The system is simple. Arrive somewhere new. Do excellent work. Leave before the place becomes a place: before you know more than two people’s coffee orders, before the ceiling above your bed becomes a specific ceiling, before you feel the weight of a specific person in a specific room. I’ve been running the system for two years and it works, and the reason it works is that I don’t deviate from it, and the reason I don’t deviate is that I did, once, and I know what it costs.
Owen. Owen is what it costs.
So: four days. I treat the other night like a data point: noted, filed, not requiring action. I’m a veterinarian. I dealin data points. I am basically data points in a person-shaped arrangement.
The next day I keep my head down through a full schedule, grateful for a rabbit with GI stasis that keeps me an hour past close. I run the blood work. I adjust the fluids. I tell the rabbit’s owner, a twelve-year-old girl with a braid and a serious expression, that Marshmallow is going to be fine, and watch the girl’s face reorganize itself from terrified to relieved, and think: this. This is what you stay for. The work. The patients who can’t ask for what they need.
The rabbit’s name is Marshmallow, which is an aspirational name for a creature currently hooked to an IV, but I understand the impulse. You name things for what you want them to be. I’ve been doing it my whole professional life, showing up somewhere new and naming it temporary, naming it deliberate, a choice made from clarity rather than because I don’t know how to do anything else.
I don’t think about the parking lot the whole time I’m saying this, which is not entirely true but is the version I’m going with.
The next day, Morrison’s cattle run goes long, and the drive home in the dark is radio and mountains. Two hours of not having to be in my own head. I’m grateful for the drive. I should probably call Becca, who has been texting a low-level worried emoji pattern since we last talked, but Becca would say the thing she always says, about running out of places to go, and I’d say I’m not, I’m being deliberate about my professional trajectory. Becca would saysurein the voice that means she doesn’t believe it. So I listen to the radio and let the mountains do their job.
Thursday’s appointment is at ten.
Grady brings the dog. I examine the dog. The dermatitis is responding well, the ear margins calmer, the skin less inflamed, the coat growing in cleaner at the edges. I keep my eyes on thedog’s flank and run the exam with the thoroughness I bring to all my exams, which is considerable.
“Twice a week with the shampoo,” I say. “The ear canal rinse after baths.”
“He hates the ear rinse,” Grady says.
“He hates the ear infection more. He just can’t communicate the distinction yet.”
The dog sits between us on the exam table and gives me a look. He’s been doing this since the first appointment, this look that I have no name for except: pointed. He’s a dog who has things to say and has been saying them without stopping since the day I met him, and what he’s currently saying is clearly along the lines of please figure this out, I’m tired of being the only adult in this situation.
“I’m not going to validate that,” I tell him out loud. I’m the one with the degree.
I adjust the light and check the right ear.
“Responding well,” I say. “I want to see him again in a week, two at most.”
“Thursday again?” Grady says.
“Thursday again.”
I enter it in the system, save the record, and turn back. He’s still at the end of the table, not moving. The weight of him in the room is familiar now, the way traffic sound becomes familiar.
Neither of us mentions the coffee night, the parking lot, the kiss, or the ten count I held at the clinic door after his truck pulled away. We are both being very professional about the fact that we are not professional, which is its own kind of thing.
“See you next Thursday,” I say.
I walk them out and watch the truck pull into the street. I close the clinic door and go back to the records.
Standing in the empty exam room afterward, I catalog the sensation of watching him leave: familiar by now, and not quitecomfortable. His truck is visible from the window for about twelve seconds before the street curves.
Thursday evening, I open the locum app. The Spokane listing is still there: waterfront practice, strong mixed volume. I read the whole thing, clinic philosophy, staff structure, typical caseload, which I never bother with at the browsing stage. Eleven minutes. Then I close the browser without applying.
The apartment is quiet. The mountain is dark. I tell myself I’ll apply in the morning when I’m fresh, which is what I tell myself when I already know I won’t.
I don’t apply in the morning.
What I do instead is make coffee and stand at the window and think about an exit I’m not making. It feels different from the exits I’ve made, the difference between a door you left open on purpose and one you forgot to close.
The air coming through the window smells like smoke, not active fire, just the season, the dryness worked into everything. I tell myself I check the town’s fire alerts because I treat animals and Station 7’s activity is professionally relevant. This is technically true. It’s also not why I check them. If there’s a call, he’s working, and if he’s working, he’s in danger.
I note this and I keep moving.
The weekend I manage. Saturday at the Breslin ranch is fine, the mare tracking well, nothing unexpected. The dog is still boarding with me, since the station caught two calls, so Sunday morning I take him on the long loop past the river, where he finds something dead in the brush and examines it with serious scientific interest. I talk him out of eating it. He gives me the look, and we walk the rest of the way back in the easy silence of two beings who’ve negotiated a workable arrangement.
