Poked

by Naomi Niles

  “And also,” he said, “Sarah has quit on us, so I’ll need someone to take her place at the desk until I can hire a new receptionist.”

  “By someone,” I asked, “do you mean me?”

  “If you wouldn’t mind doing that for me, that would be great. I sometimes wonder why we even have a receptionist and an assistant. The clinic is so small; it seems like one person could easily do both of those things.”

  I hung up the phone. Whatever he said, it sounded like he wasn’t looking particularly hard for a new receptionist. After I’d eaten dinner, I updated my resume on Monster.com and Indeed.com. There had to be another clinic somewhere in the country that would be willing to hire a veterinarian’s assistant with four months’ experience in a rural clinic. If I ended up having to move, I would probably have to break up with Curtis. I liked him, and I would miss him, but it wasn’t like we were in love.

  Well, I didn’t know about him. But at least I wasn’t.

  We’d known each other for all of about two weeks. It was nice to have someone I could go dancing and camping with, someone to keep my bed warm at night. But if I had to move, I didn’t doubt that I could find another guy to fill that position.

  What I worried about was how Curtis would handle it. Sometimes when he looked at me, I had the horrible feeling that he was way more into me than I was into him. How would he react when I told him I was moving to Austin or Seattle? If it was Austin, he might try to follow me. If Seattle, it would almost certainly break his heart.

  “It just doesn’t seem fair to him, you know?” I told Lindsay over the phone Wednesday morning on the way to work. “He’s a great guy. But every day we’re together, it seems like he just falls more in love with me, not realizing that I’m probably going to shake the dust of this town off my feet the first chance I get.”

  “Sounds like it’s time for another one of those ‘defining the relationship’ talks,” said Lindsay. “Just let him know that you like dating him and would like to continue dating him for the foreseeable future, but he doesn’t mean anything more to you than that.”

  “That makes it sound like we’re friends with benefits,” I said. “He already has one of those.”

  “He what?”

  “Well, had. Apparently he broke it off shortly after we started dating. He says I’m the only one for him.”

  “That’s oddly sweet, but also you should definitely talk to him. You don’t want him picking out rings when you don’t even know where you’re going to be living in three months.”

  Lindsay was right, of course. It wasn’t a conversation I was looking forward to having, but I didn’t see how it could be avoided, and postponing it was only going to make it that much worse when we finally had it.

  When I entered the clinic that morning, I found Dave seated at the front desk in the lobby trying to teach Tomas how to speak German.

  “Allison,” he said. “It feels like forever ago since I’ve seen you.”

  “It feels like forever ago since anyone called me Allison.” I set down my purse at the foot of his chair. “I haven’t really been following the news lately. Did you have fun in Galveston?”

  In lieu of an answer, he picked up the remote off the desk and turned on the TV. A CNN report was showing aerial footage of the Gulf spill. From the vantage of the helicopter, it looked like the entire Gulf had become a frothy sea of black ink. As we watched, a bald eagle, its wings covered in tar, dove in front of the camera and fell into the sea, apparently dead.

  “It was not great,” he said, turning the TV off. “Last week, the oil derrick caught on fire right as a tropical storm was blowing in. In some places, the air was so saturated with oil that it literally caught fire, and when the wind picked it up, it created a hurricane of flame that burned down the skyline.”

  “Yikes. Sounds like a bad time.”

  “It was like Hurricane Katrina plus the Great Chicago Fire,” said Dave, who seemed, somehow, proud of himself for having lived through it. “Half the buildings in Galveston burned down.”

  “Wait, so is Galveston just gone now?”

  “Pretty much. The half that didn’t burn down is currently underwater.”

  “At least you escaped with your life.”

  “Barely,” said Dave. “I made it out on the last boat before they closed down the bridge. Anyway, be glad you didn’t come with me.”

  “I have no regrets. Things have been pretty chill around here for the last week. I stop by the office once every day or so to make sure I haven’t missed any customers. Grant Fountain was having some trouble with his ox, but he seems to have gotten it fixed without us.”

  “It almost makes me wonder what would happen if the clinic closed,” said Dave, gathering up his manila file folder and heading into the back office. I followed him. “Maybe if people knew they didn’t have the vet to depend on, they would learn how to take care of their animals on their own.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “Most likely they would either drive to Dallas or their animals would get sick and die.”

  Dave considered this possibility for a moment. “Perhaps there is something to be said for staying open, then. At least for now.” He sighed. “Anyway, shut the door for a minute. I have something I wanted to ask you.”

  There seemed little point in asking me to shut the door since there was no one else in the building. Nevertheless, I complied, an ominous feeling in my throat.

  “I know we’d talked about this before.” He folded his hands together neatly in front of him like an insurance salesman preparing to reject a claim. “And I know what your answer was at the time, but I was thinking that in the past week or so, given my descent into the thick of danger and my narrow escape from death—”

  When I realized where this was going, I stared at him dumbfounded. I could feel the color draining from my face. “Are you trying to ask me out?”

  He looked relieved that I had interrupted and prevented him from having to spell it out. Leaning forward, he said in a whisper, “Would you?”

  It was one of those moments where I was glad to be dating Curtis.

  “I’m sorry, Dave,” I said, stuffing my hands down into my pockets. “I guess no one has told you. While you were gone, I started seeing someone.”

  Dave let out a small squeak of surprise. His face paled, and his hands flew to his mouth. “Oh. In that case perhaps—perhaps I ought never to have left.”

  “Even if you hadn’t gone to Galveston,” I said in a firm voice, “I still wouldn’t have gone out with you. It’s not like I was looking for a date and so I happened to lasso the nearest available guy. It’s not like it could have been you if you’d only stuck around. He and I are quite happy together, and I can’t imagine myself saying that about any other man in my life currently.”

  Dave said nothing. He bit down on his knuckles, which were now white as his face, and mumbled a few words to himself. It occurred to me, for the first time, that maybe Sarah had left because she’d had to put up with the same behavior.

  ***

  I drove home that night feeling hopelessly confused and worn out. Dave should have known when he asked me out that it was just going to make the rest of the day uncomfortable. We had to sit there together for the next three or four hours managing an old dog, which we eventually had to put down, and studiously avoiding looking at each other. It was with an immense feeling of relief that I walked out the door at 5:00pm into the gray half-light.

  Nightfall wasn’t for another couple of hours, but there was a storm coming in. As I drove home that night, clouds hung low over the prairies like a fleet of invaders from another world, their black underbellies lit by an eerie white-silver sheen. There was no sign of the hogs or the chickens as I unlatched the gate into the backyard; they had all scattered, presumably frightened by the fierce wind that buffeted the tiny house and bent the boughs of the cedars.

  Curtis texted me at around 7:00pm to ask if I wanted to come over to his place for dinner. But by then it had alr
eady begun raining, and after the trauma of being asked out by Dave and having to put the dog down, I wasn’t sure I wanted to see another person for the rest of the night. I just wanted to sit in my recliner sipping oolong tea and reading about the Yule Ball at Hogwarts.

  The wind continued to howl around the tiny house. Mrs. Savery texted me to ask if I wanted to come spend the night inside, where she thought it would be safer. I told her if it got any worse, I would come knock on the back door.

  I fell asleep right at the part where Harry realizes that Barty Crouch is missing and has probably been murdered and was awoken sharply later—it might have been a minute or an hour later—by a loud noise, like a gun going off.

  At first, I thought it must be the wind and reached for my phone to tell Mrs. Savery I would be heading over there. But when I retrieved it out of my purse, I was surprised to find that it was past 2:00am. I must have been asleep for at least five hours, and they would have already gone to bed. Even if I knocked at the window, they would think it was the wind knocking.

  My nerves rattled by the explosion, I sank back down into the recliner. Then, just as suddenly and loudly, it happened again.

  This time, I felt sure it was a gunshot. It was the kind of noise you hear on the fourth of July (and usually for a couple of days before and after), where you can’t tell whether it was a firework going off or a man being gunned down. But one thing I felt sure of: it wasn’t the wind.

  Cautiously, I opened the door and peered outside into the stormy darkness. What I saw there gave me chills.

  Curtis was standing in the garden, out by the tomatoes, holding a shotgun in one hand. Beneath him lay the prostrate body of a hog, its eyes colorless and blank, blood pouring out of the back of its head into the wind-blown grass. At the sound of the gun blast, the other hogs had darted off in all directions.

  “Curtis!” I shouted over the wind’s howling. “What in the hell are you doing out here?”

  Curtis turned at the sound of his name and began walking slowly toward me, still carrying the gun in his hand. “No!” I yelled, goosebumps creeping up the back of my neck. “You put that thing down before you come anywhere near me!”

  Curtis’ face paled, and he gingerly set the gun down in the grass. He stepped forward but kept looking back at the gun every three or four steps as though afraid the hogs were going to steal it.

  “Hope I didn’t startle you,” he said when he was close enough to talk without having to yell. “Them hogs have been in the tomatoes and cucumbers again. I’ve been here all night hanging out with Marshall and Darren; then they went to bed, and I heard these animals rooting around in the garden, tearing up our vegetables.”

  Drawing in a deep breath, I said, as slowly and plainly as I could, “I don’t care what they were up to. You didn’t have to kill them. You didn’t have to come out here in the middle of the night and shoot them outside my window, scaring the living daylights out of me!”

  Curtis stared in stunned disbelief. “Are you really gonna tell me how to take care of my own animals?”

  “As a veterinarian, yes, I believe I have that right!”

  “Veterinarian’s assistant.”

  I took a step forward, eyes glinting furiously. “Do you really want to go there?”

  He raised his hands as though signaling for me to lower my voice. “Look, I’m sorry I said that. But you don’t understand, these hogs have been decimating the garden, I’m running out of options, and you picked up a bad time to start getting sentimental about a couple of mangy animals.”

  “Sentimental?” I pointed a thumb at my chest. I must have looked a crazy sight, standing there in the doorway framed in the lamplight with the wind blowing my hair in all directions and the rain slapping around me. “I’m not sentimental; I’m traumatized. Because, as you know, I’ve bonded with every single one of the animals in this pasture, and here you are in the middle of the night, blasting ‘em to kingdom come!”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Allison,” he said in a mocking voice, “but that’s the reality of farming. Or did you seriously not know where the sausages and hams you gobble up every morning came from? You certainly eat enough of ‘em!”

  I was so angry now I was seeing flashes of red. “Oh, you did not just make fun of my weight,” I said in a voice of deadly quiet. Curtis’ face looked ashen—even he seemed to have instantly realized he had crossed a line—but he said nothing.

  My hands were shaking now; my whole body was shaking. “Go away, Curtis,” I said. “You go home and call your girlfriend or whatever and have her come over and comfort you. She’ll tell you what you want to hear. She’ll say you’re a great man and you were right to kill those hogs, and you don’t have to listen to me, because what do I know?”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want to hear it. Whatever you’ve got to say, just zip it. I don’t want to speak to you right now.”

  I closed the door and climbed into my bed, soaked and shaking, leaving him standing alone in the rain.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Curtis

  I barely slept that night, thinking about how much I had hurt Allie. I didn’t think she’d understood what I had meant, but she hadn’t given me a chance to explain before she slammed the door in my face.

  When I woke up the next morning, I peered through the gray curtain of rain into my parents’ yard. Allie’s car was already gone. She must have gone into work early.

  With a miserable feeling, I put on my boots and sloshed through the dirt and mud to Mama’s house. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until I stepped through the door, and the smell of breakfast wafted toward me: spinach, chicken and mushroom omelets fried in a special sauce of Mama’s own creation and served with Spanish-style rice and hash browns.

  “Mama, that looks tremendous,” I said as she set the table. “You’ve really outdone yourself this time.”

  “I was really hoping Allie would come over this morning,” said Mama, “but her car’s not in the driveway. She doesn’t usually leave this early.”

  I scratched at the back of my neck. “We, uh, had a fight last night.”

  “Oh?” Mama set her trivets down on the table and gave me her full attention. “Nothing too serious, I hope.”

  “Well, it’d have to be pretty serious to prevent her from coming to breakfast.” As soon as I said the words, I regretted them: my remark about her eating habits last night was one of the reasons I was in hot water. “I just mean she doesn’t usually turn down a chance to eat your cooking. I think partly it’s a way of showing you respect, but also she really enjoys it.”

  “Well, I’d hope so,” said Mama. “She certainly eats enough of it.”

  “See, that’s just what I told her! Only she didn’t take it quite as well as if you’d said it.”

  “Is that what y’all are fighting about?” Mama sounded appalled.

  “No, but it came up while we were fighting.” I told her the story of how I’d heard the hogs rooting around in the garden during the rainstorm and tried to scare them away by shooting the leader. “And she objected to that, I think because she was woken out of her sleep by gunfire and it scared her, and because she feels ‘connected’ to all the farm animals.” I only meant to quote her, but it ended up sounding more mocking than I had intended.

  Dad had been sitting at the table this whole time without saying anything, but as I recounted the details of the fight, he leaned forward, listening intently.

  “Thanks for doing that for us,” he said when I had finished. “Honestly, I’d probably have done the same thing in your position, if I’d been out there last night. I’ve tried every means short of killing ‘em to keep ‘em from getting into the garden, and it hasn’t worked. If I’d seen ‘em out there, I’d have just about lost my patience.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” I turned to look at Mama, who nodded her head.

  “And if anybody has a problem with it,” he added, shuffling his paper, “they can take it up with me.”


  “I just think maybe she’s not used to the idea that animals die on a farm,” said Mama as she poured honey into her coffee. “I think if you grew up in a big city like Boston, you’d have been sheltered from some of the realities of life on a farm that we take for granted. You’d go to the store to pick up your ham and never question where it came from. Now it’s looking her right in the face, and she don’t like it.”

  “Do they still teach Charlotte’s Web in school?” Dad asked.

  “I mean, she took this job working for a vet because she loves animals,” I said. “I think she has some sentimental attachment to them.”

  Having said this, I began to wonder if perhaps our conflict was born out of fundamentally irreconcilable differences. She was the friendly, animal-loving veterinarian’s assistant from a city out east; I, the humble son of a poor farmer. We had been doomed from the start.

  ***

  Dad and I went out riding that morning. The sky was beginning to clear after last night’s rains, but in places, the ground was still damp with mud and pools of standing water. We trotted along at a steady pace past large oaks sodden with rain and small cedars standing half-cracked, their trunks bent by the wind.

  I still hadn’t seen Zach since he left for Lindsay’s house on Saturday night. Dad said he had come in a few times since then but had been mysteriously silent about where he had been and what he had done. An old friend of his from high school, Debran Fallows, rode beside me wearing a gray waterproof jacket and a straw hat.

  “You know, I don’t remember you bein’ this good at riding when we was in school,” she told me after we had been riding together for some time in silence.

  “I reckon I don’t remember the subject ever coming up,” I replied.

  But Debran remained oblivious to my condescension. “Matter of fact,” she went on, “there’s a lot about you now I don’t remember being the case in high school. You used to be so tall and skinny, and it seemed like you was always being sent to the assistant principal’s office. I remember when you got in trouble for stealing the intercom and announcing that Brian Oakley’s mom had died from getting syphilis from a cow. Brian Oakley’s mom was pissed!”