He couldn’t help it.
Chapter twenty-one
Emma sat with the dog in the backseat, holding his paw at an awkward angle to keep it elevated while he squirmed beside her, his eyes following hers as she spoke to him. It was hard to know what she was even saying, but the words kept coming all the same, bits of poetry she must have picked up from her dad, the words to a song her mom used to sing. She talked and she talked and she talked, and she was grateful to Peter for not interrupting her—even when he climbed back into the car after stopping at a gas station for directions to the nearest animal hospital—because there was a certain momentum to the whole thing, and she was afraid of what might happen if it broke.
The dog still made a series of pitiful cries now and then, but he had calmed down somewhat once he was lying down. Emma suspected the problem wasn’t so much the cut—though that certainly wasn’t good either—but the discovery that he didn’t have enough good feet left to walk on. And so she continued to rub his ears, stroke his face, run a hand along his fleecy white belly. And all the while, Peter continued to drive.
When it seemed that the dog was resting easily enough, she checked his bandage again, then looked at Peter in the rearview mirror. “Any idea if we’re close?”
“Should be, yeah.” He flicked his eyes up to meet hers. “You’re doing great with him.”
Emma nodded. “I think he’s more scared than hurt.”
“Still,” he said. “You’re keeping him calm.”
They were silent after that, and Emma watched the rise and fall of the dog’s rib cage, the tremble of a sigh going through him.
“I used to want to be a vet,” she said after a moment, so softly that she wasn’t sure Peter even heard her until he glanced up again.
“Not anymore?”
“I’m not any good at science.”
“It takes a lot more than science to be a good vet,” he said. “It takes passion and hard work and common sense …”
“It’s okay, Peter,” she said. “I know what I am, and I know what I’m not.”
“But you don’t,” he insisted. “How could you? We’re only sixteen.”
“Almost seventeen.”
He smiled. “All that stuff can be learned,” he said. “What you’re doing now, that’s instinct. And it counts for a lot.”
Emma looked down at the dog, whose eyelids were flickering, and who was making small twitchy movements with his hind legs. She ran a hand lightly over the blunt end of his missing leg, and he thumped his tail on the leather seat.
When they pulled in to the veterinary clinic, Peter ran ahead of them to get help bringing the dog inside; their efforts at carrying him earlier had been a precarious exercise in flailing and fumbling, the two of them doing everything they could not to drop him, setting him down as gently as possible every few yards. Now one of the technicians appeared with a dog-sized stretcher, and together they heaved him up and onto it.
Inside, the waiting room was nearly full. There was a droopy-eyed Lab curled up beside his owner, a man glumly clutching a large cage that housed a parakeet, and a tiny beagle puppy who threw his head back and howled at them with gusto.
“You two can wait here,” said the technician, a guy who couldn’t have been much older than they were. “The vet’ll take a look at him and then be right out.”
Emma and Peter took seats beside the man with the bird, which made a couple of piercing squawks that seemed aimed in their general direction.
“I wish we could be back there with him,” Emma said, eyeing the door.
Peter leaned forward, and she could see he was reading the signs in the lobby, notices about vaccines and immunizations, puppy classes and special brands of dog food.
“How much do you think …,” he began, then stopped and looked at the tiled floor, his cheeks flushed. “I mean, I wasn’t really thinking … I didn’t really stop to consider …”
“How much this’ll cost?”
He nodded.
“It can’t be that bad,” Emma said. “I’m sure he’ll just need a few stitches. How much could it be?”
“You’d be surprised.”
She lifted her shoulders. “What else were we gonna do, leave him in the woods like that?”
“No, of course not, it’s just …”
“We’ll get to Nate’s house later today, so it’s not like we’ll need much more cash,” she said. “And I’ve still got a bunch of my savings left anyway.”
“Right.”
“Do you?”
“What?”
“Have any money left?”
Peter’s hand went to his pocket as if to examine his wallet, but he seemed to change his mind. “A little,” he said. “But not enough for any unforeseen expenditures.”
Emma realized she hadn’t ever really stopped to consider Peter’s finances. She knew he worked part-time at the barbershop, but she also knew he probably didn’t get birthday money or an allowance like she did, and thinking back on all the meals they’d had the last few days, all the stops at gas stations and restaurants, she felt suddenly terrible for not having thought about it.
“I guess this whole trip was kind of an unforeseen expenditure, huh?” she said, and he nodded, looking somewhat embarrassed. “Look, I have enough to cover this, so don’t worry about it, okay?”
“I’m as much responsible for him as you are,” he said. “I don’t want you to have to—”
“Peter, it’s fine. Really,” she told him. “And if it turns out to be really expensive, I’ve got my parents’ credit card. Which is technically only for emergencies. But I think this counts.”
“I think so too,” he said, his eyes wandering around the waiting room before landing on Emma. “Thank you.”
The swinging door that separated the waiting room from the clinic opened with enough of a clatter to startle both the parakeet and the beagle into another song. The technician crooked a finger at Peter and Emma.
“You’re up.”
The vet—a middle-aged woman in scrubs—was leaning against a counter on the other side of the door, chewing on the end of a pen as she studied a clipboard.
“That’s a beautiful dog you guys have,” she said, looking up as they approached. “I’ve got him sedated at the moment, and he’ll need a few stitches in that paw of his, but I wanted to first get some information from you about how it happened.”