Rescue (Emily and Mason) Read Free Page A

dimples.
    “I’m Mason, the new vet tech.” My hands smell like the
antibacterial wash that we use, which is not a pleasant odor. There’s an
awkward second where I’m not going to reach out my hand to shake his, but I
take it.
    “Nice to meet you,” I say lamely, pulling my hand back and
picking up the brush off the blue, speckled counter. Gail seems to realize that
I’m feeling flustered and quickly moves Mason on to the next room. That’s the
small animal room.
    I can’t say that any of them are my favorite. I work with
anything that comes through those doors whether it’s a one thousand pound horse
or a half ounce bird. But right now I’m going to be grooming a nine pound,
female, long haired cat who hates brushes. I have a feeling her owner either
never brushed her or was not very nice about the mats she tends to get on her
back legs.
    “Come on Midnight, it’s time to get you looking pretty so
you can go out with the rest to find a new home. One where you don’t have to
put up with me every day.” I smile at her as I pull her out of the cage and
stroke her a few times on the table. The attention she’s getting starts up the
purring, but as soon as the brush comes up to touch her head she gets wide eyes
and scrunches.
    I wait, patiently, for about two minutes before she head-butts
the brush gently in my fingers. When she feels comfortable enough to let me
brush her, I make sure to get all the small knots starting and brush a little
extra just to keep the comradery going. My afternoon goes a lot like that,
taking one cat out after the next and cleaning up their fur, ears, eyes, noses
and a few teeth.
    Once I’m finished with the cats, I move on to the small
animal area. It’s pleasantly almost empty. There’s just one small gerbil left
in her wire cage on one wall and a ferret with severe adrenal disease on the
other. The poor fellow came in with a blocked urinary tract, and missing all of
his fur except one small patch on his head.
    “Bandit, if you don’t stop pooping in your water dish no one
is going to want to take you home.” Animals are funny like that sometimes. He
was supposedly a well behaved ferret, but the owners were moving into a home
where they couldn’t take him. Now, whenever a tech or another volunteer tries
to get him out to show him to a potential ferret parent, he bites.
    I pull out his water dish and empty it in the sink,
thoroughly washing it before I refill it. To give him some exercise time, I
pull him out of his cage and let him run around on the floor with a few toys as
I clean out the bottom pan. The other volunteers and techs know that I let
Bandit out of his cage while I do this, but apparently one of them in
particular does not know.
    I don’t have a chance to grab the ferret before Mason opens
up the door to the small animal room. The ferret bounds right past him and
scurries down the hall before I have a chance even to call out his name. With a
frustrated sigh, I grab one of the squeaky toys and stand just outside the door
to the small animal room. It’s an incessant noise, but Bandit always responds.
    “What are you doing?” Mason asks, putting his hands up to
his ears. I don’t answer him; just keep squeezing that toy until the furless
wonder bounds around the corner of the hall and races down the tiles after me.
I lead him back into the room and close the door quickly, letting him have the
squeaky.
    “I’m saving your ass on your first day. Whenever you enter a
room with animals, knock beforehand.” I try not to sound tart, but I guess it
comes out that way. Mason puts his hands in his jeans pockets and tries to look
apologetic, but I can see the smirk on his lips.
    “I’ll remember that, Mom.” He says, his eyes twinkling.
Before I can come up with a smart-ass response, he dives right into the reason
he came into this room in the first place. “Gail sent me to get Bandit, said
his implant arrived.”
    I can’t help it. I smile. Scooping bandit up in