Page 12 of Holding On

“I’m not scared of you.”

“I mean, don’t feel like you have to be a perfectionist.”

“I want to be sure that if I screw up, you tell me I screwed up,” I say, checking the dog’s eyes with a pen light.

“Oh, you don’t need to worry about that.” She smiles. “I’ll definitely tell you when you screw up.”

“Don’t you mean ‘if’?”

She shakes her head and grins. “No. It’s always ‘when.’”

The rest of the day, though exhausting, goes a little easier. We see one bunny rabbit with an ear infection, four cats, and six dogs. Then I venture out on a house call tour to visit a milking goat with an abscess on her cheek.

Bailey is a big Nubian, and her head is hard, as I find out when she knocks my chin several times. At one point, I have to brace myself against the wooden railings of a fence and lock her head in my arm at the crook of my elbow. There, I hold her until my sister can come over and whip out her scalpel and lance the ball of pus above her jawline.

The abscess is about the size of a golf ball. Claire slides her arms under Bailey’s head and, bracing herself, offers directions to switch positions.

“Take the scalpel.”

Bailey struggles, but Claire expertly cinches her arms tighter.

“Do it,” she says. “Hurry up.”

I lay the edge of the scalpel against the goat’s cheek and apply enough pressure to open the layers of skin, being careful not to nick the muscle underneath. In one swift move, it’s over.

Pus squirts and wells immediately, and I wipe it off Bailey’s cheek with a sterile towel. She does not enjoy this process. Claire has a saline bottle ready to go with a little iodine. She nods in the direction of the bottle and I grab it, squeezing the brownish water liberally over and into the wound.

Claire cranes her neck around to get a better look. “What do you think? A stitch or two?”

“Yep.”

“Let’s switch,” she says, and we change positions.

When she shakes her arms out and I see her face, it hits me. Claire is tough and she works hard, but this is physical work, often done without a lot of sleep and often in front of owners who don’t necessarily trust her. She never has anyone to help her unless it’s the farmer whose animal she’s wrestling with.

She grabs a vile of powdered antibiotic from her back pocket and dusts the wound. In three minutes, it’s closed up and I’ve injected a vile of antibiotic in Bailey’s rump. The goat is released and trots away in a grab to regain some dignity.

Turning to the thin, pale twelve-year-old who just watched her show goat suffer barnyard surgery, Claire holds up the bottle of powder and offers kind but firm instructions. “Dust it with this twice a day. If you see any swelling or weeping or anything that doesn’t look like a normal scab, you call me and I’ll come right back.” Claire glances at me. “We’ll come back,” she corrects herself. “She’ll be fine now.”

Back in the Jeep, there’s a lament. “Oh my God, summer is going to be long,” she says. I’m driving, the windows are down, and she’s got one leg up on the seat, her blonde hair caught in a hand-grip ponytail. “You did a great job,” she says.

“All I did was follow the leader.”

“You have no idea how some people don’t know how to do that.”

By the time we roll back to the clinic, it’s four o’clock and I’m beat. Between the move to Colorado, the sudden move back, and the shift to working with Claire, I’m wiped. I don’t do well with transitions or change. I only know this because my sisters point this out to me every chance they get.

I’ve never been able to figure out how to give back to the four of them. I feel like it’s impossible. They’re seemingly invincible, strong, empathetic creatures who share a common bond that excludes me. And that exclusion has nothing to do with race or gender. It’s because I’m the baby of the family.

The few times I’ve seen them lose it in public was when I was singled out or accosted or yelled at by some stranger.

It was like watching the attack of the four Russo She-Bears. When I was little, it was thrilling. As I grew older, my feelings got more complicated.

We pull up to the clinic, and she’s out of the car, inside, and ahead of me on the stairwell when she reminds me of something I’ve forgotten.

“Clean up down here,” she says, eyeing the lobby as she heads upstairs. “It’s not too bad. You’re on call tonight.”

“Is there a beeper?”