Chapter 3 of 3Someone Good

The clinic's ledger held a blue heeler with a torn pad and nothing else, and that visit was the whole of Dr. Lena Petrova's income in Verbena. She had spent nearly everything she owned to buy the practice, and the town's largest horse ranch had already told her no. If paying clients did not find their way up the half mile from Main Street soon, the arithmetic would finish what the divorce had started.

Friday came in hot and dry, and by mid-morning the dust off the two-acre lot hung in the air like flour. Beatriz Ocampo arrived with a foil-covered plate and a list of everything the clinic was missing, written in her looping hand on the back of a feed store receipt.

"Menudo," Beatriz said, setting the plate on the counter. "You look like a woman who skipped breakfast."

"I skipped two."

"Then I was right."

Lena peeled back the foil. Hominy and chile, and for a minute the little office smelled less like a business she might lose and more like a kitchen. She found two clean mugs and filled them from the pot.

"How do you already know everything about me?"

"I've lived in this town longer than the stop sign has. Sit down and eat."

Lena took the list to the table and read it while she ate: obstetrical chains, a calf jack, weatherstripping for the kennel door, a heat lamp for the recovery run. The wind came through that door like a knife, and Beatriz said so twice, in a tone that suggested she had already decided who would be paying for the repair. The plate sat between them, half gone, and neither of them moved to cover it.

"Where do I find all this?"

"Verbena Hardware. Sam keeps the good chains in back, and he won't charge you for the advice."

"Anything I should know about him?"

"Widower. Keeps to himself. Doesn't talk about people behind their backs, which around here is a hobby most folks haven't given up."

Lena finished her coffee, rinsed the mugs, and drove the half mile to Main Street, past the diner and the market, parking under the only cottonwood big enough to call a tree. The hardware store had the shade and the open door.

"Door's open, so you're welcome," a voice said from behind the counter.

Samir Chowdhury came around it with a pencil behind his ear and a box cutter in his hand. Solid build, a neat beard going grey, and eyes that took her measure without any hurry about it.

"You'd be the new vet."

"Lena Petrova."

"Sam Chowdhury." He didn't offer a hand. He offered a roll of weatherstripping. "This is what you want for a kennel door. The foam stuff peels off in the heat."

"I need chains too. And a calf jack, if you stock one."

"Back shelf. Follow me."

The aisles smelled of burlap and machine oil, and the shelves held things she had not seen since veterinary school: hoof nippers, ear tags, a row of salt blocks stacked like bricks. Sam pulled the chains down and set them on the counter.

"Desmond's practice," he said. "You bought it."

"I did."

"Good practice, once." He wiped dust off the box with his sleeve. "Thing is, nobody around here says the second half of that sentence out loud."

"What's the second half?"

"That he let it go."

Lena laid the weatherstripping beside the chains. A question sat there waiting, and she decided to spend a little of her welcome on it. "You knew him."

"Everybody knew him. He delivered half the foals in this valley and charmed every husband and wife who owned one." Sam rang the chains up at forty-six dollars and change, then stopped with his hand over the register, watching her decide whether to ask the next question. "You've met Miles yet?"

"Wednesday. He came by to welcome me."

Sam set the box cutter down and slid it toward the wall, out of the way of his hands.

"Did he now."

"He mentioned the development. Verbena Estates."

"He came in here in the spring and offered to buy this building. Told me the whole block would be repositioned." Sam dropped the receipt into the bag. "Nice word. There's nothing behind it but money."

Lena folded the top of the bag down and held it against her coat.

"What happens if the zoning goes through?"

"Then Main Street gets a coffee shop with a chalkboard, and the rest of us get a letter from a lawyer." He tucked the pencil back behind his ear and straightened the salt blocks into a tighter line. "Thing is, Miles always gets his way. Not because he's right. Because he doesn't stop."

She counted the change he handed back and dropped it in her pocket.

"Somebody must have told him no at some point."

"Mariah Sandoval did, years back. He's been patient with her ever since." He looked at the door, at the street, at anywhere but her. "Patience from a man like that is worth worrying about."

Her phone buzzed in her pocket while she was loading the truck.

"This the vet clinic? I need somebody out here. Got a heifer down and she's been at it all afternoon."

"Give me the address."

"Pruitt place, out on the county road, past the third cattle guard." Something creaked behind him, a screen door or a gate. "I hear you bought Des's practice."

"I did. Is the calf coming, or is it stuck?"

"Stuck. That's why I'm calling a stranger."

Lena drove out with the chains on the seat beside her and the windows down. Dale Pruitt met her at the gate in a straw hat gone grey at the crown and walked her to the pen without much talk.

"Backward," she said, after the examination. "One leg folded under. I have to turn it."

"Des used to do that with a rope and a prayer."

"I use chains and patience." She rolled her sleeves and went to work.

It took a long while, and the heifer leaned into her, and Dale stood at the rail with his arms crossed and said nothing, which was its own kind of test. The pen smelled of crushed grass and wet hide, and the heifer's breathing came in long pulls. Lena talked to the animal in a low voice, gave her room between efforts, and felt for the folded leg with her fingers, slow and certain. The heifer stood with her head down and her sides working, and she had the far-off look Lena had come to recognize in barns like this one. When the calf slid free at last, Lena cleared its nose and sat back on her heels. The calf lifted its head, sneezed at the sky, and tried its legs.

Dale let out a long breath. "Well."

"Keep them both in the pen tonight and let the calf nurse when it's ready."

"I've run cattle my whole life, and I have seen that go wrong more often than right." He took a fold of bills from his shirt pocket, put them in her hand, and closed her fingers over them before she could look at what he'd given her. "You're alright, Doc. Too bad the Sandovals won't use you. They need someone good, after all their bad luck."

Lena stood in the pen with the money in her fist, watching him walk back toward the house.