“It’s totally fine,” I said, even though that was a bit of a lie. “If I wanted to make money, I wouldn’t have become a vet tech.”
I would have become a vet. Which I was on the path to doing... until...
“Well, that’s just as well, because I don’t know how much longer this place will be open.”
What?
“Oh, don’t look so flustered, I mean for the next few years.”
His caveat didn’t exactly reassure me.
“It’s just that adoption rates in this town are so gosh darn low, I don’t know how to make sense of it. Everyone thinks all the bikers will kill their pets. That’s not true, of course. We have biker clients who love their pets more than their mamas. Heck, we have one dude who looks big enough to be Andre the Giant’s cousin. He treats his little doggie like it’s his wife. It’s so sweet. I mean... ”
Dr. Clovis continued to ramble, but I only gave the appearance of continuing to listen. I instead turned to the fact the good doctor had just said that the place might not make it another couple of years—which I knew was code for the place was struggling and may not have a place for more than a few more months. No one who was in charge of delivering bad news ever said the full truth, at least not the first time.
If that happened, if this place closed before six months, what was I going to do? At least once I hit the six-month mark, I could look for other places to work at. I’d have to leave Springsville, but that was no great loss, at least not right now. Yeah, it would be nice to catch up with LeCharles, but that was far, far down on the list of things that mattered relative to “feed Shiloh,” “feed myself,” and “shelter us both.”
And yet...
Thinking about LeCharles, as I went about making sure my uniform scrubs fit and my badge worked, even as Dr. Clovis continued to talk about some of the more amusing patients, made me realize that though I didn’t necessarily have the right to call him anything more than an ex-boyfriend, he was the person I needed to make amends with more than anyone else right now. I’d treated him like shit in our relationship. He hadn’t been much better, but I knew I bore responsibility for most of it. And it wasn’t some Stockholm Syndrome thing where I took on unnecessary blame—in retrospect, it really was clear that I was at fault.
The problem right now was that I was being ignored. He still had not replied to my text messages. Texts felt like one of those things where if it didn’t happen within a twelve-hour window, the chance of getting a reply would fall off precipitously. I had to seek him out some other way.
Good luck with that. Springsville may be small, but it’s not a one-street town. And even if it was, it’s not like you’ll know where he is all the time. You don’t even know if he still lives here. He could have easily moved someplace else. Fuck, maybe he’s in Texas.
Maybe he’s in Brazil. Who the hell knows?
“Anyway, are you ready to go?”
“Sorry?” I said, realizing I had failed to hear a word that Dr. Clovis had said for the last five minutes. “Sorry, yeah, I will be.”
“Good, we have our first patient in a little bit, cat named Olivia,” Dr. Clovis said. “Sweet kitty. You know how it works, right?”
I bit my lip. The problem was in the answer.
“Yes.”
If only I didn’t know how it worked. If only I knew how something more… prestigious worked.
But it was a few years too late to regret that.
* * *
“And Olivia’s diet has been all good?”
“Well, I’m feeding her this Kibble, but she just doesn’t seem to like it right now, and I don’t know why.”
I sat at the computer in the patient room, looking at an older woman named Kelly, who was with her gray tabby, Olivia. I couldn’t even begin to describe the amount of restraint that I felt on me right now. I had gone to veterinary school, so I knew how to treat this cat, or at least how to diagnose her. There was nothing Dr. Clovis would do that I didn’t know.
But I was not the vet here.
I was the vet tech.
And that meant, for the most part, I was reduced to asking some basic questions, weighing the cat, and taking notes. It was mundane, boring, and way below my knowledge—and it was my own damn fault I was here.
The feeling, I realized, must have been what musicians felt when they lost their voice or when athletes aged and lost the ability to have their bodies keep up with their instincts. They had the talent, and they knew how to make it happen, but they no longer had the capability of doing it. There was something quite sad about it, really.
At least I hopefully had the chance to become a vet again, but I had a lot of explaining to do for why I’d dropped out of vet school the last go around. Actually, having to explain the dropout was the least of my concern.
