Лори Касс - Lending А Paw

Rafe looked at the doctor mournfully. “Don’t tell me Minster here was right, that I could lose my arm. Taking these new freaking horse pills will be enough, right? You’re not going to cut my arm off, are you?”

“It’s been known to happen.” The doctor handed Rafe a handful of papers, all of it with teeny tiny print. “Here’s what you need to do.”

“Man.” Rafe hefted the paperwork. “This is a lot of reading. I really need to look at all of it?”

Dr. Kleinow started to say something. Stopped. Eyed Rafe. Eyed me. “Well . . .”

I grinned. He couldn’t have transmitted what he was thinking more clearly if he’d written it on a chalkboard. “Though Mr. Niswander here is a born and bred northern redneck wannabe, he not only graduated from high school, but he earned a bachelor’s degree from Northern Michigan University and a master’s degree from Michigan State.”

“A Spartan?” The doctor frowned. “Yet you’re certain he can read?”

“Hey!” Rafe sat up.

I pushed him back down. “He’ll read it. And he’ll follow the directions this time.” I thumped a gentle fist on his leg. “Won’t you?”

“Yeah, but jeez . . .” Rafe was scanning the instructions.

“Just think of the story you’ll have for the kids in September.”

Dr. Kleinow gathered up the empty gauze packets and dropped them into a wastebasket. “You’re a teacher?”

“Nah. Worse.”

I snorted. “He’s principal of the middle school, if you can believe it.”

Rafe flipped a sheet. “Lucky for me they didn’t have any other applicants.”

An outright lie. There had been dozens, and Rafe had been the school board’s unanimous choice for the job.

“We done here?” Rafe kicked his feet over the side of the bed and slid to the floor. “There’s a little boys’ room that’s calling my name.”

Dr. Kleinow watched him go. “I’d guess he’s an excellent principal.”

“He is, actually.” I picked up the papers Rafe had left behind. “And will be for a long time, assuming I don’t kill him first.”

“What are friends for?”

I smiled at him. He smiled back and the moment became something that made my heart beat a little faster.

“So you two are just friends?” Dr. Tucker Kleinow asked.

I nodded. “All we’ll ever be.” Or want to be. Rafe was a wonderful friend, but it was a brother-sister kind of friendship. The thought of a life spent with him made the inside of my mouth pucker.

“And is there anyone who would be angry if I asked you out to dinner?”

“Not a soul.”

He moved a half step closer. “I find that hard to believe.”

My smile went wider and I moved half a step toward him.

“Hey, Min!” Rafe stuck his head inside the doorway. “Are you ready to go, or what? Back home I got slow glue setting up something fierce.”

“See why we’re just friends?” I asked Tucker.

He nodded. “Of course, it’s good to have friends.”

“And even better to make new—”

Rafe slung his arm around my shoulders and marched me away, yelling my phone number to Tucker.

• • •

Later that evening I thumbed off my cell phone. “Looks like I have a date,” I told Eddie. “What do you think about that?”

He yawned and gave the impression of settling even deeper into the scraps of paper he’d decided were his new home. I wasn’t sure he’d moved at all in the last twenty-four hours. Well, there was litter-box evidence that he’d engaged in some physical activity, but that could have been a trick.

My intention had been to clean up the mess he’d made, but every time I touched the papers, he’d started such a horrendous howling that I was afraid the neighbors would call the police. Not Louisa, since she and Eddie were good friends and she understood how odd he could be, but some of the newer arrivals were blithely ignorant of Eddie’s presence and could easily interpret certain events erroneously.

In the end I’d shoved the shredded papers into an Eddie-sized pile and let him nest on it. He was a truly strange creature.

Now I sat on the floor and ran my hand over him from head to tail-tip. “The last time I went out with anyone was with Kristen and her old boyfriend and a friend of his.” The friend had driven north to ski and the four of us had gone out for dinner at Red Mesa in Boyne City. It had been a fun evening, but we’d parted with a handshake and a quick hug. Though we were good Facebook friends now, even via the Internet it was obvious that no love was going to bloom.

Tucker, though. There’d been a little flame right at the start.

“And a doctor,” I told Eddie. “Go figure.” My one and only serious romance had been with a medical student. We’d met when I was a grad student at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and he was halfway through med school. We’d dated, then lived together while we finished school. Stayed together while he did his residency and I found my first job at a nearby library. Then, when he was done, we discovered we had nothing to talk about. We’d fallen out of love years earlier, but had been too busy to realize it.

“Should I tell Mom?” I asked.

“Mrr.” Eddie rolled on his back, scrunching more papers and offering up his stomach for rubbing.

“You’re right,” I said. “Wait a while and see how it goes. No sense in getting her all excited about grandchildren at this point. I could tell Kristen, though. And Aunt . . .”

I sighed. And Aunt Frances. I wanted to talk to her. Needed to talk to her.

But would she talk to me?

Chapter 13

The next day was a Bookmobile Day. Thessie, Eddie, and I headed to the southern part of Tonedagana County and today was our first run to an adult foster care facility, a small facility where residents need some care, but not the high-level care of a traditional nursing home. If the visit went even marginally well, I had a long list of similar facilities that were excited about the possibility of having the bookmobile make a regular stop.

Actually, the term “excited” wasn’t even close to the reactions I’d received when making the invitational phone calls. After two, I’d learned to hold the receiver away from my ear to prevent permanent damage to my eardrum.

I parked the bookmobile in the shade cast by the tall maple tree outside Maple View Adult Foster Care. As soon as I’d set the brakes, Thessie jumped out of her seat and headed to the back to start wrestling with the heavily laden book carts.

Thessie started down the steps, then paused. “What about Eddie?”

The cat in question was sitting in the middle of the floor, licking his paw and swiping the backs of his ears with it. Lick. Swipe. Lick. Swipe.

“Why can’t he come with us?” she asked. “He follows you like there’s a leash on him.”

There’d been no reason to tell Thessie about Eddie and Stan’s farmhouse, so I hadn’t. “I don’t want to take any chances,” I said. “If he saw a . . . a chipmunk or a bird, he could take off. We’d spend an hour hunting him down and we’d be late for the next stop.”

While we were opening the back door and pushing the buttons to lower the wheelchair lift that could also carry the book carts, Gayle came out to the parking lot. Gayle, the manager of Maple View, had volunteered to be the guinea pig for the first AFC bookmobile stop.

“Hi, Minnie,” she said, smiling. “Hope you brought lots of books. The residents are more excited than I would have guessed.”

I was introducing her to Thessie when a large voice trumpeted forth. “I spy a cat,” she said. “Right there in the window of the bookmobile.” The size of the voice matched the size of the woman who filled the wheelchair from one side to the other. Her white hair was short and curly and she wore a matching knit shirt and pants of lavender. “Gayle? Gayle, do you see?” she called, pointing to my little buddy. “It’s a cat come to see us.”