The Last Time I Saw You Read Free

Oftentimes, they nod, too, their heads saying yes to what their hearts cannot yet accept.
    But here Samson is, alive and well enough to give Lester’s face a good washing with a tongue the size of a giant oven mitt. “Hey, pal,” Lester says. “You made it! Let’s have a look at that dressing.” He rises to his knees and very gently turns the dog slightly onto his side. Samson whimpers and holds overly still, in the way that dogs often do when they’re frightened. There’s a lot of drainage, but nothing leaking through. He’ll give Samson something for pain and then call Stan and Betty. By the time he’s done talking to them—he can anticipate at least a few of the questions they’ll have—he’ll be able to change the dressing without causing the dog undue distress. He thinks Samson will be able to stand and move about a little this afternoon, and imagines him lifting his leg with great dignity against the portable fireplug his staff uses for cage-bound male dogs (the girls get Astroturf). The portable bathrooms had been Jeanine’s idea; she was always coming up with good ideas. She had the idea for Pet Airways before they came up with Pet Airways, although her suggestion was that pets and owners fly together—cages would be installed next to seats so that an owner could reach down and scratch behind an ear, or speak reassuringly, or offer a snack. This was a much better idea for alleviating the stress caused to animals when they fly, and Lester advised Jeanine to write to Pet Airways suggesting it. She said she’d rather keep the idea for herself because she wanted to start Dog Airways, as it is her belief that only dogs really care when their owners are gone. She is by her own admission a dog chauvinist, but she’s good to all the animals who come to the clinic, even the hamster whose hysterical owner brought her in because she was gobbling up her babies as soon as she gave birth to them.
    Jeanine also had the idea that Lester should attend his high school reunion. When the invitation had come to the clinic, Jeanine had opened it, and then immediately begun a campaign to get her boss to go. Lester knew what she had in mind—she wanted him to find a woman.
    When he was twenty-nine years old and had been married for only a year, Lester’s four-months-pregnant wife, Kathleen, had been killed in a car accident. Since that time, not only has he not remarried but he has not dated. Oh, he has some women friends, and he’s pretty sure some of them have had little crushes on him. But despite the charms of this woman or that, there’s never been anyone who moved him the way his wife did. He had just opened the clinic when she was killed; Kathleen had worked as the receptionist for the grand total of four days before he lost her. It doesn’t hurt the way it did at first—how could anyone survive such a thing?—but there is a place for Kathleen in his heart that leaves no room for anyone else. He is at peace with the idea of living the rest of his life alone, even if Jeanine isn’t.
    But he did finally agree to go to the reunion. It might be interesting to see all those people again, even though he’d never really been close to any of them. He’d pretty much kept to himself, for many reasons. He wonders if any of his classmates look anything like they used to, or if at the reunion they’ll all walk around squinting at name tags, then looking up with ill-disguised disbelief into a person’s face. He feels he still somewhat resembles the boy he used to be, but then he guesses that everyone does that, sees in the mirror a mercifully edited version of themselves different from what everyone else sees.
    Lester was very pleased to see that, on check-in at the reunion, he would be given a box lunch. He feels about the words “box lunch” the way Henry James felt about the words “summer afternoon”—that they are the most beautiful words in the English language.
    But mostly Lester agreed to go to the reunion