Page 11 of Knocked Up

"When can he come home?"

"Thursday. Staples another six days after that, so you'll come back for those. Then his kidney values rechecked, and honestly at his age I want eyes on him every couple of weeks for a while." She paused. "That's not me padding a bill. Some people think it is."

"I'm not some people."

She was quiet.

"Thursday, then. Come at four. I'll go over the medications with you myself, because there are six of them and one of them is stupid." There was a beat. "He's a really nice dog." And she hung up.

The relief was doing something to my legs. It was not only that a dog lived. It was that the last living piece of Walt was on a mat in a room on Federal Boulevard, and it got to stay.

And underneath that, so far down I didn't find it until midnight, standing in a kitchen that still smelled like cigarettes:

Thursday. Staples in six days. Every couple of weeks for a while.

It wasn't over. This building, this woman, this whole reopened thing did not end Thursday. It kept going, indefinitely, on a schedule.

And I was glad.

I stood there with a dish towel in my hand. I was so glad about it that I had to put the towel down and hold onto the counter with both hands. Then I hated myself for about ten minutes, which was roughly my average.

Chapter 4: Tessa

Bear went home on a Thursday with his medications and a soft cone he defeated in the parking lot. He also went home with two pages of discharge instructions. Beckett read them all the way through, front and back, standing at my counter.

"It says restrict activity. Define restrict."

"Leash walks to pee. Nothing else. No stairs if you can help it."

He turned the page over. "It says monitor the incision for discharge. What counts as discharge?"

"Anything wet that isn't him licking it."

"What color?"

"Beckett."

"I want to know what I'm looking at before I'm looking at it," he said. That was the least annoying version of a difficult client I'd ever had.

He carried the dog out to the truck. Marisol stood at the window with her chin in her hand and watched him do it.

"Go clean run four," I said.

"Absolutely," she said. She did not move.

Six days later the staples came out, which took under a minute. The recheck bloodwork came back, and that took the rest of my afternoon apart.

His kidneys were not good. It was not a disaster. His creatinine was up from June, which meant the kidneys were clearing less waste out of his blood. He was thirteen years old.

So he needed fluids under the skin, every other day, at home.

"Can you come in tomorrow?" I said. "I want to teach you something. It's not bad news, it's maintenance. His kidneys need help. The help is a bag of fluid under the skin. It's cheaper and better if you do it at home."

"I don't…"

"You do. Everybody does. It takes ten minutes and I've taught it to an eighty-eight-year-old woman with a tremor and a grudge."

"What time?"