I was pretty sure Kayla had said the closest dog shelter was the municipal one in Lawrenceville. Given that it was run by Animal Control, I very much doubted it was no kill.
My expression must have told Wilder everything he needed to know because he mouthed an f-bomb that couldn’t have been any clearer if he’d used a bullhorn.
I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Here’s the thing. Nobody owns this dog, so we have to figure out what to do with him. And in the case of a stray, that would normally be the shelter—unless you can pull six hundred and eighty dollars out of thin air,” I added.
I didn’t really expect them to pay, and I steeled myself for the torrent of abuse that I was sure was coming my way, and that I’d heard a hundred times before when people had to hand over their hard-earned cash. The ones who thought that I was only in this for the money and that I didn’t really care about the animals or—and this one was my personal favorite—that I was stealing the food out of the mouths of their children. You know, the sort of comments that really made me and my student debt feel great about the choices we’d made.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, Cash scrambled to his feet, whispered to his brother, and dug out a battered wallet. He fished out a five, a ten, and a handful of quarters that came to a buck twenty-five and held it out to me wordlessly.
“Jesus Christ, Cash,” his twin grumbled. But he stood and pulled a handful of ones and a couple of fives out of his pocketand added them to the pile. “Cash wants to pay if it means the dog gets to find a new home.”
What the hell was I supposed to say to that?
Wilder sighed, then pulled out his wallet and added a fat stack of singles. One of them had traces of glitter clinging to it. “Is that enough to start with?”
I stared at the pile of crumpled bills, and of course Cash looked at me, his face pale and tear-stained and hopeful, and fuck it all, I was about to say something really fucking stupid, wasn’t I?
“He can stay with me for now,” I said. Yep, there it was. “I’ll look after him while you find him a good home, and we’ll put his picture on the practice Facebook page to see if his owner comes forward. But you don’t have forever. If you can’t figure anything out, he goes to a shelter.”
Wilder looked relieved, which I wasn’t sure was for the dog’s benefit as much as it was for Cash’s. Cash dropped to the floor and hugged the dog and buried his face in his wriggling, hairy body. His shoulders shook, and I pretended not to notice.
“What about the rest of the bill?” Chase asked, his brow creased, and I could see it was weighing heavily on him. On all of them.
“Let’s see where we are with this.” I counted the handful of bills and coins. Altogether it came to seventy-six dollars and twenty-five cents—there had been a lot of singles in that pile of Wilder’s. “Okay, so we can call that eighty,” I said. “Which leaves six hundred outstanding.”
Wilder shifted uncomfortably. “Um, so we were hoping we could figure out some sort of payment plan?”
“Yeah,” Chase muttered darkly, “except we can only afford a dollar a week for the next six hundred weeks.”
And despite my earlier cynicism, I had the feeling that Chase would absolutely turn up at my surgery every week for the nextsix hundred weeks with a dollar bill. I got the impression he’d probably spit on it first, but still.
“Listen,” I said, “if you’re really willing to pay, we can work something out. And Uncle Jim has a hardship fund that will cover a couple hundred.”
Chase perked up the slightest bit. “So that would only leave…”
We were interrupted by the washer beeping, letting me know the load of towels I’d put in to clean earlier was done, and I let out a sigh. If I didn’t move them to the dryer now, I knew I’d forget. “I’ll be back in a minute.” I couldn’t help looking at Cash. “Don’t go anywhere.”
I ducked into the back room where the washer and dryer were and transferred the towels over. Then I put the next load on to wash and hurried back to the consulting room.
Cash looked up from where he was still petting the dog and gave me a curious look.
“Laundry,” I said. “There’s always laundry. When I decided to become a vet, nobody told me how many towels I’d have to wash.”
His mouth twitched into an almost-smile before his expression grew thoughtful. Then his eyes widened and he rose to his feet and whispered something in Chase’s ear, all the while shooting me hopeful glances.
Chase gave him a dubious look. “You sure?”
Cash nodded more vigorously than the dog had when he’d sprayed blood all over the exam room last night.
“Cash says maybe he could work it off. Like, doing laundry and mopping the rooms and shit,” Chase said. “That could work, right?” He jutted his chin out in a way that suggested this had better be the best idea I’d ever heard.
The thing was, it actuallywasn’ta terrible idea. Kayla and I spent at least a couple of hours every day cleaning and moppingand doing laundry, and it never got any less tedious. There had been a high schooler who came in for a couple of hours every day when I’d first started three weeks ago, but she’d left after a client had yelled at her, and I hadn’t had the energy to replace her. If we had Cash coming in to take care of that stuff, it would make my life, and Kayla’s, so much easier—and right now I needed all the help I could get.
I remembered the scrubs Cash had been wearing last night. “Do you work in healthcare?”
He shrugged and Chase answered for him. “He works over at Sunny Fields in Brodnax as a janitor.”
“Do you think you’d be able to come in for say, an hour every morning?” I asked.
