Wednesday, 10:00 a.m.
I left him asleep with no keys, a glass of water on the nightstand, and a note on the back of a feed-store receipt that said Clinic till noon. Sleep. Call me. There is nowhere to put a note where it doesn't look like a note. I propped it against the glass, where he'd see it before he saw anything else, and I went down the stairs on the wall side, and the fourth one kept its mouth shut for once.
The receiver rode on the passenger seat, hissing. The breath came through it faint and regular as far as the Ekbergs' mailbox, half a mile down the road. Then the hiss closed over it like water over a stone, and I turned it off.
Twenty-six hours to noon Thursday, less the drive.
I had a lameness recheck at 10:30 that I couldn't cancel without Marit asking why. I also had, in that office, a beige filing cabinet, and Osric, who had leaned on it on Tuesday afternoon and said my number back to me. It wasn't much of a plan. It was the one that fit in a truck.
* Sorley Equine sits at the edge of Marten Falls on County Road K, a long metal building with a gravel lot and a trailer ramp worn shiny, and the bell over the door tells the whole place you've come in whether you like it or not. Marit was at the desk under the ficus that nobody waters but her. Fifty-eight, reading glasses on a beaded chain, a voice that has heard every excuse a horse owner owns and isn't finished listening.
"You look like you slept in a trailer."
"A mare colicked. She's fine."
"Good, because Mrs. Sundby's been in the back since ten past with Waylon and wants it known."
I didn't go to the back. I went to the filing cabinet and put my hand flat on top of it, where his elbow had been. Four drawers, a dent in the second where a client once kicked it. From there I could see the counter, the door, and the exact square of floor where I had stood on Tuesday with my arms crossed saying three ninety-one two. Two feet from my elbow was where a client would stand to sign a slip.
"Marit. Yesterday, when Osric and I were going at it about the note. Who was in here?"
She looked over the glasses. "In here?"
"I raise my voice. I hate that people hear it."
"Everybody hears it. It's the best show in Marten Falls after the Legion meat raffle." She thought. "You and Osric, me, a couple of clients at the counter. I don't remember faces, Hanne, I remember what they bought. I'd have to look at the till. Why? Did somebody say something?"
Every word I had was one I couldn't use. Rule four. "No," I said. "Never mind."
I didn't ask her to look at the till. Looking would have cost her a question of her own, and I had four rules and none of them left room for questions. She read me the pink slips instead, at the speed of a woman who's been reading them since 2003: the rendering truck Friday; the Aunes had called Monday from Canada, up at her brother's till the twenty-fifth, and Cal needn't come about the feet. "And the reminder machine rang the Lindahls at five this morning about their wormer, because somebody set it for a.m.," she said, "and it wasn't me." I took the slips. I was looking at the register.
Waylon was a bay Quarter Horse with a left hind that had been off since April. I ran the workup like a route I drive every day: jog him out on the concrete, hold the hock flexed for a minute, let him go and watch his first three strides. He hitched. He always hitches. I wrote flexion, three out of five, positive*, and Mrs. Sundby said, "You're so thorough, Doctor," and I couldn't have told her one thing I'd done.
At the end of the corridor, in the alcove outside the surgery, Osric was scrubbing. He does it like a man taking a grudge out on a dirty pan, sleeves shoved up, a brush in each hand. He's six-four and stoops to make up for it. He had a pre-purchase on a Hanoverian mare in bay two and a buyer from Edina on the phone every twenty minutes.
"Thursday, two o'clock," he said, not looking up. "The bank. Somebody's got to be on that call who can add."
"I'll be there."
"You said that in April." He rinsed to the elbow and held the arms up, dripping. "It's a rope, Hanne, I keep telling you. You can pull on it all you want. It doesn't get shorter."
I put a hand on the wall.
It was the paint, cool and a little rough, and I held it as you hold a stall door when the horse behind it has just moved. The note is a rope, Hanne. You know that. It hadn't been his voice. It hadn't been anyone's. But there were the words, in his mouth, in the ordinary light of the corridor, with the water running.
"You all right?" He looked at me then, properly. "You look like a foaling."
"Long night."
"The mare?"
"The mare."
"Go home early," he said, and went through the swinging door backward, hands up, a man who had just told his partner to go home and would have been astonished to be thanked.
I stood there until the door stopped swinging. Then I walked around the corner to his office, because his desk is where the Lindahl heifer's chart lives, and that was a true reason.
His office is the size of a stall and looks like one, tidy in a way that is entirely for show. Under the coffee mug on the blotter, squared to the edge, a letter.
I didn't pick it up. I moved the mug.
Northline Veterinary Partners. A logo like a compass rose. Dated the twenty-eighth of May, addressed to Dr. O. Quist, signed by a V. Ashworth, Vice President, Acquisitions. The number on the second page was seven figures, and it was mine, or the practice's, which is the same thing. I read down. …This valuation is contingent upon resolution of Dr. Sorley's majority interest by June 30.
Thirteen days.
It didn't say purchase. It didn't say buyout. It said resolution, the word a lawyer uses when he means it will end one way or the other and he'd like you to pick. Since the twenty-eighth of May he had sat across from me at three Tuesday arguments and said nothing about Northline. He had known the figure to the dollar. A practice with no note on it is worth more than one with a rope round its neck, and a partner who wants the practice has a use for a majority owner with her hands full, or gone.
I couldn't make that a phone call. I couldn't make it not one, either.
"That's mine."
He stood in the corridor. He couldn't touch the door frame without wrecking a ten-minute scrub, so he stood with both forearms up, wet to the elbow, as if at gunpoint.
"It was under your mug."
"It was under my mug because I put it there." No heat in it. It was cold and flat, a voice I'd only ever heard him use on drug reps. "Put it down."
I put it down.
"Squared to the edge," he said.
I squared it. "Osric—"
"Not in a doorway. Not with a Hanoverian on the table." He looked at me the way I'd look at a horse that had just kicked me, wondering how much of it was fear. "Out, Hanne."
I went.
* I made the call from the truck in the clinic lot with the engine off and the windows up. The bank has a direct line for people who've been customers since before they had a direct line. Gary Mattson picked up on the second ring, and a chair creaked.
"Hanne. I've got you down for Thursday at two."
"That's not why I'm calling. If I needed cash by noon tomorrow. A lot of it."
"How much is a lot?"
I said the number. There was a pause with a squeaking chair in it.
"In currency," he said. "Hanne."
"In currency."
"Not by noon tomorrow. We order that out of Minneapolis, with notice and two signatures and a reason. Friday's the soonest, and I'd be pushing." A breath. "And I'd have to file the report. Anything over ten thousand, and a second one if the reason's unusual. It's done for me." His voice went careful. "Is something wrong?"
"A horse deal. Private sale. A man who wants cash."
"Then tell him no." Kind, and firm. "And I'll see you at two tomorrow, with Osric, and we'll talk about April and May."
April and May. The two payments the practice hadn't made. The note is $176,550, signed in 2016 with my own name on the guarantee line, and I had read every page of it twice, because I watched my father sign a stack of papers he didn't read when I was fourteen. I said thank you. I put the phone in my lap and watched a wasp work its way up the windshield from the bottom.
Friday. The voice had given me until Thursday noon for a sum no bank in Wisconsin would hand me until Friday. Somebody had worked that out. Or nobody had, and I could not tell you which frightened me more.
I drove home with the windows down. The wasp rode with me as far as the county road, where the wind found it.
* I'd turned the receiver back on at the county road. Static for miles, and then a half mile from the lane the static thinned to the plain plastic hiss of a room, and I turned the volume up and put my head to it.
The hiss went on. No breath. No catch at the top, no long letting-go.
I don't remember the turn into the yard. I remember the truck door hanging open, and the gravel, and the kitchen empty, the stove clock saying ten past twelve. I remember the fourth stair going off under me like a shot, and nobody up there to say anything about it.
The bedroom door stood wide. The sheet was thrown back, still creased in the shape of him. The glass of water was where I'd left it, and my note was on the floor.
The window over the bed was open all the way to the road, and the curtain went out through the screen and came back, and went out again.