When she moved past him to get her coat, he snapped back to the moment. “You’re leaving?”
Smiling, she tugged the pink jacket from a hook. As she drew it on, she nodded. “I think it’s best.” She drew her purse from where it had been hanging beneath the coat. “You need someone who’s quick on her feet, not someone like me, who gets rattled and forgets her name.”
As she started for the door, Isaiah made a snap decision. “I need someone who loves animals.” Even as he spoke, he had to wonder what he was doing. “Working in the back, you seldom have to deal with emergencies.”
“No?”
“By the time a dog or cat is put in a kennel, the worst is usually over. The job mostly involves washing down cages, changing bedding, and refilling food and water dishes. The only confusion in the kennels is usually generated by the animals themselves. The dogs tend to bark a lot, trying to get attention. The noise is so bad you can barely hear yourself think. The cats meow almost as much, probably for the same reason.”
She gave him a wondering look. “And that’s all there is to it?” She pushed at her hair. The golden wisps drifted back into place like strands of silk. “I wouldn’t have to give out meds or take temps?”
Isaiah noted that she shortened both long words in that sentence. Words with more than two syllables were clearly difficult for her to pronounce.
“No medications, no taking temperatures,” he assured her. “My mom says you’re absolutely fabulous with dogs. Is that true?”
Still smiling, she wrinkled her nose, a gesture he felt sure was meant to convey humility, but instead only made her look cute as a button. “I like them a lot.” She lifted her narrow shoulders in a slight shrug. “They don’t care how well I can talk, only how my voice sounds.”
Isaiah didn’t care how well she could talk, either. She managed to communicate. That was all that mattered. “Do you like cats?”
“Yes. Not as much as dogs, but I like them.”
Isaiah crossed his arms. Before he could offer the lady a job, there was a lot more about her that he needed to know, but he was well on his way to believing that his mother was right: Laura Townsend might have what it took to be a great kennel keeper. “If I apologize profusely for making you wait, ingratiate myself, and beg a lot, will you stay and let me interview you for the job? If I let you leave without at least talking to you, my mom will have my head.”
A dimple flashed in her cheek. “Your mom is a sweet lady. She won’t be mad. Just tell her you don’t think I’m right for the job.”
“That isn’t precisely true. I think you may be perfect for the job.”
“You do?”
He gestured at the castered chair in front of his desk. “Please, Laura, have a seat. Maybe you’re right, and you aren’t suited for the work. Neither of us will ever know if you won’t stay and discuss the particulars with me.”
She glanced hesitantly at the chair. Isaiah saw that she was sorely tempted, which told him she wanted the job a lot more than she was letting on.
“Just to talk,” he assured her, and then settled the matter by grasping her elbow to lead her toward the desk. After pressing her down onto the chair, he circled to sit across from her. She hugged the coat close as if she were chilled.
Isaiah rocked back in his chair and rested a booted foot on his opposite knee. “Kennel work requires three things: a love of animals, a kind heart, and a strong stomach. On a glamour scale of one to ten, it’s about a negative one.” He saw a tiny frown pleat her brow and wondered if he might be talking too fast. Relaxing more deeply into the leather cushions, he made a conscious effort to slow down. “The worst part of the job is having to clean up a lot of smelly messes,” he went on. “We occasionally board healthy animals, but mostly they’re either sick or recovering from surgery.”
She clasped her hands on her lap, the clench of her fingers so tight that her knuckles went pale. “Did your mom tell you I have brain damage, Dr. Coulter?”
“Isaiah,” he corrected, “and, yes, she mentioned it. A swimming accident, I believe she said.”
She nodded. “Five years ago. It left me with aphasia.” Her cheek dimpled in a fleeting smile. “I can finally say it. For a long time I couldn’t.”
Isaiah subscribed to a few medical journals to keep abreast of the advances made in treatments for humans. Canines had many of the same ailments, and the same medications often helped them. As a result, he had recently read an article about aphasia, which affected approximately a million Americans to varying degrees, their numbers growing at an alarming rate of about eighty thousand annually. Some people became afflicted because of strokes, others due to head injuries that damaged the left lobe of the brain.
“Ah,” he said. “Aphasia affects language, doesn’t it?” Isaiah also knew what aphasia did not affect—a person’s intelligence. Victims were essentially trapped in their own bodies, the damage to the left lobe interfering with normal brain signals. Many people had weakness on the right side of the body. In severe cases, sufferers were unable to speak and understood very little or nothing of what was said to them. Laura Townsend was fortunate in that regard. “You seem to speak quite well.”
“I couldn’t at first.” She looked him directly in the eye. “And I still have problems.”
Now that he knew what kind of brain damage she had, Isaiah better understood why.
“Even if I’m thinking the right word,” she went on, “I can say the wrong one—and sometimes when I get nervous, even words that should be easy, like my name, just won’t come to me.”
Little wonder his mother’s heart went out to this young woman. She was beautiful and obviously very bright. One had only to look into her eyes to see that. Yet she’d been reduced to this—applying for a menial job that many people wouldn’t even want. Even sadder was the undeniable fact that neither he nor any other vet would normally consider hiring her.
The realization made him feel small. How many people like Laura lived in or around Crystal Falls—people the world ignored and had left behind? Her brain injury clearly wasn’t so severe that she had nothing to contribute. All she needed was for someone to give her a break.
He hated to embarrass her by asking personal questions. When he tried to imagine how he might feel if he were in her shoes, he almost cringed. But there were some things he had to know before he offered her a job.
“Are you able to read, Laura?”
“On a good day.” She shrugged, the gesture implying that there were worse things. “About a third-grade level the last time I was tested.”
He tugged on his earlobe. “And on a bad day?”
“The letters jump around.” She pushed at her hair again, a gesture he was coming to suspect was a nervous habit. “My per-periph—” She broke off and lifted her hands in defeat.
“Your peripheral vision?” he supplied.
She nodded. “It’s messed up, worse some days than others. I can still read the words in the middle—if they’re short.”
Isaiah jotted a note on a Post-It pad, ripped off the top sheet, and handed it to her. “Can you read that?”
She stared down at the writing for a full two seconds. “This isn’t a good day,” she said with an airy laugh that was just a little shaky. “When I get nervous, it’s always worse.”
A strange, achy sensation filled Isaiah’s throat. Being tested on her reading ability obviously unsettled her. “It’s not a pass-or-fail thing. Just take your time. Give it your best shot.”
Her delicate brows scrunched together over the bridge of her nose. “You spelled out the numbers.”
“We do that here to avoid mistakes. I had a one mistaken for a seven once. Luckily the result wasn’t disastrous. Now it’s our policy to write the number and also spell it out.”
She looked relieved. “That’s good. That you spell them out, I mean. Numbers are tricky for me. Sometimes I see them upside down or backward.” She hunched over the note, frowned again, and haltingly read the words aloud.
“Three—cups—dry—food, two—” She broke off and looked up. “There’s an X all by itself.”
“It’s an abbreviation for ‘times,’ in this case, two times daily. I use it a lot in chart instructions.”
“Oh.” She nodded. “Two times daily. I see.”
She laid the paper on the desk and smoothed the tacky edge with trembling fingertips. Watching her, Isaiah found himself wanting to pat her hand. “You managed that very nicely. Can you remember from now on what an X stands for?”
“I think so.”
“Do you have difficulty counting?”
“I lose track without my beans.”
He’d been almost convinced that she could do the work. Now she’d thrown him a curveball. “Without your what?”
“Beans.” She fished in a pocket of her coat and held out her hand. Several dried kidney beans rested on her outstretched palm. “It’s—a trick—from rehab. I carry twenty with me. That way, when I have to count, I don’t lose track.”
“What if you have to count to over twenty?”
She put the beans back in her pocket. “I’m in deep doo-doo.”
He gave a startled laugh, pleased on the one hand that she could joke about it, but sad for her as well. “What did you do for a living before your accident, Laura? My mom couldn’t recall.”
She puffed air into her cheeks. “Why does that matter? I can’t do it now.”
Isaiah acknowledged the point with a nod. “True, and it doesn’t really matter. I’m just curious.”
“I, um, did—studies—before they built roads.” She pressed her lips together and swallowed. “To see if traffic would hurt the plants and ani-mals.” She gestured helplessly again. Her eyes darkened with frustration. “I was an env-envi—” She went back to clasping her hands, the tendons in her neck growing distended as she struggled to speak. Finally she released a taut breath, squeezed her eyes closed, and shook her head.
Isaiah realized that he was leaning forward in the chair, his muscles knotted, his teeth clenched. God. He wanted to help her get the words out, only he couldn’t. “An environmental scientist?” he offered.
Her sooty lashes fluttered open. “Yes. I w-worked all over the N-Northwest.”
She’d once done environmental-impact studies, and now she had to carry beans in her pocket in order to count? He had taken tons of biology courses while studying to become a vet and had a fair idea of what it took to become an environmental scientist. What courage it must have taken for her to pick up the shattered pieces of her life and build a new one. In a very real way, she was a phoenix that had risen from the ashes.
Gazing across the desk at her, Isaiah reached a decision guaranteed to please his mother. “Being a kennel keeper won’t be nearly as exciting as doing environmental-impact studies.”
“I don’t care about excitement. I’d just like a normal job again. I miss working with people and having friends.”
Searching her expression, Isaiah could almost taste her yearning. “If a job is all you want, you’re in luck. Judging by what I’ve seen so far, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to handle this one just fine.”
“There isn’t?”
She sounded so incredulous that Isaiah chuckled. “No, there isn’t. You may need a little extra training before we let you take a shift by yourself, but that’s a simple enough thing to arrange.”
For an instant she looked at him as if he’d just offered her the moon. Then her expression clouded. “What if I make a bad mistake?”
“You’ll be monitored closely during the training period. If you make a mistake, and I stress the ‘if,’ the person training you will catch it. At the end of two weeks we’ll do a performance review. If you’re going to have problems doing the work, it should be apparent by then.” Isaiah lowered his foot to the floor and swiveled on his chair to face the desk. “It’s only ten dollars an hour to start, and we can’t offer you full-time. Veterinary clinics require an inordinate number of employees in order to cover all the shifts and give everyone enough time off.”
Laura had never really thought about the behind-the-scenes operation of an animal clinic, but she supposed it would be similar to a hospital, with inpatients requiring constant care or observation.
“The animals are left alone here from about six in the evening—sometimes later, depending on when Tucker and I leave—until nine, when a night-shift person arrives,” he went on. “Then they’re left alone again from two in the morning until six. But aside from those brief periods, we’ve got to have someone here seven days a week. As a result, we have the usual full-time employees who work the same days all week—office personnel, technicians, and tech assistants—plus a number of part-time people who work rotating shifts. Kennel keepers fall into that group.”
She nodded, an indication to Isaiah that she was following him.
“For a kennel keeper, it works out to about twenty hours a week, I think.”
“Part-time is better for me,” she assured him. “I can’t work too much without losing part of my assist-ance.”
“There, you see? This may turn out to be the perfect job for you.”
Her cheeks flushed with pleasure, and a gleam of excitement lighted her eyes. “Maybe so,” she agreed.
“In addition to the position being only part-time, you’ll also have two bosses, myself and my brother Tucker.” Isaiah gestured toward the door. “Our building is laid out like a plus sign. We have the lobby at the front and a kennel at the rear, which serve both the north and south wings. Tucker conducts his practice in the north section; I conduct mine in the south, and we share the front office and the kennels. I have techs and assistants who work primarily with me. Tucker does as well. But the office and kennel people work for both of us.”
“I see.”
“Will it bother you, having two bosses?”
She considered the question for a moment and then shook her head. “I don’t think so.”
“Does that mean you’ll take the job?”
She gave him a questioning look. “If your brother is going to be my boss, too, won’t he want to meet me?”
Isaiah almost said that their mother would snatch Tucker bald-headed if he threw a wrench in the fan blades, but he settled for, “We’re not quite that formal around here. Tucker and I trust each other’s judgment. If I think you’re the lady for the job, he won’t quibble with my decision. And I do. Think you’re the lady for the job, I mean.”
She beamed another smile, revealing small, perfectly straight teeth. “Well, in that case, yes, I’d like to give it a try.”
Isaiah had a feeling that try had been her motto for the last five years. Only a positive, do-or-die attitude had gotten her where she was today. He opened a drawer and drew out an application form. “How does this sound? We’ll get you trained and see how you’re doing in two weeks. If you’ve had problems doing the work, I’ll let you go then, no hard feelings. If you’re doing fine, we’ll give it another two weeks, just to be sure, and then we’ll make it permanent.”
“That sounds good.”
Isaiah asked the usual questions, getting her full name, her birth date, and her last place of employment. Because of her disability, her responses took a little longer than normal. By the time he got down to the withholding section, his stomach was snarling with hunger, and his hands were getting shaky. He hurriedly jotted down her Social Security number and returned the card to her.
“That about covers it,” he said, rocking back in the chair. “How soon can you start training?”
“I can come in mornings now. Later in the day will be harder. I do odd jobs. I don’t want to quit any of them until I know this job will last. I need the money.”
Isaiah tossed his pen on the desk blotter. “For the time being, training in the morning will work fine. If all goes well, we’ll readdress your hours when the thirty days are up. Once you become a permanent member of the team, you’ll be required to work the night shift about one week a month. It’
s from nine until two in the morning. We rotate our kennel people. That way no one gets stuck on night shift all the time. Will that pose a problem?”
She shook her head. “Nights are fine.”
His stomach growled again, so loudly this time that her gaze dropped to his midsection. Embarrassed, he flattened a hand over his diaphragm. “I’m sorry. I haven’t eaten since six this morning.”
Her eyebrows lifted. “That isn’t good for you.”
“So my mother tells me.” He smiled sheepishly. “When I get busy, I’m a little absentminded, I’m afraid.”
Her eyes danced with amusement. “I noticed.”
He had to laugh. “I really am sorry about that.” He bumped his temple with the heel of his hand. “I can’t believe I forgot you were waiting in here.”
“I’m the queen of forget-ting. Don’t feel bad.” She nibbled her lower lip. “What’s his name?”
Isaiah gave her a blank look. “Pardon?”
“The brown Lab that lost his leg.”
“Ah. His name is Hershey, after the chocolate bar.”
“Hershey,” she repeated softly. “Maybe I’ll get to meet him.”
Isaiah would have offered to introduce her to the dog right then, but he was starving and needed to get something in his stomach fast. “That depends on when you can start training.” He put the application in the center drawer. “He’ll be here only a couple of days.”
“As long as I have after-noons free for my other jobs, I can start right away.”
“Tomorrow?”
She thought about it for a moment, then nodded. Urgency to eat driving him, Isaiah rose and circled the desk to grab his jacket. “Can you come in at six? They start pretty early in the kennels.”