Tennessee Vet

“Be careful. This place will suck you in. You’ll discover all sorts of interesting ways to take up your time that are not academic.”

“Fine. I need a quiet place where I am totally alone or surrounded by strangers. I am fed up with everyone I know commiserating with me over the accident. Nobody mentions Nina any longer. After three years, it is assumed I have gotten over my wife’s death. I have not. I’ll never be fully alive again without her, but that’s nobody else’s business.”

“I suspect she would have kicked your butt if she thought you used her death as an excuse to stop living yourself.”

“No doubt. Up to now I could hide in rehab and in hospitals. Since that is no longer an option, I am hiding in your rental cottage. At least I can avoid being checked out to see whether my limp is any better as I walk across campus.”

“What do you expect?” Emma said. “You nearly lost your leg, Stephen.”

“I know. I was there.”

“If that truck had been any bigger, you probably wouldn’t be here to complain about your leg.”

“No doubt. But I am here and I do complain on a regular basis, and I intend to finish my rehab out here in what my daughters call the middle of nowhere. My dean says ‘write, write, write that blasted textbook.’ The doctor says ‘walk, walk, walk on that leg.’ I’ll probably always have to use a cane, he says. No way, say I. I’ve already missed teaching the spring semester, I dropped my classes for summer school and I’m being allowed to take the fall semester as a sabbatical to write. By next spring I expect to be back a hundred percent.

“Now, about the rent on— What do you call it? The Hovel?” He pointed across the street toward an old-fashioned Tennessee farmhouse sporting a fresh coat of pale gray paint and dark red shutters. “Doesn’t look very hovel-like to me.”

“Not now, maybe, but you should have seen it before my stepmother, Andrea, came up and redecorated.”

“I’m sure Andrea did a good job. She always does. So, how much rent? I may only be here for a couple of months full-time, but I will probably continue to use it on weekends, so I’ll be happy to sign a lease for six months with automatic renewal for another six.”

“I wouldn’t dream of charging you rent.”

Stephen cut her off by raising his hand. “No. Unless I pay the going rate, I cannot come. I am hardly destitute, Emma, and Andrea said you had redone the place to rent. So, how much per month?”

“What do you think of this for rent?” She gave him a figure.

“Much less than it would be in Memphis or Nashville. I accept. I’ll drive back up this evening with the rest of my stuff and move in, if that’s all right,” he said.

“And I’ll feed you dinner.”

“Give me a rain check for tonight. I’ll be back much too late. How close to the stove can you stand?”

“Now, was that a nice thing to say?” Emma patted her belly and chuckled. “Close enough. In a sense we’re both invalids.”

The smile he gave her was real. Fleeting, but real.

“Your problem will disappear in a few months,” he said, still smiling. “Mine will last a good bit longer. My doctor says the knee will never be perfect. Maybe not, but I refuse to dodder into old age with a cane in my hand. I’d have to grow a beard and wear glasses with a little chain attaching them to my jacket so I don’t lose them. I don’t think so.”

“Do you need to go look at the house again?” Emma asked.

“I have to drive an hour and a half back to Memphis to pack.” He set the ferrule of his cane on the floor between his feet, then began to lever himself up.

Across the coffee table, Emma grabbed the arm of the sofa and began to hoist her heavy body to a standing position.

Halfway up, they caught sight of each other’s predicaments.

And fell back grinning at one another.

Five minutes later, as she waved him down her gravel driveway to the road in the Triumph Spitfire sports car he had owned as long as she had known him, she wondered how on earth to drag him back into life.

Well, it might be kicking and screaming, but she’d manage somehow. She owed it to Nina and his daughters. Nina would have wanted him to find someone else wonderful to spend the rest of his life with. Emma knew a dozen women who would jump at the chance.

CHAPTER TWO (#uca6a9067-0996-59b4-8ab1-f282274ba986)

DR. BARBARA CAREW, DVM, large and small animals, finished stitching the torn ear of Hubert, a French lop rabbit that had played too rough with his housemate, Louis, the Belgian mastiff. According to Louis’s owner, the big dog was miserable and missing his buddy. Usually Hubert—pronounced you-bear—ran Louis ragged. This was an unfortunate accident, but Hubert was going to have to be guarded from that sort of rough-and-tumble play for a couple of weeks, at least until the stitches were removed. Then the pair would have to be supervised, because unfortunately Hubert thought he was more than mastiff-size and a whole lot tougher.

“All right, my little French friend,” Barbara said as she scooped up the giant bunny. “Off you go to your cage and nighty-night.” She settled the rabbit down, checked to be certain that everything was in order in the clinic’s office and reception area, walked out the back door and across the parking lot. Outside, Mabel the lame goose was securely caged with her current crop of goslings.

“No foxes tonight,” Barbara said and tossed the big goose a handful of grain. Not that Mabel wasn’t a match for most creatures that wanted to devour her. But she couldn’t protect her goslings if she was busy protecting herself.

Mabel snapped up the grain but didn’t even chuckle a response. The goslings snuggled deeper under her. Actually, no fox in his right mind would challenge Mabel, although it might make an attempt to snatch a gosling.

Barbara walked across the grass to the barn and through it to her apartment, built at the far end. She was so tired, she was not certain she could bend down to take off her boots without falling over. She prayed the clinic answering service could handle any calls until morning.

She needed sleep more than she needed food, but she tossed a frozen diet meat-loaf dinner into her microwave and started the timer. She’d still be hungry afterward, but she’d try to endure without ice cream or cookies. She tossed her scrubs into the laundry hamper and slipped into her largest, oldest, softest T-shirt and a pair of Bermuda shorts, then poured herself a diet soda.

“I would kill for a glass of wine,” she said aloud. “But sure as I do, I’ll get called out to some cow that can’t calve.”

She stayed on her feet until the microwave dinged. “If I sit down, I will wake up in my chair tomorrow morning. And why am I talking to myself?”

Because there’s no one else to talk to.

The dinner was anything but delicious. The meat loaf tasted like cardboard and the mashed potatoes were one congealed lump. Still, it was food. Not enough, but food.

She jumped a foot when the gate alarm at the road sounded as the gate opened, and the motion-sensor lights flashed on in the clinic parking lot as someone drove around the building and stopped at the back door. “What the heck?” She yanked on her boots back over her bare feet, grabbed her big flashlight and went to see who in Sam Hill was coming in this late without calling ahead.

* * *

“IS DR. CAREW AVAILABLE?” A male voice, deep baritone. He was standing at the back door of the clinic, silhouetted against the lights. All she could tell about him was that he was tall and sounded as though he had some education.

“I’m available,” Barbara said. “And the only Dr. Carew there is.”

“I’ve got an emergency. Emma Logan told me your clinic was down this way but didn’t give me your phone number. I couldn’t think of anything to do but search you out.” Behind him the very bright lights of some kind of fancy sports car shone directly into Barbara’s eyes. “It may be too late to help him, but he was moving, and this is all I could think of.”

“You hit something on the road.” Probably a deer.

“It hit me,” he said. “Flew smack into the front of my car.”

“So you squashed an owl?”

“Not quite. Take a look.”

He stood aside. Barbara turned on her powerful flashlight and walked up to the front of the car. “You mind turning your lights off? I can’t see squat.”

A moment later the headlights went out. Barbara allowed her eyes to adjust to the lower light of the motion sensors under the eaves before she looked at the damage to whatever it was. She fully expected it to be dead.

It shrieked. A hair-raising, enraged and I’m-alive-here-people shriek.