"It's empty."
"It's eight o'clock in the morning. Of course it's empty."
She crossed the waiting room into the back. I followed her with my coffee. She stopped at the filing cabinet.
"Hi, Steve."
I looked at her.
"Steve?"
"That's his name."
"How do you know that's his name?"
"Look at him, Astrid. That is a Steve."
I looked at him. He looked back at me with the yellow eye and the half-shut one, his front paws tucked under his chest in the loaf shape cats made when they'd decided a body was safe. I'd been waiting for the word to fall out of somebody's mouth. I wasn't particular about whose.
"Steve," I said.
He blinked at me once.
"Steve, it is."
Audrey rubbed the back of his head with two fingers. He leaned into them.
"You're welcome."
"I didn't thank you."
"You will."
She left at eight-fifteen. She kissed me on the cheek in the doorway and put her hand on my shoulder a second longer than I expected.
"You're going to be busy by ten."
"You don't know that."
"I do know that. People in this town have been watching you for six weeks. They're going to walk in here today."
She went.
I spent the morning doing the work of a woman who had a clinic and no clients. I labeled drawers. I called the supply company about a gasket that hadn't arrived. I wiped down the exam tables twice. I sat at the front counter with my coffee and watched the leaves come down off the maple across the street, one at a time, in the particular quiet of a small town at eleven in the morning.
Mrs. Halloran walked by on her way to the post office, saw me through the window, and lifted her hand in a small wave. I waved back.
She didn't come in.
The bell finally went off at eleven-forty.
A woman in her thirties came in with a tabby in a carrier and the apologetic posture of a person who'd walked into a place she hadn't been planning to walk into.
"I'm sorry. I didn't make an appointment. He's scratching his ear so hard I thought he was going to take it off, and Dr. Caldwell's booked solid till Thursday."
"Bring him out back."
I took her to the first exam room. The cat was a four-year-old gray named Bartleby, which I had her tell me about before I asked her anything she came in for. Bartleby had a textbook ear infection in his left ear. I cleaned it, gave her the ointment, and showed her how to apply it twice a day for ten days. The whole appointment took twenty minutes.
