I did it in Bozeman with a broken lease instead of a conversation. I’ve done it in every town since, the vanishing calibrated to look like professionalism. Watching it from the receiving end for the first time, I finally understand the thing I owe an apology to about six zip codes for: it doesn’t read as kindness. It reads as being handed a pamphlet by someone you love.
The night he leaves, after his taillights clear the lot, I stand at the window for a while.
Then I open the laptop, and I open the Durango application, and this time I type.
Contact information. License number. Certifications. The availability field is the one that makes it real, it’s always the availability field, and I fill it in without stopping to feel anything, because I am, above all, a professional.
If he’s leaving, I’m leaving first. I stood on a porch once and watched someone I love drive toward a fire and I spent every Sunday after that waiting for a phone call, and then one Sunday the call came from somebody else’s voice. I know how this works now. You don’t wait on the porch. You beat the leaving to the door.
I hit submit at 11:42 p.m.
The dog, from his spot by the door, lifts his head and looks at me.
“Don’t,” I say.
He doesn’t sigh. That’s the strange part. He just watches me, ears at half-mast, while the confirmation email arrives with a small ding that sounds louder than it is.
I text Becca before I close the laptop, because her worried-face emojis have been accumulating since July like unread certified mail, and because telling your oldest friend is what makes a thing official.
Me: Taking a six-month placement in Durango. All good.
Becca: you’re doing the thing
Me: I’m being deliberate about my professional trajectory.
Becca: you’re DOING the THING
I put the phone in the other room. It’s gotten very crowded in here lately for somebody who travels light.
Dr.Fenn calls at eight the next morning, and I answer like a person who slept.
Her hip is officially cleared. She’s back a week from Monday, which is a coincidence of scheduling so tidy it feels curated: the practice returns to its owner almost the same day the hotshot crew rotates south. Everyone’s calendar agrees. The whole summer is folding itself up like a card table.
“I’ve been looking at the numbers,” Dr.Fenn says, after the logistics. “The practice grew this summer. New clients, the ranch work, the Grange referrals. That’s you, and don’t argue with me, I’ve read the charts.” A deliberate pause. “This was a two-vet caseload before my hip had opinions. What would you think about a conversation, when I’m back? About the practice not going back to being a one-woman show.”
The word partnership is not said. It’s enormous and unsaid.
Everything in my chest goes very still and very loud at the same time.
“I’ve accepted a placement,” I say. “Colorado. Six months.”
“Ah,” she says. There’s no reproach in it, which is worse. “Well. It’ll keep. Have the conversation with me anyway, before you go.”
“I’ll try,” I say, which we both know is what people say to soften no, and she lets me have it, and I hang up and stand in the exam room where I once rearranged her storage without permission, and I say, out loud, to nobody, “You’re fine.”
The room, which has heard me say this before, declines to confirm.
The exit takes two days, because I’m good at it.
I’ve done this a dozen times. There’s a protocol, and the protocol is the point: transition notes for every active patient, typed, alphabetized. Flag the complicated cases. Print the handoff summaries. Reconcile the drug log. Box the personal items, which fit, all of them, in one box, by design. Wipe the counter. I’m a professional temporary person. I can be gone before the leaving hurts. That’s the entire skill set. It’s on my resume in different words.
I don’t call Grady to tell him about Dr.Fenn, either. Noted for the record: he’s not the only one in this town fluent in not-mentioning. We could teach a seminar. We could co-teach it, in separate rooms.
The complications are small and everywhere, like burrs.
Janet finds reasons to be at my end of the counter all morning. She doesn’t say anything. Janet, who has commentary for weather, for parking, for the moral character of drug reps, says absolutely nothing, and looks at me over her glasses roughly every eleven minutes, and by noon I’d confess to almost anything for one syllable of her opinion. She brings me a coffee I didn’t ask for at two o’clock. It’s from Peak Grounds. Black, no sugar. I thank her, and she says, “Mm,” over the glasses, and that’s the whole goodbye.
The feed-store kid comes by for rabbit food and asks what time the clinic opens on Saturdays, “you know, in the fall,” and I hear myself say Dr.Fenn will be back before fall, and watch his serious face do the arithmetic and come up short, and he says, “Oh,” in the tone of someone updating a file he didn’t want to update.
