She huffed and leaned her weight into my palms.
I called Cabrera the next morning. She had a slot for Pen at nine. I wrote it on the wall calendar my grandmother bought at the church bake sale four Christmases back, the square under roses in her handwriting.
Then I crossed Maple Avenue and asked Astrid if she'd come down with me. I told her I could use a second set of hands.
She said yes before I'd finished asking.
She walked over at eight Thursday morning with Moose on a leash and two coffees from the diner on Main in a cardboard tray.
I watched her come across Maple from my kitchen window. Jeans, fleece, hair pulled back at the nape. She was pretty in it. She would have been pretty in a feed sack.
A few days ago, when she was in my yard in a bath towel, I'd told myself I wasn't allowed to look, and I'd looked anyway. I'd seen what was under the towel. Not all of it. Some of it. I wanted to see the rest.
I wasn't going to say that part out loud to a single person in this lifetime, including myself.
I pulled on my jacket and went out to meet her at the truck.
She handed me a coffee. The cup was still hot through the cardboard sleeve.
"How's she been?"
I took the lid off, blew across the top. The diner used cinnamon that turned up out of nowhere in the third sip.
"Quiet. She ate about three kibbles last night."
Astrid's mouth tightened at the corner. A micro-frown. She was already running the math on dehydration.
"Good girl, Pen." She crouched and put a hand under Penny's jaw, then straightened and let me lift her into the back.
My grandmother's quilt was folded across the back seat, the one off the porch swing—Pen had been lying on it since she was a puppy. Moose hopped up behind her and pressed his nose against the side of her face. Pen huffed at him without lifting her head.
Astrid got into the passenger side, set her coffee in the cup holder, and turned around to put a hand on Penny's flank between the front seats.
"Hi, sweet girl. We're going to see Auntie Sof. She's gonna make this so much better."
Pen gave her tail one slow thump against the quilt.
I pulled out of the driveway.
We didn't talk much for the first few minutes. She kept her hand on Penny. The early sun came in low through the windshield and lit the side of her face, the loose strands at her temple, the small freckles I'd never been close enough to count before. Then she broke the quiet.
"Sof and I roomed together third year of vet school. She was the one who got me through anesthesia. She has the best hands. She used to do gallbladders on cats for fun on her weekends."
"For fun?"
"She likes the hard stuff."
I glanced at her over the wheel. "Have you ever done gallbladders on cats for fun?"
"I have done plenty of gallbladders on cats. Never for fun."
A small smile from her side of the truck. She turned her head to look out the window, and the smile stayed there a beat longer than she probably meant it to.
I drove. The knot I'd been carrying around in my chest since the phone call to Cabrera loosened about an inch.
She has good hands. She likes the hard stuff.
Astrid said it as someone who'd put her own dog on the table for this woman. I was going to take that and hold it for the next thirty minutes.
