"Hi yourself."
"What's that?"
"Wine. Audrey told me not to come empty-handed."
"You weren't going to."
"I wasn't. She told me anyway."
I let her in and took the bottle. I closed the door behind her, and the smell of the kitchen hit her on the inhale.
She stopped in the entryway. She turned to look at me, and her face did the small, unguarded thing I'd been watching for since she walked in.
"You made your grandmother's roast."
"For you. Yeah."
She came into the kitchen behind me. She set her hand on the small of my back as she passed. She'd been doing that for three weeks—the unthinking touch she didn't seem to know she was doing, and which had been knocking the breath out of me at random intervals on shift.
We ate at the table. She had her elbows on it the way she did when she was tired and not performing. The roast was good. I'd done what was on the card.
She told me about her afternoon in the same way she would have told Audrey, not how she'd told it to me at her counter the morning before. Two more walk-ins after we left. A woman with a basset hound who'd been Caldwell's for fifteen years. The Bishop family called to schedule Cooper's spring shots a season early. A man whose name she didn't have yet came in at five with a parrot that had a sore on its foot.
"A parrot?"
"In Hartsdale. A sore on its foot."
"What did you do with it?"
"I treated it."
She was looking at me over her wineglass. The smile was sitting at the corners of her mouth in a way she was no longer keeping off it. The roast had done its work, and so had Duke, Halsey, and Mendoza.
She set the wineglass down.
"I know what you did."
"You did?"
"I knew the second the four of you walked in the door."
"I figured."
"Mrs. Halloran called me at four."
"She did?"
"She wanted to know if the Hartsdale Fire Department was sponsoring my clinic now, because if so, she had questions about the contract."
I laughed. Real one.
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her I'd let her know."
"She's going to gossip."
"She started before she hung up."
