“More like your only bet,” Velma said and walked behind the counter to hang the order for Emma’s breakfast on one of the clips by the kitchen.
“How are the you-know-whos?” Barbara asked Emma.
“Fine, I guess. Lively, at any rate. Seth says I need an outside cage for them. We came into town to get stuff to build it. He says he’s going to help, but I don’t see how he has the time. What does he actually do at his job? I don’t know a thing about him.”
Barbara held out her mug. Velma filled it on her way by the table.
“The first thing you want to know is whether or not he’s married. He’s divorced, and just as well. No children. Married to his job. Great guy as long as you stay on his good side.”
“And if you don’t?”
“He’ll make you wish you had.”
“How come it’s better that he’s divorced?”
“Clare was a rip-snorting spoiled brat who absolutely hated living in the country, where she had to drive thirty miles for a mani-pedi up to her high standards.” Barbara glanced down at Emma’s disintegrating fingernails. “She used to drive into Memphis to get her hair cut.”
Emma reddened. “I know my hands look awful. I need to at least take the polish off. I just haven’t had time what with the you-know-whos to find my polish remover. If Seth does build the cage, how do I pay him?”
“Don’t you dare! Talk about getting on his bad side! Fix him a good dinner. That’s assuming you can cook. This is the first time since Clare divorced him, moved to Nashville and remarried that he’s shown any interest in doing anything other than his job. He’s developing a reputation as a real hardnose. His dog, Rambler, died six months ago and he still doesn’t have another. I haven’t found the perfect one for him yet, but I will. Anyway, he’ll probably ask Earl—that’s his partner—and maybe a couple of the other guys to help him. So you’re really interested in this fostering animals thing?”
“I have no idea. I’m stuck with it now, but I don’t know how it works. Obviously I screwed up with my first attempt by picking the you-know-whos instead of a baby rabbit.”
“You had the right instincts. We don’t judge on a cuteness quotient. I’ve fostered baby turkey buzzards. Cute they are not, except to a mother turkey buzzard. But we need them. We’d be up to our ears in roadkill otherwise. I call ’em God’s garbagemen.”
Velma set Emma’s breakfast plate down just a little harder than necessary. Emma assumed she didn’t approve of poached eggs, although these looked perfect.
“You want to find out what fostering animal work is like,” Barbara said, “you go home, feed the you-knows and drive on down to my clinic. I’ve got a menagerie to oversee and no one to work with me, so I need to get back. You know where my clinic is? Just down the road a couple of miles past your house. Can’t miss it. There’s a big parking lot in front and one behind it, and four horse trailers on the side.”
Emma’s day was imploding fast. She’d intended to set up her workspace, start sending out résumés and make some telephone calls to friends and former colleagues. Networking always worked better than cold calls. At this point she wasn’t looking for a position that paid as well or carried as much prestige as her job with Nathan. Just some way to pay the bills without borrowing money from her dad.
Barbara slid out of the banquette, dropped a couple of dollars on the table for Velma and went off to pay her bill at the front.
Seeing Barbara’s clinic and her animals sounded like a bunch more fun than résumés. She’d work on those this afternoon while the babies were napping.
Several people nodded to her as they walked up to the cash register, but no one actually spoke. They obviously knew who she was…heck, they probably knew her shoe size. She didn’t dawdle over her breakfast. The babies were waiting for their breakfast, too.
At home, she was astonished by how fast they were gaining control of their legs. They marched around their playpen like animated stuffed toys and squeaked at her for not meeting their needs earlier. She fed them, cleaned them and their playpen, then went out to call on Barbara with a couple of pats on the head for each one before she left. Peony stood on her hind legs and begged to be picked up, but Emma hardened her heart. “Later, little child. I promise I’ll love on you.”
She’d been aware of the vet clinic, but she’d never had a reason to stop there.
The clinic building looked as though it had started life as a fancy pole barn and been converted to a business with real walls sometime later. Emma was surprised that the waiting room was empty, without even a receptionist behind the desk. Barbara had said she had no help at the moment, but Emma hadn’t realized that no help meant exactly that. Maybe her receptionist was off for some reason or worked only part-time. From down the hall Barbara’s voice called, “Emma, come on back, unless you faint at the sight of blood.”
Lovely. Just what she needed after a big breakfast. Still, she followed Barbara’s voice through an open door halfway down the hall.
Inside, in her signature electric-blue scrubs, Barbara stood over an unconscious tricolored hound with a four-inch gash along its flank. The flank had been shaved, and bits of hair stuck to the globs of blood that had run from the wound onto the table.
“Hey. Put on a pair of gloves—over there in the box—and an apron. You’re not going to faint, are you?”
Emma did as she was told.
“When I got back, the owner was waiting in the parking lot,” Barbara said. “He helped me get Sidney here onto the table, then he went home to feed his chickens. Big coward when it comes to blood. I guess his wife does the killing when he wants fried chicken.” As she talked, she wiped the gash. “Hand me that number ten scalpel,” she said and pointed. “That one. Thanks. I have to cut the old skin off the edges so the new skin will grow together when I stitch it.”
Fascinated, Emma watched Barbara, who seemed to work almost casually but with skill to remove the edges of the wound.
After cleaning and barbering the wound, Barbara began to suture the cut, using small elegant stitches.
“Can you talk and work?” Emma asked. She couldn’t take her eyes off Barbara’s hands.
“Sure. I assume you want to talk about Seth.”
Emma felt her face flame. “I admit it. I can’t figure him out. One minute he’s kind and gentle, the next he’s snapping at me and convincing me I’m an incompetent idiot. Granted, around animals he’s mostly right.”
“He’s a complicated man,” Barbara said. She continued to suture so that the gaping gash narrowed to a thin line. “He’s had a tough row to hoe over the years. He tends to see his job as saving the idiots from themselves and the wildlife from them.”
“How so?”
“Sponge off that dribble of blood. It’s getting in my way.”
Emma sponged. Surprisingly, the blood didn’t bother her.
“He comes from a badly broken home,” Barbara said. “His momma’s still alive and lives in the only independent-living condos in town. Wherever his father is, you can bet he’s drunk. Real pity. I’ve been told he used to be a fine lawyer. But that was before Sarah died.”
“Who was Sarah?” She watched as Barbara tightened and clipped the final stitch on the dog’s flank.
“Lucky that chunk of metal didn’t slice straight through the tendon,” Barbara said. She dropped her used instruments into the metal pan beside the table. “Can’t really bandage up this high on a rear leg. Have to try to cover it, but he’ll need to wear a collar to keep him from biting it. See that big plastic circle on the top shelf? Hand it to me, please. You’re tall enough to reach it without a stepstool. I’m not.”
Again, Emma did as she was told.
“Sarah? She was Seth’s little sister. She drowned before my husband, John, and I moved here to take up our practice. John specialized in large animals. Since he keeled over with a heart at
tack five years ago, I do it all, but I’m better with small. I’m fine with horses, but I never trust cows.”
“She drowned? That’s awful,” Emma said.
“Seth always blamed his father. I don’t know what happened, and don’t you dare ask Seth. He doesn’t like to talk about it. My guess would be that his father was supposed to be watching the child—I think she was nine or ten, although don’t quote me on that. They were out fishing. Somehow the child fell overboard and drowned. Broke up the family.”
“The death of a child often does,” Emma said. “So Seth’s parents are divorced?”
Barbara nodded. “I don’t think Seth has anything to do with his father or even knows where he is. He’s close to his mother, though.”
“What about the ex-wife?”
“They both graduated from Auburn in the same class and married right after. Big wedding down in Birmingham. Lots of bridesmaids. He was supposed to go to vet school. I have no idea why he decided not to, except that he suddenly had a wife to support. She had some crazy plan to become the lady of the plantation, swanning around and lording it over the local society ladies.” Barbara snorted. “She discovered that there aren’t any society ladies up here, and she wasn’t going to be able to have mint julep parties at the country club. I mean, who drinks mint juleps these days?”
“Is there a country club?” Emma asked.
“There’s a nine-hole golf course about ten miles south of here with a metal storage shed, which passes for a clubhouse. No fancy restaurant. No swimming pool or tennis courts. The women can play on Thursday afternoons. The rest of the time it’s men only. That’s okay. The women around here are mostly too busy driving combines and feeding cows to drink anything but a slug of straight bourbon after dinner before they fall into bed.”
“You’re happy, though, aren’t you?”
Barbara stripped off her gloves and tossed them in the waste disposal holder in the corner. Emma followed suit.
“I was happier before John died. His doctor called it ‘a catastrophic event.’ He blew a mitral valve in the middle of cleaning a gelding’s teeth. The doctor told me that when such an event happens suddenly to a relatively young man, it is almost always fatal. It nearly killed me, too.”
“There was no warning at all?”
“None. He’d checked out perfectly in his annual physical three months earlier. We’d only set up the practice here a couple of years earlier. I felt I had no choice but to carry on. Suddenly I had a family to support alone.”
“How on earth do you manage?”
“I’m trying to hire a well-qualified young vet with an eye to buying into a partnership.”
“No luck?”
“Not yet. Not many young vets want to come to a tiny practice that does large and small animals both. They want to get their DVM and move into a posh city practice treating French bulldogs. I’m barely getting by. But yes, I’m generally happy. I do not belong in a city. Nobody cares when I show up at the café in dirty jeans or muddy boots. I like that you never know whether that old farmer sitting next to you is poor as Job’s turkey or raising prize Santa Gertrudis bulls on his own five thousand acres.” Barbara stroked the hound’s head and buckled on the collar. “There. That should do it. He can’t reach his stitches to bite at them. Give me a hand moving him to a cage, would you? I’ll keep him till tomorrow morning and send him home with antibiotics, but he ought to be okay. I’ll have to see whether my part-time help is available after school this afternoon. Somebody needs to check on Sidney here when he wakes up. You’re lucky. This is generally my surgery morning. That’s why there aren’t fifty thousand animals in the waiting room.”
The big hound required both women to lift him off the table and slide him into a cage to recover. When they stood back, Emma said, “You do nice work, Doc.”
“I do, don’t I? Never did approve of false modesty. Now, you want me to introduce you to my foundlings? Come on in the back. I keep these guys segregated to avoid any cross-species infection.” She opened the back door onto another, smaller parking lot. Beyond it was a metal barn. The two women were met with a cacophony of sound as they walked into the center aisle.
“Let’s see. I have four fawns. They’re about ready to be released.” The fawns stood on their hind feet with their front hooves on the door of a horse stall well bedded with shavings. They still had their spots, but they were fading.
“Two sets of twins,” Barbara said. “Their mommas were shot out of season on posted land by poachers. Seth took after the poachers and arrested them. Then he found the babies in the long grass and brought them to me. Not easy, but he and Earl managed it. I’ve been bottle-feeding them, but they’re eating solid food now, so off they go.”
“Poor babies. What are their names?”
“Didn’t Seth warn you not to name them?” Barbara asked. “Never give them names. After they’re released, you don’t want them to remember you or any other human being. If you happen to call them by name if you see them in the wild, they may come running. Could be a disaster for them.”
Emma looked at the fawns and wondered how anybody could not name them.
“Over here we have half a dozen baby squirrels,” Barbara said, pointing to a tall wire enclosure with severed tree limbs inside bearing new leaves. “They’re learning to find acorns and hide them. This is probably the kind of enclosure Seth thinks you need.”
Emma thought it seemed sturdy enough to rate a government mortgage. If this was what Seth intended, she hoped he had a lot of buddies willing to help, because she didn’t have a clue. “Where did you get so many squirrels?” she asked.
“We always wind up with a bunch of baby squirrels during squirrel-hunting season. They fall out of the nest looking for their parents, wind up on the ground and unable to fend for themselves. People bring them to us. Out back in the pond, I have a Canada goose with a lame foot from an old fishing line somebody left floating in a tangle. She’ll never go back into the wild. She’s here for life. She’s my early warning system.” Her phone rang. “Damn!” She answered, listened, said, “I’ll be there in twenty,” then hung up and said to Emma. “Choked horse. I have to go. Want to ride along?”
“I really ought to get home and work on my laptop, if I’m ever going to find a job. This, however, has been interesting for someone who’s never had a pet.”
She drove off in tandem with Barbara, but turned left toward her house while Barbara went right. How on earth could the woman manage with only part-time high school help?
She pulled her SUV into the gravel pad beside her front porch. Home. Weird, she was already thinking of The Hovel as home. She couldn’t remember ever calling her town house home even in her mind. Despite her stepmother’s decorating expertise and her ins at the local decorators’ showrooms, the perfect rooms she’d created had always seemed like a stage set for entertaining clients and friends who were, like Trip, movers and shakers. What they used to call “bright, young things” in the 1920s.
Since she had a couple of hours before she was due to feed the babies, she checked on them from the pantry door to make sure they were all right without letting them see her. She knew that the moment they realized she was looking at them, they’d start whining for food. She had to harden her heart, once again, no matter how difficult.
Darn it, they did have names, and they had personalities. She couldn’t undo that, no matter what Barbara said. She’d have to take them far away before she released them, so they couldn’t possibly find their way back to her.
Losing them was going to about kill her, but that was what mothers did. Bring them up, protect them and then, when they were ready, send them out into the world to take their chances.
Maybe she’d better give up the idea of becoming a mother. Andrea had been a more than adequate stepmother after she married Daddy, although she must have dreaded raising the child of a mother who’
d died and left Emma when she was only nine. And after the years when Emma alone was her daddy’s girl—even if she felt she’d disappointed him all too often.
It made perfect sense that Daddy should take her half brother, Patrick, hunting and fishing as soon as he was old enough. The kid was good at both. Emma wasn’t and never would be. How could she explain how much the loss of her quiet times in the jon boat with her father meant to her?
It also made perfect sense that Daddy never missed one of Catherine’s lacrosse matches. He was older now and had more free time to do things like that.
Emma couldn’t catch a ball in a lacrosse net if it meant saving the universe.
Patrick loved woodworking with his father. Emma couldn’t drive a nail.
Catherine was a cheerleader and one of the popular girls. Emma had practically lived in the library.
Making straight As and winning the Latin contests and the journalism awards didn’t qualify the same way as doing well at spectator sports. Crowds didn’t applaud or hand out trophies to nonjocks. David French, a brilliant man and a brilliant lawyer, simply expected Emma to do well intellectually. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to give her money for getting good grades, as some of her friends’ parents did. That was her job.
She was glad that both Patrick and Cathy had turned out to be good kids who loved her and whom she loved. Otherwise she’d probably have poisoned them both out of sibling jealously.
Now she was the young animal sent out into the wild. Her parents had to pay attention to the fledglings who weren’t quite ready to leave the nest. It was right and proper. But Lord, it was hard.
She saw now that had a lot to do with her accepting Trip’s proposal. He’d offered her the safe, comfortable life she’d been born to. She didn’t have to dream big. His dreams would be hers. No chance of failure, of not being good enough, when it was somebody else’s dreams.
Except she was sick of being half-alive, of accepting what Trip and her family wanted, even if she didn’t.
Harlequin Superromance May 2018 Box Set Page 34
