I grab my keys off the bunk. The dog is off the bag and at my heels before the keys clear my pocket, already committed, already at the door.
“Yeah,” I tell him. “Me too.”
I have to find her before she’s gone.
Chapter 16
Sloane
The dog’s bowl is by the door and the dog is not.
That’s the first thing the morning gives me. The bowl says SMOKY in Keller’s Sharpie, the water in it going flat, and the floor beside it holds a dog-shaped patch of nothing that I stood at the window last night and watched drive away down Main in a firefighter’s truck.
Three rounds. I counted. He lifted the dog out three times, and three times the dog got back in, and on the last round the dog went boneless in his arms like a protest folded into a body, and the man gave up, and some traitor part of me standing at that curtain said good.
Good, because if the dog left with him, then the dog was never mine, and if the dog was never mine, then the bowl and the ear rinses and the eleven p.m. kennel floor were just thorough medicine, and I can drive to Colorado with a clean manifest.
The floor disagrees. The floor has a nothing on it shaped exactly like my only listed dependent.
Dogs are honest. It’s their finest clinical feature and, this morning, their worst. He picked. He watched me pack for two days with those ears at half-mast, and when the door openedon somebody who was also leaving, he chose the leaver he liked best.
“It’s fine,” I tell the bowl, because two years of talking to animals has left me fully capable of talking to their infrastructure. The bowl holds its water. “He was temporary.”
The word comes out of my mouth and just lies there on the floor next to the nothing. I’ve said it about every living thing in this building for eight weeks and it has never once sounded this much like a thing I made up.
Saturday. Two days. The truck’s half loaded, the files are done, the plan is executing.
There’s a list on the counter, because there’s always a list. Return Janet’s spare key. Drop the flagged case files at Dr.Fenn’s house. Final read of the drug log. Cancel the standing grain order at the feed store. Say nothing to anybody that sounds like a goodbye, because goodbyes are for people who were really here, and the whole architecture of my professional life rests on never having been really anywhere.
Two years. Six towns. I have executed this list without incident every single time.
All I have to do is what I’m best at.
The town does not cooperate.
The list never stands a chance.
Mrs.Delgado arrives at nine with a fifty-pound bag of the organic grain, the good one, the one she’s been saving behind the counter with my name on a sticky note since July. She sets it on the tailgate of my truck like a court filing.
“For your next practice,” she says. “Wherever that is.”
“That’s—thank you. You didn’t have to.”
“I know what I have to do.” She doesn’t leave. She stands there in the parking lot with her hands folded, looking at me the way she looks at produce she has opinions about, and she never says don’t go, not once, but her eyes say it in the tone she used about the tomatoes, and she pats my arm twice and drives off, and I stand next to fifty pounds of grain for a horse in a town I’m leaving.
Janet takes the spare key at nine-thirty. She doesn’t put it in the envelope I labeled for Dr.Fenn. She opens the drawer where the spares live, the working drawer, and sets it in its usual spot, and looks at me over the glasses.
“In case,” she says.
That’s the entire sentence. I stand at the counter for a while after she’s gone back to the insurance office, holding my own pen.
At ten I walk to Peak Grounds, because caffeine is a legitimate clinical need. Micah has my cup moving before the door finishes chiming. Black, no sugar. Then he does something without precedent in the historical record: he asks a question.
“Staying long enough to drink it here?”
Eight words. From Micah, that’s a filibuster. That’s a man lying down in front of my truck.
“To go,” I say, and his nod takes slightly too long, and I carry my coffee out past the window seat like a woman fleeing the scene of a kindness.
