Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

“What? I know you’re Lauren. I’m not an idiot. Shouldn’t you be doing your homework?”

“I don’t have homework anymore.”

“Well, why the hell not? You think you can just coast through school without doing your homework? Young lady, you’re going to be in for a real surprise when you hit high school.”

“Okay, Mom. Eat your chicken.”

“I hate chicken. Do we have any cookies? I’d like a peanut butter cookie. With milk. Lauren would let me if she was here. Where is she? I’d like to call her now.”

Lauren had been worried about her ability to care for others. She thought herself prone to wilting under the smelly reality of human corporality. It was almost laughable now. Lauren washed food stains and worse from her mother’s clothing, struggled to get her spongy body into the shower, kept the knives in a locked drawer, endured horrible looping conversations that weren’t conversations as much as they were brutal endurance events. Demonic anger followed by tearful bouts of recognition and apology. Her mother had cataracts coming on, and when Lauren looked into her eyes it was like watching a star die back there in some far distant galaxy behind the white veil of the Milky Way.

4.

At age thirty-nine, Lauren fell in love for the first time. She was working at the veterinary clinic in town as an assistant. She’d clean cages, fill food bowls, calm skittish cats, and help lift large dogs onto the table for surgery. She was living alone. Still renting the house she’d grown up in.

She’d had her mother cremated and she hiked up to Livingston Peak with the tin urn of ashes in her pack. She waited for the wind to gust, and tossed the ashes up and they were borne away, a small matriarchal cloud, scudding across the sun. At the top of the mountain there was a USGS survey plaque bolted to the rock and a small cairn of stones. On the top of other mountains Lauren had climbed there was often a container with a logbook or just loose notes scribbled by other hikers on whatever paper they had handy. She liked to read these little glimpses into the lives of other walkers. Most were simple. Some were flippant. Some were beautiful. She’d brought a small spiral-bound notebook and a pen and she sat on the rock cairn and tried to think of what to write. She wrote the date. She sat and thought and then wrote: My mom and I made the hike this morning. It was nice and sunny. My mom is staying for a while. I’m heading down now. She signed her name, and put the notebook and pen in the plastic bag and pushed the bag down into the tin, pressing the lid down tightly. She wedged the urn in between some rocks and left it there, hoping the mountain goats would leave it alone so others could do as she had.

—

Lauren put the knives back in the drawers, threw away the packages of moist wipes and the weekly pill dividers and adult diapers. She had long silent meals with a magazine open on the table and a glass of wine in her hand. She’d felt mostly relief at her mother’s passing, and was fairly certain this made her a bad person. She worked as much as possible at the clinic, picking up extra shifts whenever she could. She occasionally thought about returning to school, but it had been so long. She couldn’t imagine sitting in a classroom. Coming home from work to memorize anatomy terms.

She got up early. Made coffee and drank it while she walked the two miles to the clinic. Work was work, but with the arrival of the new veterinarian, Dr. Genther, it had become something more. Sandra Genther, DVM, was short and compact. Wide hips, strong legs, thick black hair that she kept in a braid twisted up in a severe bun. She’d come to work at the clinic in Lauren’s third year of employment there and surprised her by asking her name and remembering it, using it even, in conjunction with a smile, every morning when she walked through the door. The previous in-house vet had retired. Leif Gustafson was a taciturn old Swede who’d ignored the assistants as much as possible outside of the occasional barked order. In the three years she’d worked with him, Lauren couldn’t recall Gustafson once using her name. They had worked well together. But, this new doctor — Dr. Genther. Dr. Sandra. Dr. Just-call-me-Sandy, honey —she was something altogether different. She came from some deep southern state — Louisiana, or Alabama — one of those places. Dr. Sandy could calm a high-strung bird dog with a touch and a few murmured words. She was gentle, but she was strong too. Lauren had seen her single-handedly hoist a sedated ninety-five-pound Chesapeake Bay retriever from floor to operating table. She worked with a smile, and was a hearty clutcher of arms and rubber of backs and giver of enthusiastic high-fives.

She was a few years older than Lauren and had small parentheses-like creases that formed at the corners of her mouth when she smiled or was concentrating, but otherwise her face was smooth and unwrinkled. Sometimes the nature of their work would put the two of them in close physical proximity and from these instances Lauren learned that Dr. Sandy smelled like GOJO citrus soap and that she had a few strands of gray hair interspersed within the black.

Dr. Sandy was gentle and she was strong and she had lived her whole life in other places. She started giving Lauren hugs in the parking lot sometimes before they went their separate ways. Nothing much. Just a quick tight squeeze and a good job today; see you tomorrow . Lauren was still walking to and from the clinic then, and she’d wave as Dr. Sandy pulled out and drove by in her Subaru wagon.

And then, on one rather blustery cold evening in late fall, already nearly dark at five-thirty, Sandy slowed and pulled over next to Lauren who was striding toward home on the sidewalk. She reached over and opened the passenger door.

“Get yourself in this car, honey.”

“I don’t mind walking. I prefer it, actually.”

“Oh, come on, it’s colder than a well digger’s ass out there.”

Lauren laughed. Her nose was running, and she sniffed and wiped it with her glove. She looked up and down the street. The wind coming through the power lines sounded like a Saturday morning cartoon ghost. Dr. Sandy patted the passenger seat and smiled. Lauren got in.

“That was always my dad’s line, by the way. About the well digger and his ass. I use it whenever I can, and I think of him. He’s been gone for a good while now.”

“My mom always said it’s hotter than the hinges of hell.”

“Don’t get me started on hot, girl. I’m from Lafayette. I know a few things about hot. It’s hotter than a tick on a dog’s balls, hotter than a half-bred fox in a forest fire, hotter than a two-dollar pistol on the Fourth of July — it’s so hot I want to take off my skin and sit in my bones.”

They were both laughing now, and Dr. Sandy was slapping her own thigh and Lauren’s alternately. She drove Lauren home and they sat in her car, talking, for a long time. They picked up the next night right where they left off. And the night after that. And before long they were taking turns cooking each other dinner and sometimes, at work, Lauren would be standing at the sink washing her hands, and Dr. Sandy would come up behind her and rest her hand right on her hip. She’d reach around Lauren with her other arm and pull paper towels from the dispenser and give them to her with a smile, close, practically in an embrace, their faces almost touching.

Years removed, Lauren would realize that if this had happened to her — if Dr. Sandra Genther, DVM, had happened to her — when she was younger or older, her life might have taken a surprising and beautiful turn. It was strange to think about, but the young and the old seem to be uniquely positioned to take advantage of the opportunities that life affords. It’s that middle time that’s a bitch. That time when you first realize without a doubt you can’t do everything you wanted to do, or be everything you wanted to be, but you still cling to the hope that if you just make the right choices, it will all work out in the end. Of course, as a result, you are paralyzed by indecision.