Part 5
The refrigerator in the room above Cedar Creek Veterinary Clinic rattled every night. I could hear dogs moving in their runs through the floorboards. I put the photograph of Sarah and Lily beside my bed first; then I unpacked my shirts and went downstairs to find out where Beth kept the mop.
She treated me as a new employee. When I missed dirt under a kennel door, she sent me back. When I managed to steady a frightened old hound without forcing him, she had me show another assistant what I had done. X-rays stopped looking like ghosts once she pointed out the bones and shadows. I observed her mend a torn ear, then cleaned the room afterward. Before handling anything unfamiliar, I asked. Being useful required admitting what I did not know.
The younger assistant asked me once whether I’d had training somewhere else. I showed her the calluses from carrying survey equipment and said that knowing how to move quietly around an animal was the part I had brought with me. On everything else, Beth was still making me start at the beginning. She heard us from the next room and told me to replace the paper on the exam table.
Molly came by after school in muddy boots, her red braids escaping their ties. She was twelve. The first time she turned to look at me, Lily’s age caught me so abruptly that I stared at the dish in my hand. Then Molly argued with Beth about naming a rescued kitten Chainsaw. He made a terrible noise when he ate, she explained, and a delicate name would be dishonest.
I laughed and set the dish down before I dropped it.
We folded towels together one afternoon. Molly wanted to know whether the cub was alive. I said I hoped he was, and told her he had walked away with his mother. She held a towel against her chest and asked if I had loved him.
It took me longer than it should have to say yes.
Molly was not Lily. She had her own opinions, her own mother, and a way of leaving muddy prints in places Lily would never have thought to walk. I knew all that and still sometimes had to take a breath before answering her. She never asked me why I paused, which made it possible for us to finish the towels.
“He had somebody with him the whole time, then,” she said. She stacked the towel and went to check on Chainsaw.
I could not promise her that the woods were safe for a young bear. I described the mother’s visit to the blanket, the way she had inspected his leg. Molly listened without demanding a better ending than the one I knew.
By late summer I was shopping for my own groceries rather than asking Hank to bring what I lacked. I learned the cashier’s name. A former forestry coworker invited me to a birthday dinner, and I stayed after the cake instead of leaving at the first decent opening. Beth saw these things; she had enough sense not to make each one into an occasion.
One evening as we closed the clinic, she asked if I had considered veterinary school. I reminded her I was fifty-two. She asked again whether I wanted to learn. My forestry degree wouldn’t erase the prerequisites, and neither of us pretended it would. We found the science courses I needed, and I enrolled while continuing to work.
The textbooks followed me upstairs in a bag whose straps bit into my hand. There were nights I read the same section three times. In the morning I went down with questions, and Beth answered what she could before giving me still more to study. On my first major exam I earned a B. She brought champagne to the back steps after closing; Molly was inside deciding where to put my marked paper on the refrigerator.
I had worked with maps for years, yet a page of anatomy labels could defeat me by midnight. Beth never described the courses as a test of character. She would point to the part I had misunderstood, sometimes with a pencil still tucked behind her ear from the day’s appointments, and let me try again.
“You earned every point,” Beth said.
I nearly told her it was just a B. Instead I thanked her, and we drank while the last light went off in the exam room.
The case against Wade made its way through court that year. Tom told me Wade was fined and received a suspended six-month jail sentence over the threats and illegal hunting attempt. For a while Wade complained about me; eventually he left town. Hank heard of him again working security at a warehouse. I was glad he was no longer on the trail; I did not need to imagine a grander ending for him.
Hank still came through about once a month with mushrooms or fish and needles from the pines on Beth’s swept floor. During a winter visit he mentioned a large bear’s prints and smaller ones by the creek. The smaller hind print had landed oddly. I asked him if he thought it was the cub.
“Maybe,” he said. “Tracks don’t give me a face.” I asked twice again before he left, and he gave me no more certainty than he had.
The next spring Beth went with me to see the cabin. Water had stained the ceiling, and one pane was cracked. I worked on both while she made lunch on the stove. She found the pan without asking me where it belonged, and for a moment I stood in the doorway watching her move through that old room.
“The room feels changed when you’re in it,” I said. She waited, but I could not explain it better. After lunch she held me, and I managed, after an awkward pause, to hold her back. We walked to the grass where the cub had returned to his mother. Dandelions grew there now. Beth wondered aloud if he could remember me. I said that forgetting people would probably serve him well.
We stayed in the cabin that night, our sleeping bags on the floor while the damp mattress aired by a window. After the fire burned low, Beth spoke across the narrow strip of floor between us.
“Jack, could you make room for somebody again?”
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