She closed her eyes, as anticipatory humiliation rolled through her. She was going to have to eat her words to the good doctor. Every last syllable, no matter how bitter they tasted to her pride.
She stood in the middle of Fern’s bright kitchen with its touches of yellow and sunflower magnets on the refrigerator and tried to talk herself into making the call. What was she even supposed to say to him after telling him outright that he was the last person in Montana she would call for help?
She tried composing a careful speech that was an almost-but-not-quite apology. But it rang hollow even to her reluctant ears.
Maybe she should just apologize and throw herself at his mercy. But then she remembered how he’d smirked as he’d told her she didn’t look local.
Without warning, something poked her—hard—in the back of her left calf. She yelped and spun around, startled. Hamlet the Pig scrabbled backward, startled as well. He looked up at her with bright brown eyes, his pink ears standing out from his head as if he was trying to tell her something.
Unfortunately, she didn’t speak a word of pig and had no idea what his expectant look meant.
His pink nose wiggled, and then he let out a grunt that even she could tell was exasperated.
“I’m sorry, Pig—uhh, Hamlet. I don’t know what you want. Are you hungry?”
His head jerked up, and he did a funny little dance, hopping from one tiny front hoof to the other.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” she told him. “Small problem. I have no idea what to feed you.”
She opened the refrigerator and peered inside, searching for anything that looked like potential pig food. She spotted a few apples in the produce drawer and pulled one out. She remembered hearing once that apple seeds had arsenic or cyanide or something like that in them and weren’t good for people to eat.
She hunted through Fern’s kitchen drawers, found a paring knife, and commenced coring the apple. While she worked, she talked to the pig. “Are you even house-trained? You’d better be if you plan to sleep on my sofa day and night.”
She handed down the apple to the pig, who took it politely from her hand and then flopped down to the floor on its belly to chew the snack with happy little grunting noises.
“How much am I supposed to feed you, anyway? And what do you eat besides apples?”
She pulled out her cell phone and did a quick search on pig feeding. Whoops. Pigs were supposed to get pelletized pig feed supplemented with leafy green vegetables and high fiber, low calorie vegetables with only the occasional small serving of fruit.
“Well, I blew that, didn’t I? No more whole apples for you, buddy.”
She was completely out of her depth, here. She couldn’t figure out how to feed a single pig. And there were a dozen more animals waiting outside for her to feed, medicate, and clean up after.
She sighed and made the call.
He answered on the second ring. “Dillon Steele.”
She closed her eyes. “This is Tessa Lawrence. I need a veterinarian.”
A pause. Just long enough to be annoying.
“Huh,” he said, and she could literally hear him smiling, “I thought you were going to learn animal medicine yourself.”
She gripped the phone so hard the case creaked. “The cat needs insulin and I don’t know the dosage or how to administer it. Can you come to the farm or not?”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
He hung up. She set the phone on Mick’s kitchen table and stared out the window at the mountains and the lake and pondered the barn full of animals she was now responsible for.
Three hundred and sixty-five days. And then Makayla’s entire future is taken care of. She can go to whatever university she wants to, wherever she wants to go. She can travel. See the world. Never have to worry about money.
And she knew all too well how important that last one was. She’d come from a life of extreme wealth where the cost of anything never even entered her mind and had gone to being a single parent with barely two nickels to rub together. She was more acutely aware than most people of what a luxury it was not to have to worry about covering all the bills or fearing the next unexpected car repair or medical expense.
Were it not for her grandfather stepping in after Mick died and secretly sending her a small monthly allowance, she didn’t know how she would have survived that first year. She’d used the money to pay for Mick’s funeral and to start her little clothing store. Initially, she envisioned a chic little boutique that would raise the standard of dress among the ladies of Cobbler Cove.
But before long, she broke down and stocked reasonably priced clothing for women and men, children and adults. The store didn’t make a ton of money, but it reliably covered her and Makayla’s living expenses, and it kept clothes on the backs of the local populace. Nowadays, she used her grandfather’s monthly check to pay for Makayla’s violin lessons, an after-school tutor, and the occasional outing to a museum or a play over in Apple Pie Creek’s Community Theater. She put the rest of it into a savings account for Makayla’s college education.
She heard a spit of gravel announcing that a vehicle had turned into her driveway. Might as well head out to the barn to talk to Dillon. Maybe Makayla’s presence out there would keep him from being too rude about rubbing her nose in her stupid pride.