The Wilder Sisters (6 page)

Rose’s office was upstairs. Halfway up, the narrow hallway snaked to the left into a long, windowless room used for storing purged files and cleaning supplies. Rose stepped inside and shut the door behind her. She set the case of toilet paper on the supply shelf. Going in there to dump files—a task she tried to work on a little on each day—she enjoyed the aloneness, the utter quiet. Also, depending on where she stood, she could unobtrusively eavesdrop on the treatment rooms, the front office, even the kennels. She knelt on the floor to riffle through the file box. All summer she had carefully weeded through the manila folders, removing onetime and deceased clients from active status. Each day she tried to get through another letter of the alphabet, but so far she was only up to
B
. In her hands she held the Brannon file. She remembered the horse, a flea-bitten gray Mrs. Brannon had rescued from an abusive situation. Sultan had lived five happy years in that family’s care. One day the Bronco was in the shop, and Rose had begged a ride home from

Austin. Along the way his pager went off. They stopped to take a look at the silver-tailed gelding, too elderly to withstand the costly colic surgery. Austin gently suggested that to end to his suffering they put the animal down. Mrs. Brannon took the news stoically. Austin had stroked the horse’s neck before he depressed the plunger of the syringe. Later, in the truck, he’d pulled over to the side of the road and turned his face away from Rose. That was the first time she had seen him cry.

Downstairs she could hear Paloma contending with Mrs. Ortega, who had her house dogs, a pair of yappy Chihuahuas—not to be confused with her ranch dogs—groomed weekly.

“Did Maria give you any trouble?”

Paloma didn’t have to answer the question because Mrs. Ortega wrote and acted out dialogue for her pets.

“Maria says,
I wouldn’t do that. Jose and I were good little
cachorros,
yes, we were. We got our toenails trimmed and our
tutus
cleaned and now we’re fresh and pretty for Mami
.”

Rose could imagine the patient expression on Paloma’s face. Mrs. Ortega was the widow of one of the richest ranchers in the state. She managed her late husband’s assets with a shrewdness that impressed even Chance Wilder. Best of all, she paid her bills immediately and in cash. As far as Paloma was concerned, she could dye the bug- eyed, trembling little pooches lime green. Rose made it up to the letter
C
on the files before she quit. Tomorrow she’d deal with anoth- er letter. She left the supply room and headed upstairs.

At the top of the landing, directly across from one another, were their offices. Austin’s featured a shower and half bath. The vet he’d bought the practice from had been open twenty-four hours a day and had probably spent a lot of nights here. Since his time, however, Floralee had grown to support three vets, two of them large-animal, Drs. Zeissel and Donavan. The
OPEN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
sign that used to hang out front under the beams now hung here on the wall. Austin said it was the happiest day of Leah’s life when he took the sign down. The Floralee vets traded off being on call. Beneath the sign was a double-bed-size futon sitting atop twenty equally spaced crates. Inside the boxes were photographs, winter ski clothes, and books. Next to the bed sat a Mission-style armchair. Austin insisted this setup was necessary if he had to stay the night with a tough case, but no one bought into that lie or called him on it. The books beneath the futon

were his dearest possessions. The man was a fool for the classics, a voracious rereader of Steinbeck and Hemingway, an anomaly in the days of television tabloid shows, talk radio, and the three newspapers serving Floralee. The real reason Austin had moved these things in was that Leah had thrown them into the driveway the day she kicked him out. At first she wanted their house to herself. Eventually, when she left Floralee for a larger playground, Austin moved back into his home. Anyone else would have returned the books to their rightful places, but not Austin. If his bookshelves at home were bare, maybe that meant one less thing to dust. If the matched set of Mission chairs suddenly stood solo—well, perhaps he didn’t feel compelled to invite people over. The furniture that stayed here seemed to Rose like a testament, not just to Austin’s fractured marriage but also to his inability to move forward from Leah to trust another woman.

At the opposite end of the stairway, Rose’s office was neatly organ- ized. Her pine desk featured stacking in and out boxes; her paper- work was date-coded and her blotter free of doodles. A donkey-tail cactus hung above her desk, prickly and green, its healthy append- ages nearly glancing the top of her computer monitor. On the left- hand corner of her desk two matching picture frames held photo- graphs, one of the kids riding double on Max, and the other, a clos- eup of Philip, taken a few months before the accident. Her late hus- band had been hiking at Bandelier with his buddy Mike. Philip’s hands grasped the ladder leading out of the ceremonial kiva at the upper ruins. Emerging from the darkness, he was smiling, looking directly into the camera lens, his eyes open so wide that those dark blue circles surrounding the iris stood out, reminding Rose of the doomed O-rings on the Challenger space shuttle. Every time she looked at the picture she couldn’t help but feel he had been thinking about something important, some thought she’d never get to hear, information that might change how she lived the rest of her life. He and Mike trained all year long for the autumn run. They ran the trails to the kiva, then took the four hundred feet of vertical ladders at a clip that would stop anyone else’s heart. Mike could recite the results of the last decade’s Super Bowls, explain which individual plays had led to magnificent upsets, but otherwise he wasn’t much for recalling details. Usually Rose felt comforted by the photo, but lately the broad smile had the opposite effect.

Philip’s customers had expected him to be upbeat as he hawked his company’s industrial product line, which included all manner of adhesives, power tools, and saw blades. To Philip, smiling was a work thing, and in his leisure hours he’d had few grins to spare. She ran her finger over the glass and frowned at the dust. Somehow, the last time she’d cleaned, she had missed his picture.

For a long moment she stood staring into nothing. Had her mar- riage been happy? She’d always assumed so. Then why was it that the longer Philip was gone, the more it felt as if a weight had lifted off her chest? In that airy space that remained, she felt a flutter of panic, as if at any moment she might run out and charge herself a diamond necklace just to obsess about something different. Quickly she ordered her thoughts to redirect themselves. Her computer was calling to her, humming almost imperceptibly, as the earth was rumored to do in nearby Taos, the town where Philip had died. Rose had to concentrate to hear it, but the sound was real, all right, a drone in her ear that made her feel impatient and restless. She leaned forward in her chair and began to juggle numbers into the Advanced Veterinary Systems program she had badgered Austin into ordering. It printed out checks, set up appointments, tracked inventory, and offered a way to store client records that would take up virtually no floor space. Unfortunately, Paloma had an aversion to computers and Austin, understandably, needed concrete proof of all things, so basically she did her job twice in order to make everyone happy.
Someday
, she vowed,
we will get this office running properly
. Until then Rose picked up a pen and started in on the payables. She liked the envelopes stuffed, stamped, and licked, ready for the post office one day early.

Rose had become a bookkeeper the way some people became manager of a store: She’d been standing there when the other lady quit. Compared to grooming dogs and working the reception desk, her earlier position, how hard could bookkeeping be? Pay the bills, figure the taxes, assist in the trenches when blood ran. It was similar to being a wife. You didn’t necessarily have to
love
every little thing you did, you only had to keep things running in the face of disaster.

The intercom buzzed and Rose picked up. “Yes?” “How’s it going up there with the paper and stuff?”

“My head’s above the waterline. How’s it going down there with the furry stuff?”

“A little more interesting than I like it.”

Paloma was the queen of understatement. “Uh-oh. You need an extra set of hands in the clinic?”

“I need a wheelbarrow is more like it.”

“Don’t tell me somebody brought in another dead Rottweiler.”

There was a pause on Paloma’s end. “A drunken veterinarian dragged himself in as best as he could. He kind of parked his truck, too, if you can call leaving it in the middle of the lawn parking. A little while ago he was barking.”

Rose was sure she had misheard. “You mean barfing as in vomiting or barking as in dog?”

Paloma sighed. “Either way, it sounded a lot like a certain ex- wife’s name to me. Will you hold him down while I put him out of his misery?”

Rose closed the file she had been working on. “I’m on my way.” She hung up and checked her watch. There were still things to be grateful for: She wasn’t going to be called into the hospital to identify Austin’s body. This time he had waited until the afternoon to get smashed. The only clients likely to come by at this hour were picking their dogs up from grooming. If there was an emergency, Dr. Zeissel could cover. She wondered if Austin had made it to any of his appointments, and then prayed he hadn’t driven drunk any- where except from the bar to the clinic, a few short miles of back road with very little traffic.

A man could break your heart in a number of different ways, and Austin had them all down pat. He lay slumped against the wall of the room adjoining the small animal surgery. These were the quarters Paloma referred to as the “main brain” of the hospital. On the counter, the Vet Test 8008 printed out blood panels on presurgical patients. Austin was dressed in the same clothes as yesterday, and they were fragrant with alcohol and sweat. His cheek was scraped as if he had been dragged across asphalt, and he was minus yet an- other pair of glasses.

“
Hola, guapa
,” he crooned to Rose as she stood in the doorway. His hands lay slack in his lap. “Wanna come over here and make a sad man happy?”

Paloma shook her head, her long black braid swaying. “What we’d both like is to make a stupid man get smart, but that is beyond our powers. What’s it going to take, Austin? You going to have to wrap

yourself around a tree before you stop this crap? Rack up another DUI?”

Austin cocked his head at Rose. “You hear how she talks to me?” “Hey, you don’t like how I talk to you, fire my ass.”

Rose crossed the room and knelt by his side, offering him her arm. “You’re lucky she talks to you at all. Let’s get you upstairs and into bed.”

“I don’t wanna go to bed.” “Why not?”

“It’s lonely in there by myself.”

She and Paloma exchanged a look and laughed.

“What’s so funny?” He rubbed his mouth, as if that gesture would somehow clarify his slurry speech.

“Hush, Austin. Get to your feet or we’ll both quit.”

The two women struggled but finally managed to upright the man. It was a good thing he didn’t weigh more than 150 soaking wet or they would’ve had to leave him to snore on the tile—which, now that she stood out of breath at the foot of the stairs, didn’t seem to Rose like such a bad idea.

All the way up—Paloma pushing, Rose pulling—Austin muttered the words of wisdom drunks feel are essential to share with the sober world.
Love is a sick joke; trust a stray dog before you trust a woman; the only reliable comfort is found in bottles and bars
. Rose had heard this litany so often she could recite it herself. Then Austin started in on Leah in particular, as if the tall, black-haired woman hovered there in the stairwell, an apparition he could not reach but ached to touch. “Built her a goddamn kitchen the Mayo clinic could have used for surgery. Did she ever so much as dirty a pan in it? Bought her a twenty-thousand-dollar racehorse. She sold it and spent the money on a lawyer. Closet full of designer clothes, turquoise jewelry…” A tremor entered his voice. “Tell me what I did wrong. Didn’t I fuck

her enough?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” Paloma said. “Some girls need it three times a day.”

“I was good for twice.”

In the background a chorus of howling from the kennels started up, and Paloma said, “Hear that, Austin? Not even the dogs believe you. Save it for your pillow.”

They shoved him facedown onto the futon. Rose sat down on the

edge and tugged off his boots. She looked up at Paloma, who was rubbing her crucifix with her thumb and forefinger, mumbling. Ask her outright, and she’d deny wasting prayers on Austin.

“Myself,” Paloma said, “I prefer a chubby boy, one who don’t feel the need to Rogaine the bald spot. That kind, you fill his belly, love what hangs underneath it every once in awhile, and everything stays nice and calm.”

Rose dropped the boots to the floor and was confronted with Austin’s socks, which had holes in the heels because, just like the rest of him, his feet were skinny. “You make it sound simple.”

“It pretty much is, so long as you don’t marinate it in alcohol.” “Some people have a hard time finding their way to calm, Pa-

loma.”

“Especially if they enjoy
loco
.”

Rose shrugged, thinking of the nights when the enormity of the loss of Philip caused her to shake with fear until the sun rose in the sky. Sometimes she had a drink, just to quiet the racing of her heart, but she could never lift the bottle without thinking,
This is what killed my husband
. “It’s just taking Austin longer than most people. He’ll come around. I know he will.”

Paloma laughed. “Sure, in about fifty years, if his liver holds out.

By the way, here are his keys.”

Rose held out her hand. “Thanks. I’ll lock them in the safe after I move the truck.”

“Don’t forget to reset the combination. He had a memory for those things.”

“I won’t forget.”