Free Devotion by Howard Norman Page B

home to Truro to visit her parents. On this visit she read an ad in a Canadian veterinary journal announcing a “neighborhood practice” for sale in Parrsboro. She inquired by telephone and drove right over. She had lunch, then dinner with Dr. Alvin Frame, seventyone years old, who’d been born in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and had had his Parrsboro practice for forty-seven years. He was tall but stooped, with a head full of white, unruly hair, and Naomi could tell right off he didn’t suffer fools. The next morning she drove with Dr. Frame to his office, then to the Tecosky estate. On the way he said, “The caretaker’s name is William Field. William, not Bill. I told him we were visiting.” Two hours later, while they ate sandwiches at the Minas Bakery, he said, “Ail right, Dr. Bloor, I’m satisfied you won’t reverse all my years of goodwill.”
    â€œI hope to extend your goodwill,” she said. This made Dr. Frame chuckle, possibly at his own obtuseness.
    â€œOf course you’ll do just that. You seem a very competent young woman. You have respectable bona fides. I don’t care, really, if this sounds hokey, but my longtime clients, their confidence in me, put two daughters and a son through university. But it’s time I get out. Though I won’t give up my house in Parrsboro: my wife’s buried here. As for the practice, you just study the files, you’ll be fine. It’s mostly dogs and cats. There’s Mrs. Kelb, near Economy, who keeps toucans and parrots, in cathedral cages, you’ll see. What else? It’s rare but not unheard of the forest service will bring you a deer or coyote someone’s hit with a car. I repaired a bobcat once. Like I said, it’s all in the files.”
    â€œI look forward to the whole thing,” Naomi said.
    â€œWell, you can have the whole thing. Including the deep
dark secrets of my accounting methods and tax deductions. You can have my practice lock, stock and barrel, Dr. Bloor.” And then he named a price.
    Dr. Frame mailed notices of his retirement, which contained a request to welcome Dr. Naomi Bloor. Her first full day at the clinic was diverse, also exhausting. Since she wanted to make a good impression, she spent an inordinate amount of time with each patient and owner. That day, between 7:45 A.M. and 6:15 P.M., she removed porcupine quills from the face and inside the mouth of a mutt who whimpered nonstop, licking the pliers as if pleading directly with them (from 12:30 to 1:00, while she ate a tuna sandwich at the bakery, Dory Elliot told her, “Mrs. Ebbet stopped by, not expressly to say so, but still, she did say you handled yourself well with those porcupine quills. I don’t mean to make a pun, but Mrs. Ebbet can be prickly. You got an A-plus on your report card is what I’m saying”); gave regular checkups to three other dogs; put drops of medicinal astringent in the ears of a cat with ear mites. Late in the afternoon a woman from Great Village, Constance Sugrue, called, distraught that her four-year-old daughter, also Constance, used their parakeet’s droppings as fingerpaint. “She painted a whole nativity scene on a sheet of manila paper,” she said. “I think she inhaled something went to her brain, because why else would she paint a nativity so far from Christmas?” Naomi said, “I don’t have a strong background in parakeets,
Constance. I’d call your family doctor. My opinion? I don’t think harm was done.”
    Driving her pickup home to her one-story house in Parrsboro that evening, Naomi stopped to buy a piece of salmon, head of lettuce, tomato, scallions, bottle of olive oil, bottle of vinegar, bottle of white wine. It was a warm night out, a salty breeze off the Bay of Fundy. Listening to the radio, she made oil-and-vinegar dressing, tossed the salad, broiled the salmon. Near dusk she sat on her porch, ate dinner and drank two