Tennessee Vet

by Carolyn McSparren

  “I agree that we need to check it out first. I did talk to Seth about the dimensions. If it’s not all right, I’ll bring the guys back in to change whatever you say needs fixing. After we check it out, I will help you feed the animals, then I’ll make you pancakes for breakfast.”

  She twisted away from him. “I thought we were going to eat sensibly after today. Pancakes are not sensible.”

  “I will fix you lawn clippings if they will entice you to stay.”

  Everything in her psyche was screaming “Stay!”

  She changed the subject. That’s what she always did when the subject was uncomfortable or she was annoyed. It usually worked. “How did you extend the flight cage so fast without anyone’s finding out you were having it done?”

  He took a disappointed breath and a step back. “It’s in place of the bonfire the powers that be won’t allow me to have.”

  When he told her the story of the daylight restrictions, she rolled her eyes and shook her head. “Everybody wants you to jump through more hoops. I’m surprised you didn’t have to pull a construction permit for the flight cage.”

  “It doesn’t count as a permanent structure. Why don’t you stay here tonight? I can sleep on the couch,” Stephen offered. “You admit you’re tired. We’ll move Orville tomorrow after the clinic closes.”

  “Stephen, you and I have fun together. Let’s enjoy that and not push it, please. We haven’t known each other that long.”

  His cell phone buzzed. He gave it an annoyed glance, said, “Oh, damn,” and answered it. “Good evening, Dean. Late for you to be calling, isn’t it?” He looked at his watch. “I had no idea it was this early. I have had a long day.”

  He listened, blinked. “You’re not playing golf on Sunday?” He rolled his eyes, said, “Yes, of course I’ll be there. May I bring someone with me?” He said goodbye and hung up. “Now what is that all about?”

  “Trouble?”

  “He didn’t sound as if there was trouble. I intended to drive down one day next week, but he says his golf game fell through, so he wanted to move up the meeting to check on the progress of the book.”

  Barbara laughed. “Progress? What progress? Are you going to tell him the truth?”

  “Probably not.” He turned her to face him. “Come with me. The clinic is closed on Sunday. I’ll have a short meeting, calm the dean’s fears, then we can have a leisurely brunch and drive home. The weather is supposed to be glorious. I went to the fair with you—for all the good my being there did—so now you come with me. I was planning to abscond with you for a long drive anyway. What do you say? Yes would be good.”

  This was a way out. “I’d love to ride to Memphis with you and have a wonderful lunch. I will not, however, stay here tonight.”

  He opened his mouth to protest, so she kissed him, grabbed her purse and started out before he could protest. “Oh, and Stephen...after the clinic closes tomorrow, you and I can move Orville to your fancy new flight cage and see what he does. Good night.”

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING, Barbara fed the animals, checked her answering service, gave thanks that there had been no emergency calls, fixed coffee and orange juice and sweet rolls. Tired as she was, she had stayed awake and had been so antsy she’d had to unwrap the covers from around herself at four in the morning and start to settle down all over again.

  While she finished her chores, she had time to think. Unfortunately.

  She had fallen for this guy. She didn’t want it to end, didn’t want him to take the blasted textbook he was supposed to be writing, run back to Memphis and all the beautiful women who would be overjoyed.

  Oh, for pity’s sake, I have lost my mind.

  No, just my heart.

  It was mid afternoon by the time she finished assembling the equipment she needed for Orville, including a half-dozen thawed mice. Stephen pulled in beside her SUV with his red truck.

  “You’re getting to be a real countryman,” she said. “Your truck has mud on it.”

  “I painted it on especially as camouflage to confuse the natives.”

  He set the mug on his hood, then held out his arms. She stepped into both his arms and his kiss.

  Orville broke up their embrace with an importune shriek, which they could hear from outside the building.

  They both laughed. “I swear he knows something’s up,” Barbara said.

  “Now who’s anthropomorphizing? Let’s go check on the suitability of your new toy.”

  It passed with flying colors. The next step after they got back to the clinic was to entice Orville into his travel cage.

  Stephen offered to help, but Barbara waved him off. “I’m the one with the heavy gloves. Come here, Orville. And stop trying to poke my eyes out.”

  After they finally managed to shut Orville into his cage, they loaded the cage in Stephen’s truck, along with the rest of the supplies Barbara had assembled, and drove to The Hovel, pulling as close to the enlarged cage as possible.

  He managed to evade Barbara when she tried to catch him to release him in the flight cage. He couldn’t get out of the travel cage and he couldn’t fly, but he could hop. He was bigger, heavier and meaner than Mabel. Barbara finally managed to snare him in a blanket.

  She spread half a dozen thawed mice along the two-by-four that served as a perch across the middle of the cage. Then she set Orville on the perch beside the mice. Would he see them? Recognize them as edible? Would he turn his back and sulk?

  He chose to sulk.

  He jumped off his perch and landed on the floor of the cage.

  “You can’t walk home, dummy,” Barbara said. Another chase, another capture, another positioning on the beam.

  “Stephen, hand me that spool of thread from my jacket pocket. I’m going to fix it so that the thread slides off when he grabs the mouse. I don’t want him to swallow it or get his feet tangled, but if I wriggle it along just right, I may con him into thinking it’s alive.”

  She carefully tied a thread around a mouse, laid it on the two-by-four and pulled it along.

  Orville regarded it over his shoulder, then turned his back on it.

  “Oh, c’mon, bird,” Barbara snapped. “You’ve been eating these all along. See? Live mouse.”

  Orville turned angry eyes on her as if to say, “The heck it is.”

  It was like a battle between an exasperated parent and a picky eater. After an hour the score was a million to one in favor of the picky eater.

  Orville was now easier to catch. He was tired. Stephen took over putting him back on his perch. The big bird quit trying to fly down and simply settled on the two-by-four more like a vulture than an eagle. He glared.

  “If you were a vulture, you would love thawed mice, dumb bird,” Barbara said.

  “He’s not a vulture, Barbara, my love, but a noble eagle.”

  “Noble my foot. He’s a dumb bird that I am ready to allow to starve—or at least to miss a meal or two.” She laid a different mouse on the beam and wiggled it. At least Orville didn’t turn his back on this one. He began to scooch sideways on the beam. Barbara and Stephen held their respective breaths.

  He grabbed the mouse and stuffed it into his mouth. A moment later he turned his back on them again.

  “Yeah!” Barbara whispered. “Stephen, put a couple more up there. Don’t bother with the thread. Let’s see what he does.”

  He fussed and clicked his beak at them, but he ate. Barbara sat down on the dead log that Emma’s skunks had played on. “Put one on the ground,” Barbara said. “Let’s see what he does.”

  Orville ignored the mouse, so Barbara fixed it up with the thread and pulled it along like a toy.

  At first, he acted as though this was a trick. Or maybe he wasn’t hungry any longer.

  Then, without warning, he launched himself off his perch and flapped his wing
s—both of them. He landed beside the mouse and scarfed it up.

  “Yes!” Barbara jumped off her log and launched herself at Stephen.

  Highly offended, Orville hopped and flapped to the other end of the cage, where he could eat his mouse in peace.

  “It works! It’s weak, but the wing works!” Stephen swirled Barbara around in his arms, then kissed her. “Shall we leave him here?”

  “Absolutely. Beer anyone?”

  “It should be champagne. We have to celebrate.” He put her down. “We get to watch his progress, and you get to teach him the way you want to do it, and not the way a zoo vet sixty miles away wants to do it.”

  “You still should have told me before you enlarged the cage.”

  She slipped her arm through his and leaned against him. “I admit you did good. I’m glad he’s here and not in some strange cage sixty miles away.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  SUNDAY MORNING DID indeed promise to be one of the last glorious Indian summer days before the chill of late autumn set in and started the downhill slide toward winter.

  Barbara had done her best to look as though she belonged on a college campus and at a decent restaurant and not in a barn, but she worried that she hadn’t done a very good job of it.

  Stephen used their trip to explore the abilities of his new truck. He sped. “I am a mild-mannered professor, until I am behind the wheel of any sort of vehicle. Then the tiger rises. You should have learned that after my adventure with the tractor.”

  “Your accident didn’t change your feelings about fast cars?”

  “I was unconscious through most of it.”

  “How is your precious sports car, by the way?”

  “My mechanic is still scouring the continent for a new grille to replace the one Orville destroyed. Last time I spoke to him, he said he might have found one in Saskatchewan.”

  She gave him a sad little smile. “Maybe it’s time to let it go, Stephen.”

  “Ah, yes, now that I have a shiny new mistress.”

  Barbara blinked up at him. Mistress? Shiny? He patted his dashboard. Talk about being put in her place.

  “I want to let my old relic go on my terms, however. It’s a paradox. If my mechanic can restore it, I’ll want to keep it. If he can’t, then I have abandoned it in its hour of need.”

  “It’s just a car.”

  “I know, I know. I forgot to tell you. I asked Elaine and Anne to join us for lunch.

  “You did what?”

  “I wanted you to meet them.”

  So they can assess me, more like, Barbara thought. Why, oh, why, didn’t I take the time to get my hair cut? Plus a good dye job or some streaks, a decent manicure, and a starvation diet to help me drop thirty pounds in two days. Not telling her they were coming was downright rude.

  She glanced down at her hands. Not a pretty sight. Frequent alcohol scrubs were not a beauty treatment, no matter how much hand lotion she rubbed in afterward. “You should have warned me that I’d be meeting your children. Do they know I’m coming or are you going to spring me on them?”

  “Dearest Barbara, you are not being introduced to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Jerry is a scruffy academic who forgets where he parks his car unless his secretary reminds him.”

  “I wasn’t talking about the dean, but afterward. Lunch at some fancy restaurant with your daughters.”

  He threw up his hands. “My girls will adore you. Say ‘horse’ to Anne and she’ll follow you like a puppy.”

  “That’s not the point. You must stop springing things on me. I warned you I don’t do surprises well. What do I say to Elaine?”

  “Smile and say ‘how interesting’ from time to time. She never listens to anyone else. You’ll be forced to endure stories of how brilliant Roger is and how he’s the youngest lawyer in his firm to make partner.”

  “Is she really an ogre?”

  “Junior Ogress. Have to be precise about these things, Barbara. Nina kept her in check, but I’ve never had the knack. I tend to look the other way. Elaine is smart, beautiful and incredibly insecure. Roger is older than she is. Most of her girlfriends have careers as well as families. She will be jealous of what you’ve accomplished.”

  “I feel sorry for her.”

  “Me, too. Thank God she married Roger, who would love her if she sat around the house with baggy stockings rolled down to her knees and a Cuban cigar between her lips. She is a gourmet cook, keeps an immaculate house that Andrea, Emma’s stepmother, helped her decorate, and Andrea has corralled her into volunteering for a couple of charity boards. Still, no avalanche of ‘atta girls’ is enough. Don’t let her get to you. It’s envy, not malice.”

  Barbara smiled. Oh, lovely. One horse person who will talk to me about horse diseases, blood and pus, over lunch, while one ogress will try to prove that having a career is superfluous for a female because she doesn’t have one yet. Hooray! Aren’t I glad I’m going with Stephen? He didn’t tell me until we were on the road. I’ll get him for that.

  * * *

  “MY DEAR DR. CAREW, I am delighted to meet the reason Stephen has been avoiding my calls. I am no competition for a beautiful woman.”

  Barbara blushed. “Dean, I’m afraid your real competition weighs twenty-two pounds. He screams like fingernails down a blackboard.”

  “Ah, yes, he’s told me about Orville the eagle. Lucky they weren’t both killed. How’s the leg, Stephen?”

  “Improving daily. I carry the cane as protection against the neighborhood dogs now rather than to keep from tripping.”

  “Good, good, glad to hear it.” The dean cleared his throat. “And how’s the new book coming?”

  Barbara caught Stephen’s eye.

  “Slowly, but it’s coming.”

  “So is Easter. You promised...”

  “My dear Jerry, it is not Christmas yet. Have a little faith.”

  Barbara extended her hand. “I know you two have things to discuss, so I’m going to wander the campus. Stephen, call me on my cell when you’re ready to go.”

  Both men waited until the door closed behind her, then the dean dropped into the oversize leather wing chair behind his desk. Stephen took its smaller cousin on the other side.

  The dean templed his hands against his lips. “Are you planning to stop by your office before you return to the wilds of the Tennessee River Valley?”

  “The department secretary sends me a packet of mail every three days, and I answer what should be answered on paper. The rest is email. Nothing earthshaking, I promise you. The book is indeed coming slowly, my leg is indeed stronger and I am more and more exploring the idea of switching to adjunct status in the spring and doing my lectures over the internet. What would be the ramifications of that sort of arrangement?”

  The dean fell back in his chair. His white eyebrows nearly met his receding hairline. “My, my. What has caused the change of heart?”

  “The truth? You just met her. I’m coming alive again, Jerry. I love teaching, I love writing, and I think I am good at both...”

  “You are. But?”

  “I don’t want to be limited to either one any longer.”

  “I know I have been rather a jackass pushing you the way I have...”

  “You want an infusion of younger blood, I know.”

  “Nothing of the sort. I am older than you by more than ten years—never you mind how much more—and I feel as though I’m just getting started. But every beautiful afternoon in the spring when the crappie are biting on the lake, I wish I could throw it all off and move to Wyoming. What you seem to be suggesting is hedging your bets. You teach a couple of upper-level courses each semester over the internet from this place you are living. You write your books. You drive down here for important stuff like faculty meetings...”

  “Important?”

  “Do
n’t be nasty. Theoretically important meetings as needed.”

  “Like this one?”

  “Touché. I am actually using you to avoid my wife’s aunt and uncle, who are staying with us and driving me up the wall. I’m a dean, I get to misbehave like that from time to time. From the presence of your beautiful companion, I would say I did not cause you too much agita.”

  “Okay.”

  “You could continue to direct your graduate assistants as you have been and take on more as those graduate. The rest of the time you would be free to court the lovely doctor, do some traveling, continue to be paid as an adjunct professor, not as a retiree. Your pension would continue to grow. What about your house? Would you sell it?”

  “No idea. This is early days. You’ve obviously given the idea some thought already.”

  “It was the obvious solution if I wanted to keep you working. I am aware that you have not been happy as things were. But if the lovely doctor breaks your heart, there may not be a place here for you to return to.”

  “I’m no dog in the manger. Jerry, I haven’t been a fully active member of staff since the accident. You’ve already had people taking my classes...”

  Jerry brushed off the words. “Graduate assistants. Teaching largely from your notes and your books. Not bad, but when I walk past one of your erstwhile classes these days, I hear neither laughter nor voices raised in argument. I miss that. The students miss it. They miss you. Could you maintain that relationship if you were a talking head seventy miles away?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. If the classes were interactive, then maybe.”

  “When would you want to start this long-distance teaching? Spring semester?”

  “Spring? Yes, as a test. Let’s see if it works. If I can do it. If the technical people can set me up and teach me how to run the equipment.”

  “Let me talk to some of the trustees,” Jerry said. “Personally, I think it’s a marvelous idea. Win-win, as they say, but who knows what those old fogies will think.”

  Stephen stood. A moment later, so did the dean. The two men shook hands.