Lost & Found - Jacqueline Sheehan [13]
“Probably nothing. Ever hear of on-the-job training? How hard can it be?” she asked.
“Oh, this is brilliant. Because Bob was a vet, do you think you picked up special dog-warden skills? You hardly stepped foot in the clinic the last few years. Or do you think that working at the college makes you smart enough to do anyone’s job?”
Rocky was jolted by the mention of Bob. This was going to be the place where no one said his name and she didn’t have to say his name. She felt like she had suddenly swallowed wood chips and now they were going to churn through her body.
“We’re talking lost cats and dogs,” she said.
“Just get a tetanus shot right now, Rocky, and if you see a raccoon that’s foaming at the mouth and walking in circles, shoot it.”
“Shoot it? I’m not supposed to be that kind of dog warden. They didn’t give me a gun.” Sparring usually felt good with Caleb, but she had not been able to spar with him since Bob died. She had tried, but she couldn’t find the right equipment.
“Is everything working out with the renters?” While Rocky was still at the motel, Caleb had found people to rent her house.
“They’re harmless. And useless. He’s an English professor, he told me. He asked me about the oil burner like it was a rocket or something. I’m going over there again to give him another lesson in how to run it. Guess they don’t have those in Indiana.”
“Thanks. If Mom calls you to check up on me, tell her that you talked to me and I’m okay. Will you do that? I know she’s going to call you.”
“I should tell her that you sound like shit and you took a job that you know nothing about. Would you at least go get a book that tells you how to recover animals?” said Caleb before he signed off.
Rocky met Tess in the only bookstore on the island, in the nonfiction section, when Tess turned to her and said, “During the winter people on the island either drink too much or read too much. Which are you?”
Rocky wasn’t sure she’d do either and wondered if those were her only choices. She had come to the bookstore to get a book on wildlife of the eastern shores, and ended up getting Peterson Field Guides’ Mammals of North America, a broader selection.
She wondered why this woman would ask such a strange thing. Had she let slip her secret somehow, had she worn it on her face that she might need to drink? Could this woman know that she couldn’t save her own husband when she had the chance, that she couldn’t make him breathe again as he lay on the bathroom floor with shaving cream still thick on his neck?
“Oh, you’re the new one. Maybe you’ve thought of something else to do over the winter.” She put her hand on Rocky’s arm and squeezed it for a second. No one had touched her since she had arrived, other than Isaiah who had shook her hand. Rocky pulled her arm away.
“Welcome to the island. People mostly come here for the summer and leave for the winter. Guess that makes you an opposite. I’m a caretaker for some of the houses over the winter and manage a couple of rental properties in the summer. Let me know if I can help you get acquainted,” she said. She wrote her name and number on a sales receipt.
Rocky took her book home and began to study about the only animal that she had thus far encountered, a cat. Felis catus. The coat is shed and regrown every spring and fall, gestation is fifty-eight days (that part she had known because Bob lamented the reproductive capability of cats) and that cats will refuse to learn something that is not to their advantage. Her own adopted cat demonstrated this by refusing to stay indoors during the day. She arrived at the sliding glass door each evening demanding to be let in and campaigned as heavily each morning to be let out. Rocky obliged.
The first official call that she got was from Tess. “Some fool from the summer left a cat on the north side of the island. It won’t come to me and it looks like it’s starving or sick. Can you come get it?”
Rocky called Isaiah, just to check on Tess, to see if she might be some weird old woman who was left here by her family to haunt the islanders. Isaiah laughed