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Canine Kisses
On the Thursday after the dinner party, Kaybri informed Noah she wanted to visit the Stoltzfus farm that night. As Noah started to protest, Kaybri cut him off and stated that she intended to leave the clinic at ten and needed him to show her how to get to the farm.
Kaybri was asleep on the sofa in her office when Frank touched her hand to wake her.
“What time is it?” she asked, raising her head groggily.
“It’s six a.m.”
Kaybri found Noah’s and Autumn’s report on her desk a week later. The information was clear without doing a statistical study. The dogs sold by Puppy Camp were dying too young and too often. Of the sixteen dogs that had died, eight had been purchased there. She asked Noah to go with her to Puppy Camp.
As Kaybri walked under the enormous sycamore tree and spotted Frank on his rocker on the porch, she wondered if he had spent the night right there with a tumbler of whiskey in his hand. Fairbanks was still at his feet. There were even more children and pets running across his lawn than there had been the previous day.
Later that day, Tandy and Ethan Danzig arrived at the clinic carrying Linny, their gray Labradoodle. Autumn paged Kaybri and Noah to come to the treatment room right away. When they arrived, Tandy and Ethan explained how they had read every book they could find and watched hours of video online, but the thought of being responsible for Linny and the birth of her first litter was too much for them.
Even though the clinic didn’t start seeing patients until eight, Kaybri arrived at six a.m. on Tuesday. She loved the quiet of the morning, the dew on the grass, and treating the recuperating dogs even if she didn’t agree with how they had arrived at the clinic.
When Kaybri arrived at the clinic, Dr. Frank Stevens and his staff of three greeted her warmly. Dr. Stevens was tall and thin and had only a few tufts of white hair on his head and a sparse white beard. He struck her as quite elderly, and he seemed to have trouble walking, but he had a youthful smile and seemed genuinely delighted to meet her.
Many nights, Esther felt all alone despite her mother’s presence in the house. At night, she would often hear her mother plodding to the bathroom of their small apartment and then the squeak of the medicine cabinet opening and closing. By the time she was six years old, she understood that her mother was taking pills to “make a sad feeling go away,” as she explained it. She said the pills helped, but she never seemed to get any better despite taking them more and more frequently.
It was a gorgeous sunny day for the outdoor graduation ceremony on the quad. When Dr. Stevens, the dean of students, saw Kaybri Lynn seated with her classmates, she left the faculty processional for a moment to say something strange in Kaybri’s ear. “Come see me after the ceremony. I have a contract for you.”
Had she said contract or contact? What could this be about? But first Kaybri had to give her speech. She was the valedictorian of her class of fifty-four at the California School of Veterinary Medicine.
