Read Online Bone Valley by Claire Matturro - Free Book Online Page A

until next weekend. But I’ll be all right. My creatures can be left long enough for me to go home and get some sleep. Nobody stays here all night anyway unless there’s an animal in active crisis. But as long as there’s daylight, I want to be here, so, forgive me, I need to pass on your meeting.”
    I wanted to jump in and ask a bunch of questions, but something in the look I saw pass between Angus and Lenora stopped me. Theirs was a private conversation.
    “I’ll skip the meeting and stay with you,” Angus said.
    “Don’t be silly. That phosphate meeting is your thing, these birds and creatures are mine.”
    “All right. But I’ll come back after the meeting.”
    “You don’t need to come back. I’m fine. You can’t treat me like an invalid. Besides, I’ve got Bob to keep me company.”
    “Bob?” Angus asked
    “Sure. Hang on, let me go get him.”
    Lenora left for a minute and when she came back in, she had a baby squirrel cupped against her chest. Something was wrong with its head, but her hand held it in place and I couldn’t get a good look.
    “Bob,” she said, by way of introduction. “Go on, y’all, sit down.”
    We all sat, and Lenora cooed at the baby squirrel and curled down into the kitchen chair nearest Angus’s. “Got his skull cracked. They were clearing out some woods on Antheus’s property last week, to put up some kind of office building or something, and one of the crew cut down a tree with a squirrel’s nest in it. Mom and the rest of the babies got run over by a Bush-hog, but one of the men saved this one, hurt as he was. He brought it to me.”
    No one spoke.
    “With a baby squirrel, they grow so fast. So incredibly fast. His brain will grow too big before the skull heals.”
    Angus leaned toward her from his chair, but none of us spoke.
    “He won’t make it,” she said, her voice almost a whisper, but she rubbed the soft skin under Bob’s chin and smiled at the little animal.
    I realized I was holding my breath.
    “But he eats, he’s not in any pain. I call him Bob because of the way his head bobs around if I don’t hold it.”
    “Is there any hope for him?” I asked, finally breaking the silence and forcing myself to inhale.
    “He’s okay for now. That’s enough, isn’t it?”
    I looked down at my hands, still holding the bottle of water, and I was embarrassed by my question, though I wasn’t sure why.
    When I looked up, I saw that Angus was crying. Not deep, loud sobbing, but a definite sniffling, with tears streaming down his face.
    “Oh, baby,” Lenora said, and stood up. In a quick, but gentle move, she handed Bob to me, and I cuddled the small animal, trying to hold its head like I’d seen Lenora do, and the little guy crawled up my shirt until he could rub his head against the skin on my neck. I looked down at it, just a tiny, little animal trying to live, with big, dark eyes, a little nose and mouth, brownish-gray fur, and a wound on his scalp.
    Bob the doomed squirrel chirped a little and then curled under my chin as if to sleep. I looked up and saw Lenora take Angus’s hand and pull him up and into her. “It’s all right,” she whispered.
    “Excuse us, please.” Lenora led Angus out of the kitchen and I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I rubbed Bob’s shoulders, and looked down.
    A few moments later, Angus came back into the kitchen, alone, red-eyed, and took Bob in his big hands. “Let me take him back to Lenora. Then we better get on to the meeting,” he said, gruffly.
    We left soon after that. There were about a hundred questions I wanted to ask. But I had enough sense not to ask any of them. Not just then, anyway.

Chapter 6
    Nobody bothered to tell me they were not taking me home.
    We rode in a strangled silence toward a main highway, and then Miguel turned the truck toward Bradenton, the county seat of Manatee, and not south, toward my house and Sarasota.
    “Whoa, wrong direction. Aren’t you going to take me home?” I said,