“A little. Wire’s a bad choice for fencing.”
“It’s cheap. You might as well get used to it, you’ll never convince Hugh to stop using it.” He closed the door behind her and gestured toward the kennel area for her to walk ahead. He whistled. “Look at your butt. Mama. I swear you’ve put on weight, Morgan.”
“Shut up. I haven’t gained a pound.”
“Well, you must have shrunk your jeans then. I’d be glad to give you the field-trip tour, but to what do I owe the honor?”
“Would you take a look at Hannah’s foot? Awhile back she stepped on some glass at Hugh’s. I picked it out, but it doesn’t seem to want to heal.”
“Sure.”
He took her to the same examining room where he’d first had his way with her. She stood off to the side as he reached down and lifted Hannah to the tabletop. His triceps stretched the fabric of his T-shirt under the seventy pounds of dog, and there was a year-round glow to his skin that bronzed him, not unpleasantly. Hannah trusted his hands, but drew her lips over her teeth when he touched the sore paw. “A few weeks back she started limping on and off. Today she wouldn’t stop licking it.”
Gabe looked up from the gamy paw. “For God’s sake, Chloe, this is infected.”
“I had to teach lessons, Gabe. I make my own way, remember?”
“Well, I hope you made yourself a fistful of money, sister, because you’re looking at two courses of antibiotics and four or five stitches, after I get in there and dig out the scar tissue, and you’d better keep your fingers crossed it hasn’t affected bone. This time I’m going to charge you.” He readied his syringes for local anesthetic, then took out the suturing supplies.
Chloe watched him work, his focus so intently on her dog that she could almost love him for being so single-minded. The night Absalom died, he’d said no to her on the side of the mountain, insisted there had to be feelings involved for them to press their bodies together again. Like that old John Conley song—I only deal in real emotion—what was this sudden interest in feelings? You loosed them, and Fats died on you or someone like Hank said “I love you,” but not before his lawyer had you fucking investigated.
Gabe used a cotton probe to clean the cut. He spoke without looking up from his work. “You’re quiet. Something on your mind?”
“Not exactly.”
“Oh, God. Here it comes.” He straightened, keeping one hand on Hannah. “Are you in trouble again?”
“I’ve been thinking about my mother.”
Gabe stopped probing the cut long enough to look up at her. “That came out of left field. What about her?”
Chloe went to the sink, pressed a hand to the cool metal, ran her fingers across the box of plastic syringe caps. “Maybe she gave me up because she was sixteen years old and married to some clown who beat her.”
“If so, that might have been her only choice.”
“Maybe she didn’t want me at all.” Chloe sighed. “I know, all in the past, this is ridiculous. It’s just—I’ve been wondering lately—what if we’d stuck it out together? Would we have done any better?”
“Probably not, so why waste time worrying it?” Hannah whined and Gabe gave her a pat. “Almost done, girl. Chloe, hold her back end, would you?”
She moved to the dog. “Maybe I should look for her, search out the truth, maybe that’s what I need.”
“Will you be able to live with what you find out?”
A bright pool of blood puddled on the table and the needle flashed silver. She looked away. She could handle the pierce of the needle and the smell of infection, but blood made her queasy.
She crossed her arms across her dog. “You know me too well.”
“That’s another possibility.”
“Gabe?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I have this funny feeling in my belly.”
He grinned. “It’s probably guilt.”
“Oh, fuck you. It’s physical, kind of fluttery, you know? And it comes and goes.”
“You’re not eating that chorizo Hugh’s always buying down in Mexicali, are you?”
“No. But I’ll eat anything else. Smoking tastes bad, and I’m so tired in the morning I feel like a bear in November.”
He finished up with Hannah and filled a bottle with purple amoxicillin tablets for Chloe. “One every twelve hours. Finish the whole bottle, then come back, and I’ll refill it and take out the stitches.”
She nodded.
“Now come over here and let me look at you.”
When Hannah was down on the floor chewing up a couple of Pet-Tabs Gabe had given her, Chloe took her place on the table. Gabe unbuttoned the first three buttons of her shirt, pulled the tail out of her jeans and listened to her heart and lungs, front and back. Then he made her lie back, unbuttoned her jeans, and felt around her belly, just below the elastic of her Jockey underwear. “You have gained weight.”
“I’ve been eating lunch, that’s all.”
He reached inside her shirt and cupped her breast.
“For Christ’s sake, Gabe, I am not in the mood.”
He pushed her back down and told her to shut up. “Your breasts feeling tender, a little swollen?”
“Yeah. You want to rub them for me?”
He smiled. “Not at the moment. When was your last period?”
She put her face in her hands. “I don’t know. They haven’t been regular for over a year. There was one time awhile back, but it only lasted for a day.”
“Nothing since then?”
She shook her head no. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. All day I’ve been thinking of nothing else, and it’s scaring me to death.”
He pulled her shirt back down. “Go buy yourself one of those drugstore tests.”
She grabbed his T-shirt with both hands, and Hannah started to growl. “I’m not pregnant! Don’t you go saying I am.”
He held his hands out. “I’m a veterinarian, Chloe. You want a real doctor’s opinion, there’s a doc in the box off Santa Margarita. Read a People magazine while you wait.”
“Goddammit, Gabe!”
“Hey, don’t swear at me. Did you use protection?”
“Mostly.”
“Well, mostly isn’t always. It happens every day, darling.” He helped her sit up—Chloe not speaking, Gabe using one hand to wipe the counter down, putting the used needles into the disposal tray, the other hand resting on her shoulder. Finally he broke the silence. “If you’re feeling life, that fluttering, chances are you’re a couple months along. Most women don’t feel it until the fourth or fifth month, but Cynthia always felt it in the third, she swore she did. You’d have to decide immediately if you want to abort. Any later it’s the saline route, and believe me, that’s not pleasant.”
The room wasn’t that cold, but she started to shiver. Gabe put his arms around her, hugged her to his chest. “Being pregnant isn’t the end of the world.” He bent his face to hers and kissed her cheek. “Go talk to the professor. He’s got an investment.” He patted her belly, then took his stethoscope out and pressed down inside her jeans to her belly, moving it until he found a place where he could hear something.
“What are you up to? Can you hear a heartbeat?”
“Even if I could, it’d be deafened by all that racket. Your gut sounds rival any animal’s I’ve heard. If you were a horse, you’d colic, starving yourself like you do. Women.” He started to laugh.
She pushed him away.
He took off the stethoscope and set it on the counter. “I’m going to feed you supper, and I won’t take no for an answer. Especially if there’s a little bandit in there, taking his eats first. Here.” He reached into a drawer and handed her a sample vitamin pack. “They’re for people, relax. Take one in the middle of the day so you don’t get sick from it. It’ll pick you up, but don’t use it in place of regular meals or you’ll puke.”
He nuked frozen macaroni and cheese in the microwave in the back room. They ate sitting cross-legged on the
floor, listening to the country music station, and Hannah licked the trays clean after she finished a trial-size bag of lamb-and-rice kibble. The kennel was fairly quiet, but sometimes they could hear the woo-woo of a malamute Gabe was boarding.
“That dog sounds lonesome,” Chloe said.
“Spoiled rotten, that’s all. You know, you’d make a terrible mother,” he said, sucking on a root-beer Popsicle.
“News flash.”
“Boy or girl, the kid would grow up thinking it was half horse.”
“What’s so wrong with that?”
Gabe laughed. He shut his eyes, the lashes so long and thick she could see why women fell like dominoes at his touch. “Because just like you, the kid would turn out wild and hard-headed, breaking every heart within reach. You want my advice?”
“No, but when has that ever stopped you?”
“Take a chance. If you’re pregnant, have this baby. Let that professor take care of you. You’ve worked hard, Chloe. You’ve earned a regular life. Just do it.” He stuck the Popsicle back into his mouth.
“I take care of myself.”
Gabe’s face was an odd mixture of puzzlement and hurt. “Since when? You took care of Fats, you mother Kit Wedler, and you fed that lame horse even when you couldn’t afford to feed yourself. Try again, sweetheart.”
“Oh, Gabe,” she said, suddenly feeling her losses mount up. “It still hurts so much. Just like it was yesterday. I can’t lose anything else. I just can’t.”
He set the Popsicle down on his napkin and took her hands in his. “That’s the only reason people have a baby, Chloe. They take the risk, hoping the joy will outweigh the pain. Don’t you get it?”
Chloe didn’t answer—couldn’t—to say anything would make the possibility of a baby—Hank’s and her baby—too real.
Hannah put up her sore paw and howled. Gabe laughed. “See that? The hound’s smarter than you’ll ever be. She understands me perfectly. And she’s telling you to listen.”
CHAPTER
25
No matter what grew inside her, tomorrow was a full workday—but try and tell that to her exhausted body. Worry worked its way into all the muscle groups; her blood jittered like a pot of boiling coffee. She lay there in the dark of the cabin, the smell of spring outside maddening in her nostrils—wild grasses, the hard tang of sage, a bursting of miniature nameless purple and pink wildflowers on the hillsides. Beneath it all, the fertile damp aroma of mud. She tracked the source of all her trouble back to that night Phil’s horse went hooves up. If she hadn’t answered the door, hadn’t gone down to the college, hadn’t been bloodied by Gabe’s makeshift delivery, she never would have met Hank, never would have…
There came the flutter again. Swift, indecent, and gone as soon as she put her hand to her belly. Dear Mama, whoever you were, and wherever you are: You suppose I’m doomed to repeat your mistakes, even though I grew up with other people? Shall I flush this baby, if it is a baby? Will I end up having to give it up if I don’t? Did you even tell the father? How ever did you make up your mind?
Fats had children somewhere. He didn’t talk about them, but sometimes he’d sent them money. How old were they now? Did they have their own children? They hadn’t come to the memorial, she hadn’t tried to contact them when she spread the ashes. Chloe’d seen him mail envelopes to Alabama and to some University in Texas, and wondered if she was older than they were, what they would think of their father shacked up with this young girl. Fats had room in his heart for the stable kids. He always found time to stop and squat down, eye to eye with the smallest rider. He admired their bug collections and horse drawings, and oftener than not, one of them sat on his knee while he barked out commands in the lesson ring. Despite the cigar smoke and rough edges, there was some exchange there that came naturally.
She threw off the sleeping bag in the night air. Too hot. The scar on her shoulder blade felt itchy. That accident had laid her open to the bone. Get your blond ass over the fence, Fats had insisted, but jumping six feet on an unfamiliar horse, that was pushing fate. She watched the Grand Prix on television in that sports bar in Mission Viejo, but never saw herself in that league. Never. You could admire a thing and not have to do it. Perugina, this money thoroughbred he was brokering, needed a video to show a possible buyer down in Houston. So there they were at night in the arena with Francisco holding the camera and Fats yelling out directions and the horse beneath her trembling. She’d always trusted Fats to know what an animal was capable of and what it was not. She’d gone, and they’d made the fence, technically, landing with the horse’s rear legs torn open to the tendons and her shoulder likewise—dislocated, too—the jump in splinters around and in them.
Gabe Hubbard had gone right to work, assembly-line fashion, horse first, getting him stable, Chloe shot full of novocaine, waiting in a daze of blood and gauze.
Fats had been shaken. Couldn’t understand how he’d judged so poorly what he knew best. When everyone was repaired he paid Gabe in cash and took off on a weeklong drunk. Chloe took over his lessons, made excuses: His brother in Georgia’s dying of cancer. Again? A different brother, he comes from a big family. She ate Darvon by the handful and taught until sunset, then lay alone in their bed in the cheap apartment, stitches throbbing, wondering if this would be the time he wouldn’t come back, would end up in a twisted heap of metal on the highway for her to come and identify.
When he came home she could sense a change in him. He’d gone beyond tired now, he was out there on the windowsill asking death, May I have this dance? He’d quit drinking, cold. Then he’d start up again, trying to make up for lost time, forgoing pint bottles and upending fifths, four or five of them a week. The first few hospital admissions were more about restraining Fats than healing him. He’d be tied into his room spitting and shitting blood, too weak to withstand the DT’s, and some resident would give him a drug to calm him, deluding him into thinking he was well enough to leave. In no time he’d be down the hall, his cowboy hat cocked on his head, his silver belt buckle fastened over those hospital pajamas, catch himself a bus to the nearest bar, find a buddy to buy him the first one. Later on he was too weak to bother tying down and no longer fought the doctors. When they’d accomplish the impossible, bring the tough old bird back from hemorrhaging, no viable platelets in his CBC, he’d open his eyes and start in cursing. You cheap bitch…. Chloe’d sit there next to his bed, tears scoring her face, deliriously happy they’d saved him for her to love one more day, and there he’d be calling her a cunt, blaming her, saying it’s all your fault, you know, why didn’t you just let me die?
They were on a first-name basis at county, and they drew the same doctor so many times they were about to start sending each other Christmas cards. What do we do this time? he asked, and Chloe said, Give him his wish. Make him as comfortable as you can without performing any miracles. He took a full ten days to die. Alcoholism is the slowest form of suicide, the doctor told her, early on when they were still trying to get Fats to sit in on an AA meeting. But this marinated horseman wasn’t grabbing any intelligent way out. He was riding the dark horse for the full count. There was very little dignity in his pain. One by one, systems shut down, and though she was hoping for uremic poisoning—relatively painless—finally it was the artery to the liver that did him in. When the liver vein shut down, the dirty blood backed up, simple and logical. Esophageal varices was the medical term for it, but that put an undeserved dignity to the event, formalized a struggle made entirely of blood and body fluids and human panic. The esophageal artery took over for the liver and ruptured under the strain. He reached for her and tried to cry out, but literally gargled in his own blood. She hooked two fingers into his mouth, trying to clear the passageway, but the blood didn’t stop, it just kept flowing. She looked at him, slack jawed, beaded with oily alcoholic sweat, and loved him even though he was bad for her, older than her father, and the whole sex thing, though it wasn’t morally right, was really just about two scared people trying
to hang on in the dark, not even a quarter as loving as it ought have been. He’d made a choice—the booze, not her—and she’d stood by for those few perfect moments—eager for crumbs. Despite all that, she loved him, even at the moment of his death, as stupid as it seemed, as arbitrary.
She was weeping now, hot tears washing over her face in the dark. She felt Hannah’s cool nose press her arm in question. “Thank you, God, for bringing her back to me,” she said aloud. “Thank you for not taking her, too.” She turned over to stroke the dog. “Thanks for the roof, for getting me out of trouble with the court, and for Fats, no matter if what we did was a sin, because he kept me alive, you know he did, and I guess I had to go through all that to get to this moment, so will you for Christ’s sake tell me what I do now?”
Outside her window, the owl took up residence in the tree. Oak branches scraped up against the single pane, and Hannah took off, nosing and scratching the door open so she could investigate. A warm wind blew in; Chloe felt it move across her arms and face. She was alone in her bed, her few possessions spread around her like museum pieces. She held her hands to her stomach and sighed her way into a troubled sleep at last, not even bothering to shut the door.
The morning was an hour off yet when she woke. She went straight to the small brown-paper sack on the windowsill, took out the pregnancy test, and read through the directions. She took the chamberpot from beneath the couch bed and went outside to use it. Hannah barked hello from her place on the creek bank, twitched one spotted ear, then laid her head back down to sleep.
Back inside, Chloe eyedroppered her urine into the test tube and set it back on the counter to wait the hour this test took. The others claimed results in only a matter of minutes, but they were upwards of twenty-five dollars, and this one was eight. Ten minutes—an hour—did it matter how quickly you knew a thing that might take months to happen?
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