"Thank you, Astrid."
"You're welcome."
"I'd like to see him."
"Give me ten minutes to get him settled. Marisol will come get you."
"Alright."
I started to turn back toward the exam room.
"Astrid."
I turned back. He was still looking at the floor.
"I think it's about time I retired."
He said it to the floor. He'd been carrying the thing for a stretch, and it came out of his mouth whether he'd planned to say it or not.
I didn't move.
He'd been the only vet in this town for thirty years. He'd built a practice from nothing in a place that didn't have one. His wife died five years ago, and the practice became the thing that gave his mornings a shape. He walked into his practice at six-fifteen that morning and the practice wasn't what saved his cat. The vaporizer he'd noticed leaking a week ago and hadn't called the rep about was what he walked into. Five years of small refusals to call a rep. I was what saved his cat.
He'd figured out which version of himself he was looking at.
"Joe. You don't have to decide that today."
He looked up. His face did something I'd never seen it do.
"No," he said. "I think I do."
I let it sit.
"Alright."
"Alright."
"Marisol will come get you."
I went back to the exam room.
I worked through the morning. The Yorkie with the torn nail at nine-thirty. A vaccine for a six-month-old lab puppy at ten. A recheck on a basset named Earl at ten-forty. Joanne pushed two clients to the afternoon and slotted in a walk-in at eleven.
Caldwell sat in the waiting room through the whole of it. He moved to the corner chair after eleven, when the bench filled up. He read a six-month-old magazine cover to cover. He drank the coffee cold. Joanne brought him a fresh one at ten.
At twelve-thirty, I told him to go home.
"I'll call you at three. He'll be awake by then. You can come back tonight to sit with him. He's not going anywhere."
He went.
The afternoon was quieter. I cleaned the surgery suite at one, scrubbed the table, changed the drape, and autoclaved the instruments. Marisol took her lunch at one-fifteen. Joanne ate hers at the front desk, standing up, because Joanne was sixty-four and had been eating lunch standing up for forty years and wasn't going to be talked out of it now.
Caldwell came at six. He sat in the back with his cat on a heated pad and his hand on the cat's flank until seven-forty. On his way out, he paused at the door.
"Astrid."
"Joe."
