I come out of the staff restroom and Darcy looks at me for a long, long moment.
"Go ahead," I tell her, holding out my arms. "I know what this is. This is the grand finale of a revenge trilogy. Take your shot."
"I would never." Her voice wobbles like a tightrope walker in wind. "You look very qualified."
I glance down at myself. "These kittens have stethoscopes, Darcy."
She nods, fighting laughter. "They're board-certified."
I swear under my breath and follow her and Cathy into an examination room.
The morning's first event is Cupcake.
Cupcake is an orange tomcat the approximate size and temperament of a propane tank, boarding for the week while his owner cruises the Bahamas, and he requires a pill. Cathy demonstrates the hold. Cupcake submits to Cathy the way the sea submits to the moon. Then she hands him to me, and Cupcake performs an honest reappraisal of the situation and files me under scratching post.
"At least he's purring," I say, optimistic, an instant before he isn't.
The next forty-five seconds are footage I'd pay real money to keep off the internet. I've gone hand over hand across a crevasse ladder with nothing but thousands of feet of air beneath me. I have steady nerves and fast reflexes and twelve percent body fat, and none of it matters, because Cupcake has decided to relocate to the top of my head via my chest, and he is taking the scenic route.
When it's finally over, the pill is in the cat, the cat is in the kennel, and I'm bleeding from three locations through a kitten-print shirt.
"He likes you," Cathy says.
I dab at a laceration on my forearm. Darcy’s hiding a laugh behind her hand. "This is him liking me?"
Cathy smiles. "He made eye contact. That's huge for Cupcake."
"He made eye contact with my jugular."
Darcy’s laughter escapes—a choked giggle that sounds entirely too pleased. "You did great. I particularly liked that pretzel maneuver you did with your arms when Cupcake tried to somersault off your forehead."
I give her my best glower, but it’s hard to hold when she’s on the verge of dissolving into giggles. At my expense, I remind myself, trying to feel annoyed.
"All right. Cupcake is medicated and I need stitches. Are we done here?"
"Not quite," Cathy says, with a conspiratorial look at Darcy. "Follow me."
The puppies come next, three Lab-mix brothers from the Hendricks's accidental litter. They need exercise in the side yard, and I provide play-by-play like it's the Westminster pre-show. The puppies are a tougher crowd than Cupcake in their own way. They have eleven legs between them at any given moment, no brakes, and a group decision-making process based entirely on momentum. Within ten minutes they have untied both my shoes, stolen one sock through means I cannot reconstruct, and, in a coordinated maneuver during the post-play water break, all three of them christen my sneakers in sequence, like signing a guest book.
Darcy is no longer hiding her laughter behind her hands. I can hear it over the barking and the other clinic sounds. It's the real laugh, and it's directed at me, and I stand there in soaked shoes and ruined pink kitten-doctor scrubs experiencing what I can only describe as a win.
Kennel turnover takes an hour. I scrub, hose, squeegee, and relocate bedding for fourteen animals, and I do it properly, corners and all, because Cathy inspects like a drill sergeant and because there's a version of this day that ends with someone saying the billionaire from the city did half a job, and that version doesn't get to exist.
"Last item." Cathy consults the clipboard, and something in her serenity sharpens. "Let’s go meet Winston."
Winston is a bulldog. Winston is a low-slung, wheezing gentleman of advanced years, and Winston, Cathy explains, with diagrams, requires a procedure called expressing his anal glands.
I look at the diagram. I look at Winston. Winston looks back with the weary patience of a dog who has seen many volunteers come and go.
"There are professionals," I say. "Entire professions. Of professionals."
"And on Sundays," Cathy says, snapping on gloves and holding a second pair out to me, "there's us."
Jesus Christ. I have defied death on three continents and lived to tell about it. I have eaten things in the backcountry that had strong opinions about being eaten. I once free-soloed a pitch in Utah that my own safety officer refused to film.
But I find my limit in a small white room on the east edge of Mattichogue—and the limit's name is Winston.
Cathy explains the procedure twice. I keep waiting for the part where she laughs and admits she's kidding. The part does not arrive. Even Darcy looks green around the gills as Cathy briefs me on what I’m about to do.
