to anybody. Not one. Somebody's wife tried to get something out of him at the club and he just stood there."
Kristin did not answer that.
"I'm telling you because you'd hear it," Brynn said.
"I know why you're telling me."
Blake sent nothing that month. Lena reported it like weather. Nothing this week.
Kristin did not ask what he was doing. She noticed that she had to not ask, and noticed how often, and kept a private tally for about ten days and then stopped keeping it, because the tally was worse than the wondering.
The last Sunday in June, at five in the morning, her phone went off.
Prewitt was in Rochester at his sister's.
The other man was two hours north. There was a heifer down at a place outside Delano called the Sundstrom farm, first calf, been at it since two, and the voice on the phone belonged to a man named Ray Sundstrom who was trying very hard to sound like he was not asking for much.
"How long's she been pushing?"
"Three hours. Little more."
"Anything showing?"
"One foot. Been one foot the whole time."