Dr. Noah and the Sugar Plum Fairy Read Free Page A

they should never be covered with excessive costuming. In a bag attached to the same hanger, Jane found the headpiece. This year’s wardrobe mistress had chosen a classic, lightly-embellished tiara with just enough sparkle to catch the attention of all the little girls with ballerina dreams, but not enough to detract from Melody’s shimmering blonde hair.
    There were four new packages of white tights on the floor below and about a mile of wide pink ribbon on the coffee table where her mother had no doubt been sewing bright new ties into a variety of ballet shoes. Jane moved the hanger from the barre to the door frame where the costume could dangle freely with no danger of being crushed.
    She returned to the barre and rested her right hand on it. She relaxed her elbow and adjusted her posture. Head up, eyes front, left arm floating on air in front of her with a perfectly shaped ballet hand. And just as she’d done every time she was home and found herself alone in the game room, or every time she’d taught a class at a studio near her college, or any time she’d taken a class at the Dance Science Department at A&M, she started through her practice and strengthening routine. First position, heels touching, feet turned out. Second position, like the first only feet apart. Third position, then fourth and fifth...
    Sometime later, Jane returned to her bedroom. Monsieur Snowball was not on the bed. She began the search around the house. Not in the litter box, not near the food bowl, not at his very own trickling water fountain. She went back to her room. Sometimes, if she left the closet open, he would find his way onto a pile of her dirty clothes. Not this time. Then she remembered her doll house, long abandoned now and tucked into a corner of her room under little used clothing and cumbersome accent pillows. Her mother reported Snowball often slept there on an old chenille blanket when Jane was away at school.
    Jane flipped on the bright overhead light and dashed to the corner. The cat was there, nestled inside.
    Something was definitely not right.
    She dropped to the floor and met him nearly nose to nose. “What is it, buddy? Are you feeling bad again?”
    He stretched his right front paw onto her cheek. Frozen seconds slowed and then crept up on each other and clicked away faster as Jane realized what she was seeing. She touched the cat’s head and stroked his forehead with her thumb.
    And after one small matter-of-fact meow, Monsieur Snowball slipped quietly away.
     
    ****
     
    Noah propped open the back door of the clinic and headed outside with Bridget, a Border Collie mix that had been hit by a car a week ago. The owner had yet to come forward, and the person who’d discovered her by the road and dropped her at the clinic had refused to leave information. Noah let her off her leash to run along the massive drainage ditch that stretched for hundreds of yards in either direction behind his clinic. He whistled and the dog scampered back, sniffing every blade of grass as she came. He patted her black-and-white head.
    “Good job. How could someone not be looking for you? You’re so smart.”
    Then again, he found most Border Collies—mixes or otherwise—to be extremely intelligent. Smarter than most people and with far more common sense, he could probably send Bridget to the corner store for juice all by herself. At the very least it would probably take fifteen minutes to train her to retrieve his jacket so the next time he stepped outside in cold, spitting rain, he could send her back for it.
    He trudged along the well-worn path, avoiding fresh rain-slicked muddy spots and swiping the occasional drop of water off his face. It would take time to reacquaint himself with winter Hill Country weather. One day it was forty-six degrees with scattered showers, and the next it could be sixty-five and sunny.
    At any rate, Christmas in his clinic in Texas was going to be a lot better than his Christmas in California a year