Part 7
Daniel recognized the clinic’s return address before he bent to pick up the envelope. Mica sat beside the pack, watching his hand. He could already think of reasons to leave the letter on the counter: the roads, her afternoon appointment, the fact that one more week would hardly be the longest he’d waited.
He opened it standing there.
The paper was ordinary. So was what Mica had done with it; she carried things that fell on the floor, and this one had happened to come from oncology. Daniel read the request for reassessment, took his phone from his pocket, and dialed while the opened envelope was still in his hand.
The scheduler found his name. There was a pause while she looked through his record, and he waited without offering an explanation.
“We’ve left several messages, Mr. Rowan.”
“Yes. I got them.”
“Dr. Mehta has an opening Thursday morning. Would you be able to come?”
From where he stood, Daniel could see the little container in the daypack. He’d washed it after the trip to the lake and put it back empty, the lid resting lightly in place. He could take the letter with him too.
“Thursday,” he said. “I’ll be there.”
He wrote the time down before the scheduler finished speaking.
At that first appointment, he had to say how long it had been since his last blood work. Dr. Mehta ordered updated testing and imaging; the next treatment plan would depend on what they found. Daniel kept wanting to apologize, which would have been easier than giving precise answers.
Some of the results were less alarming than he’d expected. Others showed that waiting had reduced his options. Dr. Mehta explained both without scolding him, and Daniel stayed with the conversation when he wanted to look at the door.
He asked what the next appointment would involve. A nurse offered to put the schedule on paper for him, and he let her, holding out the sheet he’d brought. He put it where he could find it again.
Daniel rode to his first treatment in Walt’s passenger seat. Over thirty miles they failed to agree on a radio station, and even the drive was interrupted when Walt spotted a utility pole he wanted to inspect. When Walt returned to the truck, Daniel pointed out that somebody still employed by the utility could have done that.
“You can explain it to the pole,” Walt said, getting back in.
Daniel was irritated all the way to the next bend. Then Walt changed the station without being asked, and he settled back against the seat.
On a rainy morning in May, Daniel stood at the kitchen counter with his coffee, checking the time. Treatment hadn’t given him back the body he remembered. Some afternoons he got as far as removing his boots before sitting on the floor; Mica would settle a few feet away until he moved and let her come closer.
Between appointments, when his strength and the weather allowed it, he had made himself available for outreach. A generator check or a wheelchair-ramp repair could occupy a good afternoon. He’d driven the tracked rig after a late-March snowfall, too. When Janet refused to let him lift anything, he labeled extension cords so Edith could read them without her glasses.
Quiet visits had suited Mica. Daniel could give her room to approach people as she chose, and nobody needed to pet her for an afternoon to go well. She remained wary of fast-moving men, fond of plain chicken, and liable to walk off with one of Walt’s gloves.
He lowered his cup and glanced at the mudroom container. Six pieces of kibble had occupied it for a week while Mica ate each meal from her bowl.
All the containers remained available, even the dusty one under the table. He hadn’t emptied them to test her or decided she ought to be finished with them. She could go and look whenever she needed.
Mica was lying near the radiator now. The first time he’d found her belly up on the living-room rug, no longer positioned to flee, he’d stopped with his coffee halfway to his mouth. She had rolled just far enough to see who was there and promptly gone back to resting.
Daniel put his cup in the sink and went upstairs for his treatment jacket. It hung behind the bedroom door, where Claire’s sweater had stayed until April. He paused with his hand on the hook.
Taking the sweater down had brought back her voice, complaining about his towel folding as if the awkward stacks were an argument he meant to win. He’d stood holding the sleeve before making space in the cedar box, among her letters and the ribbon from their dried wedding bouquet. The box remained unsealed. He had a place to hang his jacket now, with her photographs still around him and the blue mug still waiting in the kitchen cabinet.
He carried the jacket downstairs and opened the daypack. Water and his medication list went in first, followed by a paperback Walt had recommended so enthusiastically that Daniel was prepared to dislike it. From the kitchen doorway, Mica watched him finish packing.
When he set the open pack on the chair, she came over to sniff its side pocket. He waited, remembering the trips she’d once made between her hiding places and that zipper. She turned away and went to her bowl.
“Back after lunch,” he told her, closing the pack.
She began eating while he was still inside the house.
The two men were still at the clinic when Daniel had expected to be home; a lab result needed repeating. Once they were on the wet highway, his shoulders began to ache. He pulled over and asked Walt to take the wheel, handing him the keys before moving to the passenger seat.
He spotted Mica watching through the living-room glass as they came up the drive. She stayed there until he was out of the truck. At the mudroom door he found her waiting, close enough that when he lowered his hand she could rest her nose against it.
He let his fingers rest there.
Then he took off his wet boots and carried his jacket upstairs to the hook. By the time he came back down, Mica was finishing the food she’d left. Daniel set the pack beside the chair and stood at the counter while she ate.
She didn’t wait for him to look away. Rain ticked from the eaves outside the mudroom, and a little water shone in the heel of his empty boot.