The Last Time I Saw You Read Free Page B

high school classmate might be the equivalent of family in terms of offering an intimate access, as well as a lowering of the usual defenses. Lester imagines leaning against a makeshift bar and talking to Don about a lot of things: The ethics of chemo for extending the lives of suffering animals. The increase in aggressive behavior in dogs—is it from them being put in cages and left alone for so long? How many immunizations are now proven to be carcinogenic? Lester also wants to ask Don if he doesn’t feel a little like a bullshit artist when he advocates brushing pets’ teeth. Especially under anesthesia. Lester himself can’t recommend it. Give a dog a marrow bone, give a cat a break.
    If he were going to be completely truthful, Lester would have to admit that there is one other person he is interested in seeing at the reunion, one he’s not thought about since he left high school, but now that he has been reminded of her, he wants very much to see what kind of woman she became. He hopes she shows up, but he’ll keep it to himself, that kind of hope.
    In his office, Lester dials the number for Stan and Betty Kruger. It rings several times and then Betty answers in an uncharacteristically soft voice.
    “Betty?”
    “Oh, God,” she says.
    “No, it’s good news,” Lester says, and Betty begins to cry.
    “STAN!” she yells. “He MADE it! Samson’s OKAY!” To Lester, she says, “We’re coming right now. I’m in my robe and pajamas. Don’t look.”
    After Lester hangs up, he sits back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. He thinks about a man he met on a train in France last year. The man, Hugo, asked him what the saddest experience he ever had as a vet was, and Lester said it was the day he had to tell someone whose son had died of cancer that the son’s dog, whom the father had adopted, had developed the exact same disease. It happened more often than people knew, that dogs developed the same illnesses as their owners: diabetes, adrenal diseases, cancers. It was one of those mysterious things.
    “And the happiest experience?” Hugo asked, and Lester said the happiest came after one of the saddest: he’d made a house call to put down a fourteen-year-old tricolor collie named Mike whom Lester had often seen standing with the family’s kids at the end of the driveway while they waited for the school bus. Their mother had told Lester that Mike would go to the same spot and wait for the kids to come home in the afternoon, always at precisely the right time. “We never tell him the kids are coming,” she’d said. “He just knows. He’ll go to the door and bark to be let out, and the kids will arrive right afterward, without fail.” One Easter, the family had gotten a duckling, and he and the dog had become best friends—they’d slept together every night until the duck died, and Mike often visited the duck’s grave, his tail wagging on the way there, hanging low on the way back. On the day Lester came to put the dog down, the family had Mike lying on a quilt and had just offered him beef tips, which the dog had refused. Four months later, the owners had returned to Lester’s clinic with a new puppy, a beautiful female tricolor.
    “So. This is life, eh?” Hugo said. “We lose something here, we get something there. The trick is to stop looking in the old place to find the new thing.”
    Lester nodded, and then he stared out the window of the train at the countryside as they traveled through it. Sometimes it was hilly; sometimes it was flat; always, in one way or another, it was beautiful.

THREE
    M ARY A LICE M AYHEW PUTS THE SOFT-BOILED EGG INTO the bright blue porcelain holder she bought at the thrift shop yesterday. Presentation is all. If Einer Olson finds his breakfast good-looking, maybe he’ll eat it. She adds a bud vase with a half-opened yellow rose, though this is more for her benefit than for his. Einer is indifferent to flowers. He says all they do is die.
    She carries