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Before the UPRC hired her to look after the rodeo animals, Reba had earned her keep by taking care of LeAnn’s horse. Her small salary, though, had been contingent on LeAnn winning. Reba had supplemented her income doing freelance veterinarian jobs, which were more common than you would think on the traveling rodeo circuit. While she didn’t get to stock a lot of supplies—there wasn’t a lot of money for it or a lot of room in the RV—Reba was able to keep the cowboys and their horses satisfied with her doctoring skills.
“Why is this feed so expensive?” Karen asked, her voice strident and nasal.
“You’d need to ask the people who are selling it. I’m just the veterinarian. And if you think that’s expensive, wait until you see my bill.”
Karen’s head reared back as if Reba had slapped her.
“My husband is a rodeo star,” she said, with her hand over her heart.
“Good for him. His horse has kidney problems. You need a feed with low protein. Grass hay is preferable.”
“I thought the UPRC covered all medical expenses.”
After a year of traveling all over the country with her sister, Reba had been offered a permanent position with the UPRC, the new rodeo organization that combined the men’s and women’s rodeo circuits into one corporation. She was still feeling out the particulars of the job. But one of the perks was she didn’t have to deal with a lot of people. Today was an exception.
“No, ma’am, they don’t.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“You can take it up with the powers that be.” Reba glanced at her watch. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to check on a bred heifer.”
The heifer wasn’t anywhere near close to delivering, but it gave her an excuse to go to the farm exhibits of the state fair, and away from the rodeo arena.
“I want to speak to your manager,” Karen shrilled her species’ war cry.
“Knock yourself out,” Reba said, glad that she wasn’t working out of a veterinarian’s office anymore.
“I find you very rude,” Karen said.
“I’ve heard that before,” Reba said over her shoulder. And in this very town, as a matter of fact. Paris, Texas, her old stomping ground. Her parents still lived here.
Three years ago, when Reba had worked at Kilgore Veterinary Services, Karen could have been one of her clients. If the rodeo had come to town and her cowboy husband was wondering why his horse had been acting lethargic, Reba might have been the vet on call who checked out the ulcers on the horse’s tongue.
Reba had been in charge of the large-animal exams at that time. Dr. Kilgore specialized in domestic pets like dogs and cats, and also in being a misogynistic jerk. He was a man-child in a white lab coat who threw temper tantrums as often as he threw pens and other objects. To say it was a toxic work environment would have been an understatement, but Reba had loved her clients—even if she hadn’t liked their owners. Crammed into the tight office space, Reba would have had to sit on the other side of the counter and take Karen’s bad attitude with a smile.
“Don’t you walk away from me,” Karen shouted after her.
Nope, Reba didn’t miss her old job at all. She didn’t miss the customers, nor the antiseptic smells and the industrial cleaner that burned her nose so badly, she couldn’t imagine how the animals with their keener sense of smell could tolerate it.
What she did miss was her patients: pregnant kitty cats, taking porcupine quills out of hound dogs’ snouts, delivering calves, vaccinating horses, and doing the other daily treatments that all types of small and large animals needed.
Reba certainly didn’t miss her boss’s fits when the jars weren’t put back in the exact order he wanted them to be in. She might have understood it if he wanted them in alphabetical order or grouped by medicine type. But no, he had his own system. It didn’t make sense to anybody but him. Once you learned it, you knew it, but it wasn’t intuitive. And sometimes when you got busy, shit happened. Then the whole office suffered.
“How did you fucking graduate college?” Dr. Kilgore would rage. He was an equal-opportunity screamer. He’d yell at the receptionists, the vet techs, and even the other doctors in the practice. One by one they all left. Reba had stayed for the animals, not for him, but when he launched a jar against the wall and a piece of glass sliced at her face from the blast, she knew she had to get out.
He had been apologetic, but it had been too late. And after being given a generous termination bonus and the promise of a good recommendation, Reba decided not to take him to court or have him arrested. But the workplace violence that she had experienced made her very wary of working in close, confined spaces, especially with loudmouthed doctors. That was why she liked working the UPRC rodeo events. It was mostly wide-open spaces.
Dr. Kilgore had always been second-guessing her, too. He was a micromanager, a control freak, and a narcissist, the trifecta of asshattery. It had taken Reba a long time to stop questioning her decisions. Sometimes, she still heard him in the back of her head when she was faced with a tough decision or a more complicated diagnosis.
Reba’s phone rang just as she entered the barn where the heifer was waiting her turn at auction. Expecting it to be one of her sisters, Reba was surprised that it was Diane Brolin, the coordinating supervisor of the UPRC veterinarians, and her boss.
“That was quick,” Reba said.
“Were you rude to Vanessa Sunderland?”
“Depends. Is Vanessa a twat?” She could almost picture Diane closing her eyes and shaking her head.
“Please don’t use language like that.”
