Page 66 of Spiced!

“Five minutes,” I said.

She cocked her head and looked at the imaging spread on my desk, then she looked at the folded paper under my phone.

“Is she going to be okay?” she said.

She hadn’t met Marisol, had only heard about the case in the pieces I’d shared over the past week, but Diane had a way of adopting cases she considered hers by proximity, and Marisol had become one of those cases.

“I think so,” I said. “I don’t know enough yet to be sure. This is a tough one.”

She nodded. “Okay.” She picked up her bag. “Go home. Feed the ferret. Talk to the plant.”

“The succulent.”

“Whatever,” she said, and left.

I gathered the imaging, stacked it carefully, and put it in its folder. Then I turned off my desk lamp and sat in the dark of my office for a moment with the folded paper under my phone and the almost-theory in my head and thought about an eleven-year-old who had watched a vet be matter-of-fact about kindness and decided on the spot that was what he wanted to be.

It had been our cat, technically, though Sasquatch had made his own arrangements and mostly belonged to the neighborhood. He’d come home one afternoon and simply wasn’t moving right. My mother drove us to a clinic that smelled like antiseptic and wet dog, where a tired man in his sixties kneeled on the floor to be closer to a scared animal instead of making the animal come up to him. He talked to Sasquatch the entire time in a low, even voice, explaining what he was doing, as though our cat could consent. I remember thinking that no adult had ever explained anything to me that carefully. Sasquatch lived another six years out of pure spite, which felt, at eleven, like proof the man had worked magic.

I didn’t become a veterinarian because I loved animals, exactly, though I did. I became one because I had watched someone be gentle and competent at the same time and understood, in the immediate and total way children understand things, that those two could be the same act, that you could fix a thing and be kind about it while doing so. I had spent my twenty-two years since getting very, very good at the fixing half. I was aware—dimly, the way you’re aware of a dentist appointment three weeks out—that I had possibly overcorrected and needed more work on the empathy part.

Chapter 18

Adrian

Of course, I smiled at exactly the wrong moment. In my defense, Jacks had just said something about a new beer tap situation. It wasn’t even funny, but somewhere between “the regulator valve” and “the third time this month” my brain had drifted to a man with bedhead and a very gravely morning voice. The smile had arrived before I could do anything to stop it.

Jacks stopped talking.

Benji froze.

Even Finn glanced up from his clipboard.

Jacks looked me up and down like a copier scanning paper. He landed on my smile.

“What?” I asked.

It sounded defensive even to my own ears.

“Nothing,” he said, but the way he said it was the way people said “nothing” when they meant something and were deciding how to deploy it.

I went back to my pre-shift stretch and ignored him. This worked for approximately four minutes.

Benji left for the back, returning a moment later with a case of Fanta. Finn had restocked on Thursday, and Benji always brought it back personally, as though the Fanta required an escort. Honestly, I appreciated this diligence. He set the case on the bar, looked at me, and stopped. He tilted his head. I kept stretching.

“Adrian,” he said.

“Benji,” I answered.

“You’re glowing.”

“I’m warm. It’s Florida.”

“You’re in an air-conditioned bar with no people for body heat.”

I finished one stretch and began another. “I walked from the car.”

“It’s sixty-eight degrees outside.” He removed a bottle from the case, popped the cap, and leaned against the bar. “You got laid.”