Page 27 of Holding On

Her mouth opens a little.

“Now you’re thinking.” I pause and lean over Sasha. “I’m not walking across campus at night to get to a lab. Not outside Worchester.”

“So you’re not going to lab practice because you think campus police will be after you?”

“It happened, Claire.” I don’t want to have this conversation deteriorate into details that happened in the past, and there’s nothing she can do about it in the present. It’s not worth it.

“What happened?”

“Just cool it.” I glance at her face. “I’m not discussing it, so back off.”

“But—”

“I mean it. I need to focus on Sasha.”

She pauses. In her frustration, she takes the scalpel from my hand. “Do what I did, then, and go with a friend.” She leans over the dog lying on the table. “I’ll make the first cut, and then you go in.”

“Fair enough.” The trouble is, this lady is also overweight, even more so than the lab from Monday, and I can’t find the tumor.

“It’s not ever like the textbooks,” says my sister.

“No shit.”

“Use your fingers, not your eyes,” she says.

“What the hell does that mean?”

It means I have to feel around. And Claire is right. Under my right index finger is a mass about the size of a lime, and when I look, its shiny cream surface tells me I’ve found what we were looking for.

When we finish and I stitch the incision closed, being careful to space them out this time, I add “Talk to Ferg. Re: diet and weight plan.” on Sasha’s chart.

Sasha’s sleeping comfortably in her crate when Claire comes up behind me and puts a hand on my shoulder.

“Now is a good time to start making those phone calls.”

“Phone calls?”

“Yeah, for the clinic’s delinquent bills.”

Shit.

“That’s on you, dude. You got five calls to make, and they’re all going to be brutal.”

“Don’t you use email up here? Can’t we just email them like normal people?”

“A lot of people don’t have a computer,” she says. “Go in there and get it over with.” She points to the office door, and I sigh.

Twenty minutes later, I emerge just in time to unlock the front door and greet our first guest—a small cat with a tooth abscess—and we run right up until noon. By lunch, I’m feeling pretty good. Almost cocky.

“Today went pretty well,” I say, hanging up the scope on a peg in the office.

“You’re only three hours in.” Claire smiles. “I’m really proud of you. You did a great job.”

We move upstairs for a quick lunch, and Claire checks her messages for the first time. Tuna fish sandwiches aren’t my favorite, but they work. I start making one for each of us.

Pulling the phone from her ear, she turns, perplexed. “This is from Finn. So Maya’s not staying at The Inn at all this summer?”

I shake my head and take a bite around my tuna fish sandwich. “No. There’s something going on with her.”