Part 5
“I’ll think about it,” I said. Beth nodded and went back to her pie. She didn’t ask how long I needed.
After she left, I lay on the cot without changing the pillowcase. In my sleep, Lily was walking through the woods beside the cub, her hand resting on his fur. She turned toward me with the pleased, impatient expression she used when she thought I ought to be keeping up.
“You did good, Dad.”
I woke before daylight. The cabin was still empty, and I still missed her. When Hank answered the radio later that morning, I asked him to tell Beth I would come.
The room over Cedar Creek Veterinary Clinic had a small refrigerator that rattled at night. Beneath it, through the floor, I could hear dogs shifting in their kennels. I unpacked my clothes, put Sarah and Lily’s photograph beside the bed, and went downstairs to ask where Beth kept the mop.
She didn’t ease me into the work. I missed a patch beneath a kennel door, and she sent me back to clean it. When I steadied an old hound without frightening him, she asked me to show her newest employee how I’d positioned my hands.
“You don’t have to fill every quiet second,” she told the girl. “Watch him.”
I was good at quiet. Learning when to speak took longer.
Beth showed me what she looked for on an X-ray and let me watch her repair a torn ear. I still cleaned the room afterward, and I still asked before touching anything I hadn’t been trained to use. There was a comfort in having work with a beginning and an end, even when another dirty kennel waited beyond it.
Molly came in after school with red braids and mud up the sides of her rubber boots. She was twelve, and the first time she turned toward me, I had to concentrate on the bowl I was drying.
Then she began arguing that a rescued kitten should be called Chainsaw. Lily would have chosen something pretty; Molly explained that this one made an alarming noise when he ate. I had to set the bowl down because I was laughing.
One afternoon, while we folded towels, she asked about the bear.
“Is he still alive?”
“I hope so. He went back with his mother.”
“Did you love him?”
I lined up the edges of the towel. “Yes.”
“Then I think he’s okay.” She pressed her stack flat. “He had you, and now he’s got her.”
I couldn’t promise her he would always be safe. I could tell her about his mother checking that leg, and Molly listened before going to see whether Chainsaw needed another towel.
By late summer I was buying my own groceries again. I learned the cashier’s name, went to an old forestry friend’s birthday supper, and stayed after the cake. Beth noticed these things without congratulating me every time I managed to leave a building.
One night, when we were closing, she asked whether I’d considered studying veterinary medicine.
“I’m fifty-two.”
“I know how old you are. I’m asking whether you want to study.”
My old forestry degree wasn’t a way around the work. Beth helped me find out which science courses I would need, and I enrolled in classes I could begin while working. The early coursework came home in a bag that was always heavier than I remembered making it.
I sat upstairs with textbooks after the clinic closed. Sometimes I reread a page three times before admitting I’d understood none of it. Then I went down the next morning and asked Beth, who usually gave me an explanation and something else to read.
When I earned a B on my first big exam, she bought a bottle of champagne. We drank it on the back step after closing, with Molly inside choosing where my marked paper should go on the refrigerator.
“I know what that took,” Beth said. “I’m proud of you.”
I looked at the glass in my hand. After a while, I said thank you instead of telling her it was only a B.
The case against Wade moved through the court over those months. Tom told me he had received a fine and a suspended six-month jail sentence for the offenses arising from his threats and the illegal hunting attempt. He complained about me for a while, then moved away; Hank later heard he was working security at a warehouse.
Hank came by about once a month, bringing fish or mushrooms and leaving pine needles on Beth’s clean floor. One winter visit, he described two sets of bear tracks he’d found near the creek before the weather closed in.
“Big ones and a smaller set,” he said. “One hind print didn’t land quite square. Reminded me of your little fellow.”
“You think it was him?”
“Could have been. I didn’t see them.”
I asked about the tracks twice more before he left. Hank answered both times without pretending he knew more than he did.
The following spring, Beth came with me to check the cabin. A leak had stained the ceiling, and a windowpane was cracked. I worked on them while she made lunch on the old stove, moving around the room as if she remembered where I kept everything.
“It feels different with you here,” I said.
She turned from the stove. I wasn’t sure whether I meant the room or the whole stretch of woods, and she let me leave it unfinished.
After lunch, she put her arms around me. I stood stiffly for a moment, then held her, feeling the warmth of her back through her sweater. Neither of us tried to turn it into a joke.
We walked to the grassy patch where I had left the cub. Dandelions had opened beside the old blanket’s resting place, and Beth asked whether he might remember me.
“It would probably be safer if he didn’t,” I said.
She looked toward the trees. We stood together until the evening chill began to come through our sleeves.
That night we unrolled sleeping bags beside the stove. The cabin mattress smelled damp, and I had propped it near the open window to air. I watched the firelight shifting on the ceiling while Beth settled a little way from me.
“Jack?”
I turned my head. She was looking at me across the space between the sleeping bags.
“Is there room for someone in your life now?”
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