Dr. Jerry was yawning by the time Callie got to the cats. “Just do the usual, my friend. You know these animals as well as I do, though be careful with that last one. Never turn your back on a calico.”
She smiled at his playful wink.
“I’ll give Mr. Pete’s human a call, then take my executive time.” He winked again, because they both knew he was going to take a nap. “Thank you, angel.”
Callie kept up her smile until he turned away. She looked down, pretending to read the charts. She didn’t want to watch him shuffle down the hallway like an old man.
Dr. Jerry was a Lake Point institution, the only vet in the area who took EBT cards in exchange for services. Callie’s first real job had been at this clinic. She was seventeen. Dr. Jerry’s wife had just passed away. He had a son somewhere in Oregon who only called on Father’s Day and Christmas. Callie was all he had left. Or maybe Dr. Jerry was all that she had left. He was like a father figure, or at least like what she’d heard father figures were supposed to be. He knew Callie had her demons but he never punished her for them. It was only after her first felony drug conviction that he’d stopped pushing her to go to vet school. The Drug Enforcement Agency had a crazy rule against giving prescription pads to heroin addicts.
She waited for his office door to close before starting down the hallway. Her knee made a loud pop as she extended her leg. At thirty-seven, Callie was not that much better off than Mr. Pete. She pressed her ear to the office door. She heard Dr. Jerry talking to Mr. Pete’s owner. Callie waited a few more minutes until she heard the creaks from the old leather couch as he laid down for his nap.
She let out a breath that she’d been holding. She took out her phone and set the timer for one hour.
Over the years, Callie had used the clinic as a junkie vacation, cleaning herself up just enough so that she could work. Dr. Jerry always took her back, never asked her where she’d been or why she’d left so abruptly the last time. Her longest stretch of sobriety had been too many years ago to count. She’d lasted eight full months before she’d fallen back into her addiction.
This time wouldn’t be any different.
Callie had given up on hope ages ago. She was a junkie, and she would always be a junkie. Not like people in AA who quit drinking but still said they were alcoholics. Like somebody who was always, always going to return to the needle. She wasn’t sure when she had come into this acceptance. Was it her third or fourth time in rehab? Was it the eight months of sobriety she’d broken because it was Tuesday? Was it because it was easier to have these maintenance spells when she knew they were only temporary?
Currently, only a sense of usefulness was keeping her on the somewhat straight and narrow. Because of a series of mini-strokes in the past year, Dr. Jerry had shortened the clinic hours down to four days a week. Some days were better for him than others. His balance was off. His short-term memory was unreliable. He often told Callie that without her, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to work one day, let alone four.
She should feel guilty for using him, but she was a junkie. She felt guilty about every second of her life.
Callie pulled out the two keys to open the drug cabinet. Technically, Dr. Jerry was supposed to keep the second key, but he trusted her to accurately log in the controlled substances. If she didn’t, then the DEA could start snooping around, matching invoices to dosages to charts, and Dr. Jerry could lose his license and Callie could go to jail.
Generally, addicts made the Drug Enforcement Agency’s job easier because they were desperately stupid for their next fix. They OD’d in the waiting room or had a heart attack on the toilet or snatched as many vials as they could shove into their pockets and started running for the door. Fortunately, Callie had figured out through big trials and little errors how to steal a steady supply of maintenance drugs that kept her from getting dope sick.
Every day, she needed a total of either 60 milligrams of methadone or 16 milligrams of buprenorphine to ward off the vomiting, headaches, insomnia, explosive diarrhea, and crippling bone pain that came from heroin withdrawal. The only rule Callie had ever been able to stick to was that she never took anything an animal needed. If her cravings got bad, she dropped her keys back through the mail slot in the door and stopped showing up. Callie would rather die than see an animal suffer. Even a corgi, because Dr. Jerry was right. They could be real assholes.
Callie let herself stare longingly at the stockpiles in the cabinet before she started taking down vials and pill bottles. She opened the drug logbook next to the stack of charts. She clicked her pen.