BUT OF COURSE she did. She’d been correct about her riding muscles. The first thing out of whack, when she gave up wearing sneakers and riding boots to wear high heels every day instead, was that her calf muscles tightened. Now, after no more than a week of wearing nothing but flats, her muscles were protesting that she wasn’t being fair to expect them to spring back like rubber bands.
Barbara had told her that Monday morning at the clinic was usually busy.
Judging by the trucks and SUVs parked in the clinic lot, the customers had arrived well before the hour the clinic was supposed to open. And she was expected to organize.
She had no idea how to triage animals. She figured she’d start the way the media did its stories—if it bled, it led. Any animal that was bleeding, therefore, went to the front of the line. After that, she hoped Barbara would give her guidance. She suspected, however, that she was on her own.
Barbara had warned about the lame goose called Mabel. The goose didn’t bother the customers with their dogs on leashes and their cats and other critters in cages. It seemed, however, to take a dislike to Emma and flew at her with wings and beak extended. She took a deep breath and shooed it out of her way and off the path to the front door. Like a lot of bullies, it just needed someone to call its bluff.
Mabel seemed to know who didn’t belong; maybe having an animal was the goose’s version of a ticket to pass.
Emma smiled and slipped through the clients to open the front door. It was unlocked, but no one had walked in without being invited. She checked the clock over the registration desk. Two minutes before the eight-thirty opening time. In city shopping malls, even one minute past opening would have resulted in shoving and pushing.
She slipped behind the desk, turned on the computer and smiled at the first person in line. “Yes, ma’am?”
“Pooky threw up all night. I’m scared to death somebody’s tried to poison him.” The woman’s face was ashen. She was attached to a leash, but whatever was at the end of it didn’t show up over the counter.
Emma stood up and peered over the edge. Pooky was some sort of Chihuahua cross. At the moment his ears drooped. He looked pretty miserable. No doubt he was about to throw up. And guess who’d be mopping the floor? Emma quickly took the woman to the closest exam room, and met Barbara coming down the hall toward her. She updated the vet as fast as possible. “Oh—I didn’t even ask her name.”
“There are appointment forms in the top drawer. Hand them out. They can fill them in while they wait.”
“She thinks Pooky was poisoned.”
“He was, by half a fried chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy. She gives him what she calls Sunday dinner. He’s in here nearly every Monday throwing up. It’s a miracle he doesn’t have pancreatitis.” She disappeared into the exam room.
After a few false starts, Emma began to get into the swing. It helped that after the first rush, the number of clients and the severity of their problems tapered off.
Although most of the clients had dogs and cats, Barbara also had to drain a foot abscess on a very pregnant nanny goat that arrived standing on the backseat of the owner’s BMW sedan.
“Mignon just hates the truck,” the large lady chauffeuring the goat said. “She rides fine in the BMW. Pregnant as she is, I hate to make her any unhappier.”
At ten minutes after twelve, Barbara locked the front door.
“Can you do that?” Emma asked. “What if somebody shows up late?”
“Then they’ll have to come back. If I didn’t lock the door, neither one of us would get so much as a cracker for lunch. So, how was your first morning?”
“Harder than I thought it would be.”
“But definitely easier for me. It’s pretty clear you have your hands full with the clients. I’ll have to get Betty to clean cages and mop the floor when she comes in after school this afternoon. You couldn’t possibly stay until five thirty, could you?”
Emma felt her heart sink. There went the résumés and the cold calls. “How on earth have you managed? How long since you had somebody in the office?”
“Never full-time, but I had a darling girl going to school in Jackson. She graduated in January and went off to graduate school in March. I haven’t had time to look for anyone full-time since she left. Come on, let’s have some lunch.”
“I didn’t bring anything. Where’s the closest grocery that fixes sandwiches?”
“In town. Don’t worry, I brought lunch for both of us. I heard you had a busy day yesterday.”
Of course Barbara knew about the rescue. Might as well run a continual news feed on a blimp over the county. If she’d gone to bed with Seth, everybody would be discussing it before either of them woke up from postcoital bliss.
Another good reason to avoid even the semblance of an affair.
After lunch Barbara introduced her to the animals being rehabilitated. “I think the fawns can all be released Thursday morning,” Barbara said. “You couldn’t by any chance come early, could you? Seth’s coming to help load, but I could use another person.”
“How early?”
“Say—six thirty?”
And then work her regular hours at the computer. Did these people ever slow down? It was worse than the last days before a new marketing campaign went up when she and the rest of Nathan’s team worked most of the night.
“Then can I leave a little early if it slows down?”
Barbara nodded, closed her eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.
This might work as a stopgap Joe job, but she needed her career back, her house back, her family and friends back, and working for Barbara wasn’t the way to get them.
She noted that the squirrels were gone from the big cage, replaced by baby raccoons that seemed to be growing as she watched them. They spent more time climbing the wire than they did on the ground.
“My next major construction is a flight cage for raptors. I don’t know what I’d do if I got a screech owl that needed to exercise a broken wing. They have to be able to dive onto their prey. I get bags of frozen mice to teach them. It’s not as good as actual live mice, but although they’re bred as raptor food, I can’t let them loose to be killed. I know that’s stupid. My friends who are trained as raptor rehabilitators laugh at me when I drag frozen mice along the perches to convince an owl to eat them, even if they aren’t alive.”
“How do you train as a raptor rehabilitator?” Emma asked.
“You have to train to be a licensed rehabilitator first,” Barbara said. “Pretty strict rules and training. And then you get much more training. Among other things, you have to raise your own bird and train him. You work with a licensed raptor rehabilitator until he says you’re ready. The fish and wildlife people—Seth’s people—run classes in Williamston. A good deal of it is common sense, but there’s also bookwork on various anatomical differences among animals. For example, in the vet business, if I shoot a syringe full of penicillin into a horse’s artery, he’ll likely die before I can get the needle out. Vein is fine. Artery—a no-no. You can’t give aspirin to a cat. Nor, by extension, a bobcat or a panther. Then, if people would only leave fawns they find curled up in the brush alone, nine times out of ten the mother will return to pick up her baby, usually when she’s through foraging. And raccoons like to dip their food in water before they eat it. Oh, and beavers poop in water, not on land. You like this stuff, don’t you?”
“I have to admit I do like it. I could never get all of it straight.”
“That’s why we all work together. There’s always another rehabilitator to give you advice or come and help you. Why don’t you take a class? The wildlife people run introductory courses all the time. Then you can see if you really do enjoy this stuff.”
“But I couldn’t do it back in Memphis. The raccoons are quite a plague in the city. If I rescued any, my neighbors would go ballistic.”
“So, you’re still planning on going back to Memphis.”
Emma felt her face flush. “There are no decent jobs in the country, Barbara. I have a career. Or I did have. I liked it. I made a really good living. I have a mortgage to pay. I’ve pretty much showed I haven’t got a clue how to fit in out here. I mean—everybody thought my ironed linen napkins were way over the top.”
“But we appreciated them.”
Emma patted Barbara’s hand. “Of course you did.”
* * *
THE FIRST THING Emma did when she got home from the clinic was to clean up after the skunks. She brought Seth’s playpen into the yard and sprayed it with the outside faucet, then scrubbed it with disinfectant. After that, she scrubbed the pantry the same way. Still no lingering odor of skunk. So no release into the wild yet.
She knew she had to keep going with her chores until she finished. If she sat down, she’d fall asleep where she sat and not wake up until morning. At which point she’d be covered with mosquito bites to match her fading chigger bites.
She spread the remaining night crawlers, along with carrot pennies, apple slices and hot dog rounds, in the skunks’ kennel. They pounced as though they hadn’t been fed for days. Then she cleaned their little kiddie pool. Did they eat minnows? If so, Barbara was bound to know where to get some. If they ate them in the wild, they needed to learn to chase them and catch them before they departed for the woods.
Finally, she scrubbed all the combined odors she’d encountered off her body and out of her hair. She put on Bermuda shorts and a long-sleeved work shirt, combed her hair but left it wet, cropped bits and all. Then she fetched a glass of white wine, sprayed herself with mosquito repellant and sank into the front porch swing.
The grill sat in the front yard under the water oak. She really didn’t care when, if ever, it made its way back to the rear porch.
She gave a longing look at the bag swing, which swayed gently in the evening breeze. She couldn’t count on Seth to rescue her again, so no bag swing.
Seth’s SUV wasn’t in his driveway. Working late? Or a hot date?
Now, that presented an interesting situation. Did he already have a steady girlfriend? Nobody—probably not even Barbara—would feel the necessity to clue her in if he did. So far as anyone knew, they were simply neighbors. No one would consider that she would want to have that information. She and Seth were simply acquaintances.
Did Seth think that’s all they were? Did she? Okay, so they’d spent some time together, but they’d barely even kissed. As good at kissing as he was, he’d obviously had plenty of practice.
Barbara said his wife had left him. Why? According to Barbara, the ex didn’t like the country and was currently married to a city dentist.
Was that the whole story? Seth was an attractive man. Possibly one of the most attractive around here. What to say his wife hadn’t left him because she got tired of his playing around. He didn’t seem like the type, but then Trip hadn’t seemed like the type either.
Until he was.
What was Emma to Seth? A couple of peculiar dates, but no pressure to take it to the next level. Emma’s stepmother had said that in her day, men all wanted you to go to bed with them. But she said, “They didn’t actually expect you to do it.”
Emma had found that in too many instances, most of the men she’d gone out with did expect you to go to bed with them. It infuriated her. Like every single woman she knew, she’d had to fight her way out of situations that verged on rape. The wine was vintage, the food was French, so sex was the expected end of the evening.
She and Seth had enjoyed brunch—Lucullan, but still during the day. Would he have pushed for a little post-prandial delight if not for Bobby Joe’s rescue?
But he hadn’t pushed after he’d hauled her off the bag swing. That would’ve been the obvious opportunity.
Or maybe he wasn’t pushy because he wasn’t that interested? Talk about a downer.
Because, dammit, she was interested. When she dreamed at night, there was no other face in her dreams—erotic or otherwise.
Before long, if he didn’t do something, she might have to. And she never in her life had before. She’d always been pursued. She didn’t have a clue how to pursue.