Carolyn McSparren - Listen to the Child

Apparently, Jimmy’s father had spent his days over coffee at the local diner and his nights playing poker and drinking illegal booze with his farmer buddies. His wife had not only worked the farm pretty much by herself, she’d canned, sewed and baked biscuits from scratch three times a day.

Her experience should have made her applaud Kit’s desire to become a police officer and not be dependent on her husband. Instead, she resented anything Kit did that didn’t involve pampering Jimmy. Kit cursed the day Mrs. Lockhart had rented out the Mississippi farm and moved to a retirement condo in Germantown.

“Daddy keeps saying he’s going to take Meemomma and me down to the farm in Mississippi so I can ride a horse. He says he wants me to see where he grew up.” She sighed. “’Course, he never does.”

Until Kit’s accident, Emma had used the sudden and unexplained onslaught of stomachaches or even extra homework to keep from going with her father. Since Kit’s accident, she’d tried to use “looking after Mom” as an excuse.

Of course, Jimmy blamed Kit when Emma didn’t want to stay with him. He would never admit that after so many broken promises, a child like Emma would simply stop asking to be disappointed.

Kit knew Jimmy loved Emma, but she didn’t fit into his lifestyle.

He didn’t seem to realize that all too soon she’d be a teenager and then an adult, and he would no longer fit into her life.

Kit hadn’t wanted to ask him about his support check this afternoon. It was two weeks late. Before, when Kit had been making good money with the police department, the money hadn’t mattered so much. Now, even with her disability pension, she had to watch every penny. Jimmy’s check could at least buy Emma a new pair of Nikes from time to time.

Pushing herself away from the front door, she went to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator and reached for a beer, then stopped and took a diet soda instead. Her mother was right. She didn’t have a problem with alcohol now, but boredom could very well lead to a major one if she didn’t watch herself. Besides, she really didn’t like the taste of beer.

Drink in hand, she walked from the kitchen to the den, where she turned on the television and stretched out in the recliner. She had closed captions on a number of channels, but there never seemed to be anything she wanted to watch. She tried to practice lipreading, but the faces were too often turned away or backlit.

So how to spend the afternoon? Running? Didn’t appeal to her. Besides, it was probably going to rain again any minute.

Riding her bicycle? Without Kev in the basket to warn her about traffic, she was asking for trouble.

The flower beds in the backyard badly needed to be cleaned up and weeded for spring, but she couldn’t get up any enthusiasm for that, either.

She needed a job, dammit! A job that she went to and worked at and then came home and rested from. A job that paid actual money and gave her actual satisfaction. She’d never been a stay-at-home housewife and mother.

What was she going to do with the rest of her life? Live on her pension? Sure, if she wanted to sweat every bill. She’d never wanted to be anything but a policewoman from the time she was five years old.

When the single thing that defines you as a person is taken from you, who the hell are you?

MONDAY MORNING Mac met Mark Scott walking down the hall of the clinic with his little black-and-white mutt at his heels.

“Morning.” Mac bent down and scratched Nasdaq’s ears while the little dog wagged its whole body. “I need to talk to you. Ten o’clock.”

“Okay,” Mark said, looking at Mac suspiciously. “Please don’t tell me you’ve discovered the newest piece of equipment to make you the perfect surgeon and it only costs two million bucks. I get enough of that from my beloved wife.”

“Sarah simply believes in buying the best for our clients,” Mac said with a perfectly straight face.

Mark rolled his eyes. “She’d been after me to buy the best from the first day she walked into this place. She made my life a living hell until I gave her what she wanted.” He grinned. “I got payback, though. She’s not only made me the perfect wife, she’s given me the perfect daughter. Not a bad trade-off for an ultrasound and a laser. So what do you want?”

As business manager of Creature Comfort as well as vice president of Buchanan Industries, Mark split his time between his cubbyhole in what had once been a storage room at Creature Comfort and a palatial office on the top floor of Buchanan Towers. Since Coy Buchanan—Rick Hazard’s father-in-law—had bankrolled Creature Comfort in the beginning, it was only right that Mark keep an eye on the clinic’s bottom line. However, clinic revenue had increased so much in recent months that he was around less and less these days.

“I do not want equipment.” Mac looked down at Nasdaq. “And put that dog on a diet.” He turned his back on Mark and walked toward his office.

He met Nancy coming out of his office with a sheaf of files in her hand.

“Oh, there you are,” she said, and thrust the files at him.

“And I’m supposed to do what with all this?”

“That’s a leading question, Doctor. Drink the coffee I just put on your desk and read them. You’re spaying a couple of cats at nine.”

“Great,” he muttered. Spaying cats, neutering dogs, stitching up gashes and pinning broken bones of animals whose owners let them loose in traffic. Was that all his life had become? He’d wanted to make a real difference. At least Sarah and Eleanor got to work on a variety of animals. The only time Mac saw the inside of a horse was when one of them needed his help, which, given their levels of proficiency, they seldom did. He badly needed a new challenge.

Maybe he should do what Liz Carlyle was doing—go back to school for a year and pick up an additional specialty.

He had a specialty, blast it. He was the best damn veterinary surgeon in the South—possibly the United States.

Yet he spent his nights watching television and his days spaying cats.

Maybe he should sign on for a tour of duty at one of the big African parks—they always needed vets. He could certainly afford six months of little or no money. Ngorongoro, maybe, or Kruger.

His partner, Rick, would have a heart attack if Mac even suggested a six-month leave of absence. He had responsibilities to the clinic.

“Your kitties are waiting for you,” Nancy said from the door.

“Shaved and prepped?”

“No, Doctor, I thought I’d leave all the prep work to you,” Nancy said with a sniff. “Of course they’re prepped. Come on, get your rear end in gear. You’ve got a full schedule, as you might know if you’d bothered to read what I left you.”

“Someday I’m going to fire you!” he called after her.

“One can but hope.”

He grinned. Anytime he started feeling sorry for himself, Nancy brought him up short. No matter how he snapped and snarled occasionally, he was doing the thing God had put him on this earth for, and doing it well.

Nancy, on the other hand, had been an up-and-coming professional Grand Prix show jumper on the verge of the big time—long-listed for the Olympics. Then the degeneration in her cervical vertebrae progressed so far and so fast that riding became agony for her.

Three operations had relieved most of the pain, but she could never ride again. She seldom talked about her neck, and when she did, she joked about it. But every time a horse came into the clinic, whether it was a small pony or that Percheron mare with the foal, she would go back to the stalls on her lunch hour to pet and hug it. Her eyes were always suspiciously red afterward.