Page 21 of Cash Hooper Saves a Life
“Ouch.” Chase rubbed his chest where my elbow had caught him during our struggle and then leaned against me. “You want me to sleep in your room tonight?”
It used to be our room not that long ago.
“Nah,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Okay,” he said, and his hug this time was a lot less violent.
And I was fine, right up until a nightmare about the time our dad beat me with a broom handle woke the whole house sometime before dawn.
The restof the week was a good one, even though I felt guilty that Chase had taken to dragging me to bed with him and Lee on the nights Lee stayed over. Lee said he didn’t mind, but that had to be a lie, didn’t it? I took to sneaking back to my own room in the middle of the night so at least they could be alone when they woke up in the morning.
Work was good. Mr. Conrad and I were getting close to finishing the Colosseum, and he was looking at which set to buy next. He was probably going to get the Eiffel Tower. Our progress had slowed because I was spending time with the dog, but that was okay. And Grandma Jane gave me a sweater she’d knitted.
“Evangeline told me I should join her knitting circle. I don’t know what I was thinking. Does this even look like a sweater to you?”
I put it on. The sleeves were very different lengths, and one of them started where my arm definitely didn’t.
“Jesus wept,” Grandma Jane said, clicking her tongue. “What a fucking mess. I don’t know if I should unravel it and start again or just set the whole thing on fire.”
“I could keep it?” I asked. “For the dog?”
He’d like a nice woolen blanket in his cage, I thought.
“Sure, hon,” Grandma Jane said. “Someone might as well get some use out of it!”
My favorite part of each day was definitely when I went to the vet clinic to see the dog. In the mornings, I went by Gobble de Goose first and got coffee and pastries. They were free because Chase would never have charged me even if Lee wasn’t the boss, and I liked how Mason smiled when he opened the door to me each morning. I liked the way he looked when he’d only just rolled out of bed, all rumpled and warm and soft. We’d have breakfast together in the kitchen, and we’d talk. It was just a few sentences over our pastries, nothing big, but it got easier every day to find my words. Then I’d take the dog out into the yard while Mason showered and got dressed for the day.
I liked the afternoons too. Sometimes I got there when there were still patients waiting in the reception area: dogs and cats and, one afternoon, a rabbit. I’d take the dog out into the yard again, and then I’d start on the floors while I listened to Mason talking to the owners of the animals in the consult room.
I found out that Mason wasn’t straight by accident. He was in the kitchen talking to Kayla, and I overheard him say, “I should have known things weren’t going to work out with my ex-boyfriend when I found out he was allergic to dogs.” He gave asharp laugh that had no humor behind it, and I felt a pang of sympathy for him.
Most evenings after Kayla left, Mason put music on and turned up the Bluetooth speakers in the clinic and finished up his paperwork while he nodded along to the beat. I put in the last load of washing for the day, and I fed the dog and took him outside for another run and a play. Then, before I left, I put him back in his cage and sat with him for a while until he settled down.
When I arrived at the clinic on Thursday evening, the late afternoon shadows from the trees reached all the way across the street, and the fading light was golden. I smelled a bit of bleach because I’d spilled some cleaning solution on my shoes earlier, and I hoped the dog wouldn’t mind. The stuff we used at Sunny Fields smelled different from the stuff Mason used at the clinic.
There was a silver pickup parked in the street behind Kayla’s car and, in the driveway, a familiar banged-up old truck that had maybe been red once but had been patched up and repainted so many times and in so many different colors that it was impossible to tell. I knew that truck. Everyone in Goose Run did. It belonged to Bobby Merritt, the mayor and owner of half the businesses in town.
I parked the dirt bike beside Bobby’s truck and headed for the clinic. I stepped inside more cautiously than I normally did because there was only one reason Bobby would be at Mason’s that I could think of, and like I’d expected, she met me at the front door in a flurry of flapping wings and angry hisses.
Lucille the goose.
“Oh, hey now,” Bobby said and tugged gently on the leash attached to Lucille’s harness. “Get back over here. She’s just being friendly.”
I nodded and stuck as close to the wall as I could to get inside.
Bobby beamed at Lucille. “We’re here for her checkup.”
I nodded again and hoped that someone had warned Mason.
There were two other guys in the waiting room as well, both bigger guys, wearing jeans and tattered muscle shirts—false advertising on their part since one of the guys was pretty fat and the other one was as skinny as a piece of string. They sat there looking pissed, like kids at the principal’s office.
“Is this gonna take much longer?” one of them asked.
Kayla fixed him with a stare from behind the reception desk. “Dr. Ross is with a client. He’ll be with you just as soon as he can.”
I caught her eye as I slunk past her, and she rolled her eyes, as though she needed to communicate that the guys were assholes. I nodded to let her know I already got it.
I’d gotten the mop and bucket and had worked my way almost all the way back to reception when Mason finished with the cat he was seeing.
