I was floundering in routine, routine, routine. It was always like this in December and January, but this year the days dragged by. The weather was wet and dreary, never quite cold enough to freeze the drizzle into black ice on the roads, but the sort of interminably gray dankness that settled into my bones and my soul like a pall of dead roses.
The nights were also interminable. I vacuumed the guestroom at two in the morning and relined several kitchen cabinets with fancy vinyl shelf paper. I ran all the television sets all over the house to keep me company. Anything to avoid the silence.
I let the answering machine pick up my calls at home. The Monday before Christmas, the phone rang, and I heard a voice say, "Maggie? It's Nels Olafson."
I grabbed the phone. "Nels? Is anything wrong with Loba?"
He laughed. "She and her three pups are fine."
"She had puppies?"
"Last night. Couple of days early. Thought you'd like to know."
"Is she all right? How was the labor? What sexes are they?"
"Whoa! She's fine. They're fine, two boys and a girl, one gray, the other two probably black. She's denned up, but she seems to be caring for them beautifully. We're leaving her alone as much as we can."
"I'm so glad. Thanks for calling me."
"We thought we'd name the little girl Maggie. Merry Christmas. Got to go."
I said to my three cats, "Even a wolf can make a new life. How come I seem incapable of it?""
Chapter 47
In which Mariah needs surgery
Five days before Christmas, my private line rang at two a.m. I was scrubbing the ovens in the kitchen. When the answering machine picked up, I heard Patsy's voice.
"Maggie, pick up. Now."
"Patsy?"
"Maggie, Mariah's colicking. Bad. We've tubed her and filled her full of mineral oil and walked her. I think she needs surgery. It could be a flipped gut. She's not a young mare."
I sat down hard at her kitchen table. "Can you make it to Mississippi State? They're the closest vet school."
"Can't you do the surgery?"
"I can if I have to. If you are afraid to risk the trip, Eli and I can call Wanda Jean at home and do the surgery tonight. But if you think you can get her there, go. Let them do the surgery. They have more doctors on staff and better recovery facilities. As you say, she's not a young mare."
"You don't mind?"
"Mind? This is a horse's life we're talking about, Patsy. Of course I don't mind. Call them right this minute, get her loaded into your trailer, and drive like hell."
"Thanks, Maggie."
"Call me and let me know how she is." Doubts struck even as I hung up the phone
Had I done the right thing? What if the mare was too bad to endure the four-hour drive to the vet school? Could I have done the surgery?
Then Susan's shining face flashed into my consciousness. If anything happened to Mariah, Susan would be devastated. She deserved the best chance.
Churning with leftover adrenaline and wide-awake, I set up the stepladder beside the naked Scotch pine I'd bought that afternoon and unpacked the Christmas lights. The previous Christmas Morgan had meticulously replaced each light in its separate slot in the original cardboard box from which the string had come. I sank down on the sofa and simply stared at them. I'd never put a light on any of our Christmas trees, including the first one. That had been Morgan's job.
Almost every day I discovered more evidence of his care for us all. When he was alive, he and I didn't often see one another or talk on the telephone during the day. We were both working. Sometimes we didn't see one another at all until I fell into bed. He'd been dead nearly a year now, and so long as I kept doing my job I could almost convince myself that everything was the same, that he'd be there when I crawled into bed.
Then I'd discover something like the Christmas tree lights and I'd feel as though I'd been kicked in the stomach. My sense of loss seemed to grow with each new discovery of his small kindnesses.
I don't know how long I held the boxes of lights on my lap before I stood up and began to unwind them. Get on with it, Maggie. Getting on is what you do, as Eli said so many years ago.
The lights would never be put away neatly again. I didn't have the patience. Morgan used to watch me fiddle with them and fume, then he'd take them away from me, kiss me on the forehead and do them himself.
I shut the cats into the utility room, ignored their plaints, and climbed the ladder with the first string. From here on in, the tree was my sole responsibility. I had to find a way not to hate doing it.
I found Holiday Inn on one of the old movie channels, turned the volume up too loud and sang along. Morgan used to say my voice could single-handedly destroy Karaoke, but tonight I wanted the noise.
"Might as well put on a few ornaments," I said. They, too, were immaculately arranged, from the cracked sand ornaments the children had made in kindergarten to the ornate German glass ornaments that Morgan had begun to collect fifteen years ago. I do not believe in ghosts or visitations, but that night I felt as though Morgan were looking over my shoulder, shaking his head whenever I put two red balls too close together.
By the time I festooned the last curl of red brocade ribbon down the side of the tree, my shoulders screamed, but my spirits were higher. I climbed down from the ladder, turned on the lights and sat on the sofa to contemplate the tree. "Not bad," I said.
The room was a wreck. Boxes lay on chairs and sofa, floor and coffee table. Everything would have to be cleared away before I picked up Sarah and Evan.
I glanced at the telephone. Patsy should be pulling into Starkville right about now if she drove as fast as she normally did. Pray God Mariah had survived the trip and would survive the surgery.
For Susan's sake, for Patsy's sake.
And for my sake.
I stood close to the exit gate at the airport trying to catch a glimpse of Sarah's dark gold hair. I saw a gloved hand waving from the back of a group of what must be Japanese tourists waving Graceland banners.
"Mother! " The voice was certainly Sarah's. I stepped forward with my arms open.
Sarah both hugged me and actually made physical contact with my cheek. When I stepped back I saw that she was glowing. "Mother, this is Evan Stomberger. Evan, my mother."
"Dr. McLain."
"Maggie, please." I had been trying to picture an assistant second unit director with no success. I had finally settled on scruffy and artsy.
I'd been wrong. Evan Stomberger wasn't handsome, but he had a craggy face with broad cheekbones and piercing blue eyes. His tan might originate in a tanning booth in Beverly Hills, but it might be from the actual jungle.
He wore a well-trimmed dark beard streaked gray at the comers of his mouth and short hair that looked as though it might be receding from a broad forehead.
Sarah would be thirty on Christmas. Evan Stomberger must be at least ten years older. He was taller than Nathan, and where Nathan had inherited his father's chunky build, this man was beanpole thin, but moved with the muscular grace of a runner or a swimmer.
Both Sarah and Evan wore starched jeans, turtleneck sweaters, and navy blue blazers. Evan caught my glance at his clothes and smiled. It was a good smile, I decided, open and not condescending. "We're not planning to put on a vaudeville act, Dr. McLain. The outfits are sheer accident."
"Maggie. Dr. McLain makes me feel a hundred."
"Will do." He guided Sarah toward the escalator with a hand in the middle of her back. Both Sarah and Evan had checked immense leather duffel bags stuffed to capacity. There was also a large cardboard box that had obviously been opened and resealed by security. "Presents," Evan said.
"Do you want to go home, or ride around town and show Evan the Mississippi River, or have something to eat?" I asked Sarah.
"Home," Sarah said. She walked behind the truck, then stopped. "Mother, the registration on your truck should have been renewed in August."
"Huh?" I looked at the sticker on the licen
se tag. It did say August.
"You could get a ticket. Why didn't you send the packet in to the registration bureau?"
"They must not have sent me one. I've been so busy..."
She took a deep breath. "No problem. We'll take care of it for you while we're here."
Evan stowed the duffel bags on the rear seat of the track and barely had room to squeeze his long legs in. Sarah climbed into the front and laid her arm along the back of her seat. He reached for her hand. A moment later as I was starting the car, she said, "When did you have the oil changed?"
"I beg your pardon?"
She pointed to the sticker sat the upper comer of my windshield and then at my dashboard. "You're way overdue. And I'll bet you haven't had the tires rotated either."
"Whoa! Sarah, hold up," I said.
She turned to look at Evan. "My father took care of the cars."
"I got it washed yesterday." I felt my face flame.
"It's okay. We'll take care of the tires too."
"Sarah, I'm not totally helpless without your father."
"I know you're not. But when you've been looked after the way you have, it takes a while to get used to looking after yourself"
No guilt dumping. just a straight statement of fact. I nearly wrecked the truck when I turned to stare at her.
"When are Nathan and Lisa arriving?" she asked.
"This evening. Nathan's renting a car, and doesn't want us to meet him, Christmas schedules being what they are. Your father's car is still in Eli's garage, so you have transportation too."
'We'll swap the day after Christmas. You take Daddy's car, and we'll take the truck to the shop."
"Like hell you will," I yelped. "Nobody touches my truck."
"It needs service. I promise we won't break it." She sniffed. "Still smells like eau de equine."
"I like eau de equine," Evan said. "Better than eau de bovine. Eau de sheep never did appeal to me."
Sarah laughed. I laughed too. My Sarah seemed more relaxed and at ease with herself and with me than she'd been since before Pride's death. I decided that if Evan broke her heart, I'd cut his out and feed it to him. If he had this effect on her, then I hoped he'd marry her. Soon.
I caught Evan's eye in her rearview mirror. I could swear he winked. I dropped both of them at the house, told Sarah where to find the keys to Morgan's BMW, all gassed up and scrubbed within an inch of its life, and drove back to the clinic. I didn't have to go back to work. So far as I knew there weren't any patients scheduled, and the boarding kennel was closed for Christmas. This would be the first time Sarah had been in the house since Morgan's funeral. She needed the time to acclimate.
After that business with the truck, I also felt like a ninny.
"Well?" Eli called from her office. Tonesha and Wanda Jean and Duane had all left for the holidays and wouldn't be back until Monday. "What's he like?"
"He's very attractive, seems to like her, and is at least ten years older."
"Ex-wives? Children?"
"Eli, I just met the man." I plumped myself down in the chair opposite her. "Sarah ...she's changed, or at least I think she has. She seems more relaxed, not as quick to take offense."
"Sarah mellowed? Now, that I will have to see."
That evening before the four of us went out to dinner, Eli settled Evan in her guestroom and presented him with a key. "My friend Shep Fischer will be driving in tomorrow morning to stay here as well," she said, "so if you run into a soigne gray-haired gentleman carrying a highball, ignore him. He belongs."
We went to a moderately priced steakhouse. Over Evan's protestations, I paid the check, which made me blink. Probably cheap by Hollywood standards, but more than I'd spent on meals in the last month.
"What does a second unit assistant director do, actually?" Eli asked over the avocados stuffed with crabmeat.
"You know those scenes in the jungle where the bad guys are creeping through the underbrush to ambush the hero, and overhead you can see the monkeys screaming and running away?"
Eli nodded.
"I direct the monkeys."
"You do not," Sarah said, with a proprietary pat on his arm. A nicely muscled arm. "Well, he does, but he also directs the extras in the underbrush. The second unit is frequently off in Prague or Zamboanga or somewhere while the main unit-the one with the stars and the story-is on a soundstage in London or Toronto. In another couple of years Evan will be directing his own pictures."
"Maybe. Maybe not," Evan said. "I'm never out of work, and I make a good living. I don't have the talent or the drive to be Spielberg or Lucas, or even Jean-Luc Goddard. I'd like to direct nice small pictures. What most people don't understand about the business is that successful small pictures with low production costs frequently make much more profit than the blockbusters."
I buttered another roll. I knew I shouldn't, but the bread in this place was exceptional. I wondered where they got it. "I want a happy ending. I get enough tragedy in real life. I prefer fantasy."
"I'd like to direct comedies, but they're much tougher than drama. It's easy to get the timing on a death scene right, but timing a comic love scene takes real skill."
"How about television?"
"Maybe. I've had a couple of offers. Now, sitcoms-that's grueling. But the money's excellent if you have a hit."
Sarah sat quietly through this exchange watching Evan as though every word that fell from his lips was a pearl.
She was obviously head over heels in love. I felt a pang. Did he love her back or was she riding for a broken heart?
Chapter 48
In which Maggie has a close encounter with a steer and has doubts about her choice of profession
Patsy left a message on my answering machine that afternoon. "Mariah's surgery went well. Dan's driving me home. I expect to sleep for twenty-four hours."
Nathan and Lisa's flight was delayed, so we had all gone to bed before they drove up in their rental car. Sarah didn t even get up to greet them, but I did. Then I went back to bed. It was two a.m. Christmas Eve morning. I prayed we'd have a quiet day.
As if.
Four hours later, I grabbed the telephone before it could wake up the children and heard J. L's voice. "It's Christmas Eve," I moaned. "Can't this wait until tomorrow?"
"Maggie, do you think I would be calling you if it could wait? One of my prize bull calves run into a tree sometime last night and broke off a stob in his shoulder. We need to get it out and clean and stitch the wound right now."
I came awake instantly. "How big is the stob?" In the south a stob can mean a length of wood that impales anything from somebody's foot to a forty foot fishing boat.
"Damned thing's sticking three feet in the air. Won't take you notime. We'll have him up and waitin' foryou."
The stick had to be removed before he drove it deeper into muscle or bone. Untreated, the wound would fester. The calf would die.
It was still dark outside. I could sneak out the back, do the job at J. L's, and be back with hot doughnuts before anyone caught me. Sarah would not approve of my taking a call on Christmas Eve, but J. L. was an old and valued client.
J. L. had a bunch of cattle and did well out of them, considering the size of the twenty-year-old Georgian mansion that sat smack in the middle of his property, not to mention the miles of expensive white PVC fences surrounding it. He had a B. A. from Williams and an MBA from Vanderbilt.
We don't raise cows in the south the way they do in Texas or Montana. First off, we think in terms of cows per acre rather than square miles per cow. We graze them on rich grass and clover in the summer and hay them in the winter with bales of hay we've raised ourselves.
Being more often under the eye of the stockmen, however, doesn't keep cattle from getting into the damnedest situations. In my experience cows are dumb, ornery, and will do nearly anything to prevent your keeping them alive and in one piece.
I drove too fast and prayed I wouldn't run head on into another truck doing the same thing. Luckil
y, I only had to slam on my brakes once to allow a fat possum to cross the road in front of me. Apparently, J. L. and his wranglers had managed to move the calf only as far as the small holding paddock before I arrived. It covered about three acres on the top of a small rise. Across the fence the rest of the herd watched in a bunch, no doubt glad they weren't 'it'
A small clump of maple and oak at the comer of the paddock stood stark and leafless. At some point a big old maple had fallen over and lay on its side perhaps ten feet from the others. From the position of the riders, J. L. had been using that tree as a barrier to the calfs movement in that direction.
J. L. and two of his hands were waiting for me. Ramirez was a big, quiet, dark bachelor. I had seen him bulldog a steer. The steer never had a chance.
Jesus stood only a few inches taller than Eli, but was built like a fireplug and wore a perpetual grin. Both men were both top wranglers and worth every dime J. L. paid them.
As I started to open the door of the truck, J. L. walked his horse toward me. For the first time I saw the calf
Calf? The thing was a half grown bull the size of a Toyota. Jesus grinned at me and called, "Hola, Dr. Maggie, we nearly got him."
Ramirez had snubbed his lasso around the horn of his saddle. The other end was looped around the neck of the calf.
Ramirez's quarter horse was backing up and sitting on his haunches to keep the line taut, despite the youngster's best efforts to free him self.
"Y'all let me know when you got the back half too," I said.
Thirty minutes later the score read "calf.. four, cowboys: nothing."
"Hell and damnation!" J. L. shouted as the calf slipped down in the mud on his side and tossed the lasso free again. "I'm gonna shoot the sumabitch!"
"I might have been able to if I had the capture pistol," I said to J.L., "but you swore you'd have him secure by the time I got here."
"Hell, woman, don't rub it in." He spun his horse and trotted past me to keep the calf from bolting back towards the herd. "Once we get him down, Maggie, you ready to shoot him with something to keep him down?"
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