He avoided them even in his practice. Nancy usually spoke to distraught parents about Bobby’s rottweiler or Betty’s kitten.
You could count on animals to act like animals, so he preferred to devote himself to them and not to the owners who caused so many of their problems.
He said goodbye to Big and walked back up the hall to his office. His footsteps echoed on the tile floor. All the treatment rooms were soundproofed, so once he had closed the door on the kennel, he could no longer hear the whines and barks of the patients. The clinic felt almost eerily quiet.
As he reached the door of his office, the front-door buzzer sounded.
Good. An emergency. Maybe something to get his teeth into, to keep him from feeling as though he was the last human being on earth.
He walked into the reception room and peered through the glass doors.
His heart bounced into his throat. It was that Lockhart woman. He’d know that hair anywhere.
He opened the door for her.
“I’m here to see Kev.”
“Yeah. Come in.” He stood back and held the door.
She turned away from him and called, “Hey, Em, it’s okay.”
The passenger-side door of an elderly but well cared for red Jeep opened and a slight figure jumped out and ran up the stairs.
A child! A tall, skinny girl in oversize jeans and sweatshirt. Obviously Kit Lockhart’s child. There couldn’t be half a dozen people in the city with hair that extraordinary dark red. As she bounced up the steps, he saw that she had missed out on her mother’s green eyes. Hers were hazel.
She might be a beauty someday. At the moment she was as uncoordinated as a day-old foal.
He took a step back.
“Is he okay? Can we see him?” the child asked. “We brought him some of his toys.” She held out a brown paper sack.
“Whoa, girl. This is my daughter, Emma. Emma, this is Dr. John MacIntyre Thorn. He’s the man who saved Kevlar’s life.”
“Uh-huh. Can we see him now?” She slipped past him.
“Um, yes. Please follow me. And be quiet.”
Fat chance, he thought. He’d learned about the habits of prepubescent girls from growing up in the same house with his younger sister, Joanna. They invariably squealed every chance they got. No doubt this one would do the same.
As they came to the door of the ICU, he pointed to the Quiet sign. He pushed open the door and stood aside. The child shoved past him, then stood stock-still a foot inside the door. He nearly tripped over her.
“Oh,” she whispered into the immediate stirring of whimpers and meows.
“Kevlar’s over there on the bottom tier.”
She went to the corgi and dropped to her knees in front of his cage. “He’s Mom’s dog, really,” she said, pressing her open palm against the wire. “He works for her. Can I get him out and pet him?”
“Carefully. Don’t let him run around. Just hold him and pet him. You can give him his toys before you leave.”
“Thanks,” said Kit as she joined her daughter on the floor. “Hey, Kev,” she crooned. He came into her lap, licked her chin and settled quietly while mother and daughter bent those extraordinary red heads over him.
Mac felt the need to talk, to tell them about the incision, the prognosis, how beautifully the dog was doing—anything to interrupt this tableau that pointedly excluded him. But he couldn’t speak to Kit—she couldn’t see his lips. He had no idea how to speak to the child.
Emma solved the problem for him. She stood up awkwardly, but with the fluidity of young joints, and began to wander around the room while her mother continued to pet Kev. He watched her long fingers caress the dog’s pelt, and felt a shiver down the back of his neck.
“What’s wrong with this little dog?” Emma asked.
“What? Oh—let’s see.” He prided himself on knowing his patients. “That’s Chou-Chou. A bichon frise. Cataract surgery on the left eye. We’ll do the right one in about six months.”
“He was going blind?”
“You know about cataracts?”
“My granddad had them. What about this one?”
“Her name’s Rebel. She’s a boxer. Had a flipped intestine. Not all that rare in large dogs. But it kills quickly if it’s not surgically corrected.”
She poked a finger into the next cage where a large black-and-white cat slept and shivered from time to time. “This one?”
“Her name’s Folly. She got hold of some antifreeze. There’s been so much liver damage we may not be able to save her.”
“Oh, poor kitty! We have a cat named Jo-Jo, but he never goes outside.”
“How does he get along with Kevlar?”
“When Mom brought Kev home, Jo-Jo spent four days under the towels in the linen closet. Then he decided that if Kev was going to stay, he’d better get used to him. Now they’re good buddies.”
Mac had fallen into step beside Emma as she checked every cage. He found himself explaining all his cases almost as though he were talking to an adult.
Exactly as though he were talking to an adult, actually. Emma seemed to understand what he said, and when she didn’t, she asked for explanations.
He discovered he was enjoying himself.
“Hey, Em, let Dr. Mac off the hook,” Kit said as she unfolded from the floor with the same ease her daughter showed but with much more grace. She held Kevlar against her chest. “He’s got stuff to do.”
“Doesn’t look like he’s got any other stuff at all,” Emma said.
“Emma Lockhart!”
He laughed. “She’s quite right. I was reading the Sunday paper and getting ready to check the large-animal patients in the back when you arrived.”
“Large animals?” Emma asked suspiciously. “What kind?”
He shrugged. “Cows, sheep, horses—”
“Horses? You got horses?”
Kit groaned. “You just hit the hottest button you could. This child has never even been on a horse, but she is horse crazy.”
He glanced at Emma’s shining face. “I don’t work on the large animals so I don’t know if we have a horse in the clinic at the moment,” he said. “I haven’t checked the charts.”
“Could we see? Could we, please?”
If she’d whined, he probably would have said no, but she sounded enthusiastic and excited.
“I don’t see why not.”
“Listen,” Kit said, “you don’t have to…”
He didn’t attempt to answer her, but took Kevlar gently from her arms, put him back in his kennel and gave him his toys. “Here, boy, play with these.”
“Bye, Kev,” Emma said. It was obvious she was eager to get going.
“See you tomorrow, sweetie,” Kit said. She touched Mac’s arm so that he faced her. “When can he come home?”
“Tomorrow, if he doesn’t develop an infection. But he won’t be up to par for a couple of weeks.”
“Can he work for me?”
“So long as it doesn’t entail running up and down stairs too often, I