“You’re my hero, Doc,” Jax said with a wink and grin that in Ryan’s opinion weren’t at all charming. “Good luck with your sheep,” Jax said to Ryan.
“He’s not my sheep,” Ryan said. But his argument was lost in the chaos of the other man rounding up his four-legged army of weird and heading out the door.
A pretty, reindeer-antlered tech held the door for him and stood there grinning after him.
“Are you going to help him, Jonica?” Sammy asked the tech.
“I’m gonna watch and laugh for a minute before I offer any assistance,” she called over her shoulder before ducking out the door.
Sammy laughed and shoved a wayward curl out of her face. It flopped defiantly back into place.
“Good news,” she said, crossing the gray linoleum tile and holding out the leash. “Your sheep is fine. No cuts or swelling. No limping. I don’t think you hit him.”
Ryan blew out a breath. At least he hadn’t run over a sheep. That was the one and only tick mark in the Reasons Life Doesn’t Suck column.
“Good. But he’s still not my sheep,” he repeated.
Now the damn thing was staring at him. So was the vet. She jiggled the end of the belt leash at him.
“Can’t you keep him? Find his family?” Ryan asked, staring dumbly at the leash. If he reached for it, if he touched it, the sheep was his responsibility. He was familiar with the rules of No Takesies Backsies.
Besides, he had a small-town bank to destroy and a plane ticket to book.
“We don’t have the facilities to house livestock here and we can’t just let him roam free,” she insisted.
“Look. I just got into town an hour ago for a family emergency—”
“Is Carson okay? I talked to him this morning, and he didn’t mention an emergency,” she asked, looking worried.
Her eyes reminded him of a field of lavender. Fresh and bright. Maybe he was coming down with something? He didn’t have romantic notions about attractive strangers and lavender fields. He slapped a hand to his forehead, but everything felt hot compared to his frozen palm.
“He’s fine,” Ryan said, shoving his frozen hands back into his pockets. She couldn’t make him take the sheep. “He had to fly to Boca to help his second cousin after her surgery.”
“He’s eighty-five-ish years old,” she said with the faintest smile on unpainted lips.
“Apparently the cousin is ninety-nine.”
“That’s some longevity you’ve got in your family.” She took a step toward him, still holding the makeshift leash.
He took a step back like she was asking him to hold her pet snake. The backs of his legs caught the edge of the waiting room bench, and he half-fell, half-sat.
She reached out and took his hand, and for a split second, Ryan felt something besides the cold, besides the frustration and despair that had lodged in his very soul for a week. It was a warm shock to the system. For a second, he craved more with an intensity that made him rather nervous.
But that shot of heat dissipated when she firmly placed the end of the belt in his hand and closed his fingers around it.
“No,” he insisted, tossing the leash back at her.
“Yes,” she said firmly.
“I have no sheep experience, and I’m in the middle of several personal crises. So you can take this sheep and do your damn job.”
“Are you staying on Carson’s farm?” Sammy asked, ignoring his very logical argument.
“Yes, but—”
“Put him in the barn tonight and then let him into the south pasture in the morning. The fence is in good shape, and there’s tall fescue in there for grazing.”
“You’re a veterinarian. You can’t turn your back on a sheep in need. I almost ran him over. I have no idea what fescue is. Stan is in mortal danger in my care.”
She laughed. “I have faith in you, Ryan.”
“Great. A stranger in wet Santa scrubs who smells like animal urine has faith in me. That means the world,” he ranted. He was tired. Hungry. Grumpier than usual. And had concerns that he was careening into a full-blown nervous breakdown.
She released a sigh nearly as weary as his soul felt. “You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked.
“Why in the hell would I remember you?” he demanded. He’d never been to this bizarre, little, special-brownie twilight zone before and he highly doubted she’d come to him for accounting advice. He would have remembered that face, those lavender eyes.
“Winter Solstice Celebration? Fifteen years ago? One Love Park?” she pressed.
“I know very few of the words that just came out of your mouth.”
Fifteen years ago, his parents had announced their divorce. He’d spent that Christmas morning in his father’s bare-walled condo eating cold cereal and opening a plastic bag of unwrapped presents. That afternoon he’d been shuttled to his mother’s new townhouse to repeat the process. It had sucked. Every Christmas since had pretty much sucked too.
Great. An hour in this damn polar hamlet, and he was already suffering from Seasonal Affective Disorder.
“You seriously don’t remember?”
Now she looked annoyed. Good. Ryan liked annoyed better than amused. “Look. I don’t know you. I don’t know this sheep. And I have shit to do,” he announced.
With that, he spun on his heel and pushed through the door.
“It’s not like I don’t know where you’re staying,” she called after him.
“I’ll be gone by lunch tomorrow,” he predicted.
Without a backward glance at Goat Guy chasing the big goat around the parking lot, Ryan headed in the French-accented direction of the nearest liquor store.
The Monthly Moon: Apocalypse Recovery a Long Road: How to Grow Out Your Perm by Anthony Berkowicz
6
Lunar Liquors was located across the street from a grocery store called Farm and Field Fresh. Ryan zipped his car into a spot at the back of the lot. On reflex, he pulled out his phone and tried to check his work emails. When the app prompted him for his new username and password, he remembered there was no work, therefore, no work emails.
He did, however, have a text from Bart Lumberto, one co-worker he wouldn’t be missing. Bart was a pot-bellied ass-kisser who stole clients and dumped all the work on the firm’s bookkeepers. His aunt was a partner which meant Bart had never been taken to task for his assholery.
Bart: Trying it on for size. Thanks for the bigger office, dipshit.
Ryan gripped his phone so hard the case cracked. The jackass had sent a picture of his feet propped on Ryan’s desk.
“Fuck.”
Any tiny scrap of hope he’d been holding on to that the partners would reconsider their decision and give him another chance extinguished. There was only one thing left to do. Ryan pried himself out of the car and shivered his way to the door of the liquor store.
He stepped inside and was blasted with both heat—a welcome sensation for his mostly frozen face—and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” wailing from the speakers in the ceiling.
Ryan had been in his share of liquor stores since turning twenty-one a decade or so ago. They all seemed to have the same displays of the same bottles, the same moderately depressed clientele, the same bitter employees.