The appointment was over, and rswfire was still talking to her — that was a lot, wasn't it, that was a whole lot they did to you — the words pitched low and steady, the way a person speaks to something small that has just been handled by strangers. The clinic staff had been thorough. He said so twice, as though the thoroughness itself were the finding worth recording. He asked her if she was feeling okay. He did not wait for an answer he knew wouldn't come.
Six weeks old. That was the number that came back, and it landed against a different number he had been handed earlier by a different vet — three or four months. The correction was not a surprise to him. I knew that other vet just — I just knew not to trust anything that man was telling me. He said it plainly, without heat, and then he said the thing underneath it, the operating principle it had proven: trust your instincts always. The bad reading was discarded. The good one was adopted. That was the whole procedure.
Then came the inventory. Her ears cleaned — no mites, but very dirty. Four kinds of parasites, one of them rare: whipworm, tapeworm, coccidia, roundworms. He worked through the names slowly, feeling for the pronunciation the vet had given him, getting some of it close enough. A syringe by mouth for four more days. A flea treatment today. Vaccinations in three weeks, then a second round three weeks after that. No surgery to worry about yet — she's just a little baby, she's just six weeks old. And spayed, not neutered; he caught himself mixing the terms and corrected it out loud, in the same register he corrected everything else. Bailey would need a preventative deworming, though they thought he was probably fine. Wait for the three-week visit, unless something showed. There were a couple of ways to check.
The flea bath happened outside, at the RV. He had tried to do it without submerging her, and that was a process — his word, delivered with the flat honesty of a man who had just been in a small fight with something that weighed almost nothing. Stay in there. Stay in there. Five minutes. He narrated the countdown to her while it ran. I'm so sorry, baby. I know. I know. One more minute. One more minute, Baby Luna. This is horrible, I know — I wouldn't like this either, but you'll feel so much better afterward. He held the time because the time was the treatment.
Afterward she was mad at him. He said that without apology or interpretation: she's mad at me now, she's actually trying to hide from me. So he gave her the room to. She went into her carrier bundled in a blanket with a ceramic heater running beside it, and he let the space around her stay quiet. The fleas were still visible on her coat, but they looked dead. That was enough for now. A store run for a flea bomb would come next, and then — this was the shape of the hope, stated as hope — she could come out and be part of the whole environment. Meet Bailey for real for the first time. Hang out on the bed. Just integrate into our life.
The personal update came last, and he flagged it as such. He was supposed to be at the dentist that day, top teeth, and obviously this was more important. Rescheduled to near the end of the month, from a campground two hours from this one. And he wouldn't be getting them that day anyway — whoever fabricates them had decided another appointment was needed before finalizing, so there would be an appointment after that, and probably another one after that. Still a lot. He turned it over once and set it down: he was going to stay in here for autumn anyway, so it wasn't a big deal, just going to take longer.
What remained was the winter. He named it and left it open — still got to figure out my plans for the winter — a sentence with no resolution attached, sitting in the same logistical field as a three-week vaccination appointment at a clinic he'd be driving back to from somewhere else, a dental fitting that had grown a tail of further fittings, and a six-week-old kitten in a heated carrier who would forgive him by evening.