Is Your Heart in It?
“This is the liver,” Dad says.
The dog’s unthawed enough so you can smell the death.
The rotting, I guess.
Dad waves his pinkish latex glove. “Hey? This is the liver.”
We’re in the exam room of his vet clinic, standing over the split Doberman corpse Dad’s autopsying.
“The liver,” I say.
He sticks his hand in there and wiggles the pink and purple bits around. “That’s the kidney.”
I’m sixteen. An hour ago, I was playing Minecraft in my room. Dad appeared in my doorway and said, “Amber. C’mon.”
When dad appears in my doorway and says, “C’mon,” I’ve learned that means you’re supposed to follow him to his truck and ride to the clinic to help him “treat” a dog. Typically, this involves holding it while he sticks it with a shot.
How he treats cats, I couldn’t tell you. Presumably, that’s too dangerous for non-professionals.
The dog will be terrified. I’ll grip its lower jaw with my left hand and lift while pressing down on its neck with my right hand. It’s scary for me, too. This prevents the dog from biting Dad. Sometimes, they squirm out of my grasp, but Dad doesn’t get mad.
These dogs are always smallish. Large or mean dogs he treats with the help of a thin, silent woman named Ruth whom I would not mess with were I a large or mean dog. Ruth lives on a farm with lots of horses. This is all I know about Ruth. She works at the clinic.
Dad, with reverence, digs upward and removes a small, dark object — these pieces are all pink or brownish purple — that’s definitely a heart.
“That’s a heart,” I say.
He lays it on the table. My father has just ripped this dead dog’s heart out.
“What happened to it,” I say.
“Cancer,” he says.
“What kind?”
“Lymphoma,” he says.
I’m not sure what that means. I’d say so, but the musty smell of the dog is making me nauseated.
He reaches toward the dog’s stomach area and fishes around in the intestines. “It spread.”
I want to go outside, but Dad is enjoying himself like when we go fishing. Putting worms on hooks also grosses me out, and I make him do that. On the rare occasion I catch a fish, he’ll pry it off the hook. I hate it when the fish fins stab my hands.
“Blood’s in the stool,” he says.
When my Dad and I came into the clinic earlier, through the back way, through the little fenced in area where they walk the dogs, he said, “Watch out for dogshit,” not “stool.”
“Dad, it stinks,” I say. “I need some air,” the irony is that outside the clinic — if you go the back way, anyway — it smells like dogshit. If you go the front way, you walk through the runs where the dogs bark and rush the chain link run gates.
I lower my head and dash past the runs. A German Shepherd jumps and slams its gate with its paws. The latch on its run is zip tied orange, which means it must be muzzled.
Outside, in the parking lot, I balance beam along the concrete stoppers capping the lined spaces.
Dad joins me and lights a cigarette.
“Alright,” he says, and climbs in the truck.
On the way home, we drive through Dairy Queen for milkshakes. Waiting in the drive thru, I say, “I’m making a “C” in biology.”
Dad nods. He doesn’t get my point.
“And algebra,” I add.
He tells a long story about flunking math in college and retaking it.
We stop at the park to sit on benches in the sun to drink our milkshakes. In two weeks, they’ll have auditions for Shakespeare in the Park, I tell him. Rehearsals are over summer break.
I say, “Mom heard UT Knoxville has a good theater program. Did she tell you that?”
He nods.
An old lady walks by with a little white dog. I ask if it’s a Bichon Frise. He says it’s a Pomeranian.
We throw our milkshakes away.
“What do you do with a theater major,” he says.
I don’t really know, so I say, “You get an MFA after. For grad school.”
He nods.
I say, “To make contacts with equity theaters.” I’m kind of making this up as I go.
My parents met in Auburn at Dad’s vet school, then moved to Tennessee where living was cheaper. You go to vet school to start a practice; that’s pretty straight forward. That’s probably what he’s thinking.
On the ride home, he’s quiet, doesn’t turn on the radio, so I say, “What’s lymphoma?”
“Cancer in the lymph nodes.”
“Is it fatal,” I say. “Always?’
He shakes his hand horizontally.
We’re almost home. “Are you going to sell the clinic? When you retire?”
“We’re looking for another vet. As a partner. Part time.” He means him and mom. “Maybe we’ll sell it to them.”
I call my dad to my room and show him the replica of his clinic I built in my Minecraft world, how you can pet the dogs and make little hearts appear over their heads because they like you.
“That’s a heart,” he says. “Alright.”
“I made the amphitheater and the park, too,” I add.
“Do you have biology homework?” he says.
I turn the game off and nod.
“Tell your mom if you need help.”