“Let’s go.”
She got ready in fifteen minutes, and we were out the door and on the road with me being only a little bit late.
“What are you doing today?”
I glanced over at her quickly to see her practically bouncing in her seat.
“I have a C-section this morning on a Pomeranian,” I said. “And I think we have a bowel exploratory surgery from a Great Dane that ate a chicken bone. He has gut rot.”
“Oh, that’s sad. Are you going to be able to save him?” she asked.
“No idea,” I admitted. “Maybe if it’d been caught earlier? Possibly. But with him not eating, and throwing up, and it being almost a week, probably not. But the dog’s parents are pretty broken up about it because he was at a doggie daycare for the last week. And they want to do everything possible.”
“Hopefully you can fix him up,” she said. “Who works for you now?”
“The same crew that’s been with me for about two years now. Holly is the newest, she’s the second vet that I hired,” I explained as we got closer and closer to town. “Carlene, Rhett, and Young are still there. We have a couple of night workers that are seasonal. They just left.”
I saw an uptick in boarding and vet visits during the winter months when the skiing crowd came in. The upper crust of society that skied usually brought their pets with them. Sometimes they boarded them while they were in town. Sometimes they just stopped in for a checkup. Sometimes shit went wrong while they were staying in their McMansions on the hill and their pets needed emergency care.
When the warmer months hit and the snow left, so did the uptick in clients.
Not that that meant that I had less work. That just meant I had less clients in-house.
I actually had more work when it came to farmers needing help with their horses and their cows, especially during birthings.
But I didn’t keep the night workers when their boarding facilities took a dramatic dip.
Honestly, it was a relief.
I liked having clients and all, but boarding animals wasn’t really something that I wanted to specialize in.
“Do you like the new vet?”
I felt her studying my face, taking in every grimace and eye crinkle.
I shrugged.
“She’s okay. A little too ‘pick me’ if you know what I mean. Always looking for validation, and she’s young. She’s a little too intense for my liking. But usually when she’s working, I’m usually not there, so I’ve decided to see how she works out for the practice.”
“What do you mean by ‘pick me?’” She frowned.
“She goes out of her way to seek validation and approval.” He grinned. “I learned that phrase from Holly, funny enough.”
When we got to town, I pulled into the coffee shop right around the corner from my vet practice and put the truck into park.
She looked at me like I’d just hung the moon.
“What’ll it be?” I asked. “Your usual vanilla latte? Or do you want to be adventurous today?”
She was never adventurous.
She’d found her coffee order at fifteen and had kept that order since.
However, she did change up her Danish order.
Though, that was likely because Reyelle, the lady that owned the coffee shop, never cooked the same Danish two days in a row. You never knew what you were going to get when you walked in the door.
Nettie stayed in the car until I walked around the hood and pulled the door open for her.
