Page 72 of Animal Tamer
The bell over the door jingles.
“Afternoon, girls.” He takes his hat back off. Turns the brim in his hands. “Is, ah—is everybody here? On shift, I mean.”
“Just us and Dr. Reyes,” Paige says. “He's finishing a dental in the back.”
“Might want to get him.”
Paige goes. My hands find each other in front of my apron, and I make myself breathe the way she taught me. Out for four.
I know what he's going to say. I've known since Friday night. It doesn't matter. When Carl says it, the floor still tilts.
“Doc Vance is dead.” He's not looking at any of us as he talks. “Found him out at his place. In the barn.” His throat works as he swallows. “He, ah. He did it himself. Shotgun. Left a note in the kitchen.”
Dr. Reyes sits down hard in one of the waiting room chairs. Paige makes a sound behind her hand.
And I stand there with the cold spreading up from my feet, because knowing a thing and hearing a deputy say it in your reception area are two different animals. Carl's hat keeps turning in his hands. The radio on the counter is playing the same country station it was playing when Vance came through that door, and some distant part of me thinks I should unplug it and throw it in the dumpster.
“Are you—” My voice comes out thin. I clear it. “Are you sure he...”
Carl shakes his head slowly. “No doubt, hon. Coroner was out there all day. Everything at the scene, the note, the—” He catches himself before the details get loose. “His wife's been notified. She's in Ohio. She, ah.” He looks at his hat. “She wasn't surprised. That's all I'll say. Practice was failing, marriage was done, man was drinking. Whole town watched it coming and nobody wanted to see it.”
I wait to feel like a monster. Instead, I look at Paige,unhurt, three feet away, crying into a wad of tissue over a man who was always mean to her.
“There'll be some paperwork,” Carl says. “Estate stuff, the practice, patient records. Lawyers'll sort it. Y'all keep the doors open best you can for now—animals don't know to grieve.” He puts his hat back on and pauses at the door. “I'm sorry, girls. Doc Reyes.”
The bell jingles. The cruiser crunches out of the lot.
For a long moment, nobody moves. The radio sings about a dirt road.
“I brought him coffee Thursday,” Paige whispers. “He didn't even look up. I should've—I don't know. Noticed something.”
“You couldn't have,” I tell her, and it's the truest lie I'll ever say, because there was nothing to notice. He didn't decide anything. Four men decided it for him in the dark, and one of them is going to sit across from me at dinner tonight.
I hug her because she needs it and because I need it, and we stand in the middle of the waiting room holding on while Dr. Reyes rubs his face with both hands and asks nobody in particular what happens to the practice now.
That question takes over the rest of the shift. We cancel the afternoon appointments—nobody has the stomach, and Mrs. Delgado cries on the phone when I tell her why, and then apologizes for crying, and then tells me Vance spayed her first cat in 1998, back when he was different. Everyone has a version of him from before. The town will spend the next month choosing which Vance to bury.
By five, the three of us are sitting around the break room table with cold coffee.
“Vet Corbin might absorb the client list,” Dr. Reyes says. “Or somebody buys the building outright. Either way, thisplace needs a vet who wants to stay. You'd be first in line, Wren. Six years here, the clients love you. Whoever takes over would be insane not to?—”
“I'm not staying,” I blurt.
Both of them look at me.
“I mean—” I turn my mug in a slow circle. “I'm thinking about leaving. There's an offer. A staff position.” My heart is going too fast for how casual I'm pretending to be. “With the carnival. Full-time vet for the menagerie. They travel year-round, and they've got an elephant and a lion and a bear and now six peafowl, and no practice within driving distance most weeks, and?—”
“You'rethinkingabout it,” Paige says.
“I'm thinking about it.”
She looks at me the way she looks at an X-ray. Long. Careful.
“Dr. Reyes,” she says sweetly, without breaking eye contact with me, “would you give us a minute?”
He takes his coffee and goes to close out the charts, and the second the break room door clicks, Paige leans across the table.
“Thinking about it.”
