A Feral Darkness (2 page)

      
Or a manager, for that matter.

      
Especially not the manager who now stood in the doorway, arms crossed. She found him when she circled the table to get a better angle on Flowers' back leg, simultaneously changing to a longer blade without stopping the clippers, a practiced motion of skillful fingers. But when she saw Roger...
then
she turned off the clippers. She knew that look, and it never bode well.

      
Roger was boss, and he knew it. And being boss meant telling people to do the impossible and smiling benignly when they had no choice but to agree. He wasn't a big man, but he had a meaty look to him; he filled out his shirts with a bulk that at one point had been muscle and now wasn't so sure anymore—just as his dull brown hair still held the style that had suited it when it was thick. Now Brenna thought a quick pass or two with her clippers—a nice #4 blade—would be a mercy.

      
"Busy in here today," he said. "That's the way I like to see it."

      
"Keeps things interesting." Brenna grabbed the ever-handy broom for a few quick, futile swipes at the growing tumbles of dog hair around her feet. The small room held three height-adjustable grooming tables, but the third table no longer adjusted without several people grunting and hauling and twisting it, so they kept it at the lowest height and used it for the largest dogs. Otherwise, it held a fishbowl full of tiny handmade bows, with the bows-in-progress beside it. There was a short set of corner shelves and two rolling carts crammed with grooming equipment; the tub room held the shop vac and a plain grooming table where they towel-dried the dogs before popping them into crates to sit before powerful crate and stand dryers.

      
Three tables but not quite enough space for three active groomers; they never had more than two on shift at once, with three total on the payroll and Brenna as senior.

      
"Just signed up another one for you," Roger said, and his voice held that tone, the one he used when he knew he'd done something to ruin her day but had done it anyway because it would make a happy customer. Or so he thought, with the giant, blithe assumption that things would turn out his way.

      
They weren't likely to. Not this time. "I can't fit in any more dogs today. I can't do any more dogs than this in one day
ever
, unless you get me experienced help."

      
"I gave you Katy," he protested, throwing his arms out wide.

      
"For two hours in the morning, and she hates it. She's bad at it, and she doesn't know what she's doing."

      
"What do you have to know to bathe a dog?"

      
"The question," Brenna said, managing to keep her voice light only because she'd had so much practice, "is what do you have to know to bathe a dog
correctly
? Or even, say, to get a dog in the tub?"

      
She shouldn't have said that last; she knew it as soon as the words were out of her mouth. His face closed down at the reminder of the time Katy had needed help and
neither
of them could get the 70 pounds of quivering German Shepherd into the waist-high tub—not by trying to convince her to walk up the ramp meant for large dogs, not by tugging or shoving or lifting. Until Brenna walked in from lunch, expecting to find the animal bathed and drying, and with no more thought than
I don't have time for this
, slung the dog up into the tub.

      
Only in retrospect had she seen the look on Roger's face, now imbedded in her mind's eye. Embarrassment. Resentment. It had at least, she'd hoped, taught him that he couldn't simply throw just any of the interchangeable floor associates back to work grooming for a day.

      
She had
hoped
.

      
"It's just a bath," Roger said. "No clipping. Medium-sized dog, I checked."

      
Brenna felt something clutch hard in her stomach. She waved toward the tub room. "There's a whole room full of dogs waiting for me, and everyone of them is a problem today. I swear, there's something in the air today. I can't do it, Roger. I can't even do what I've already got."

      
"We don't turn away walk-ins, you know that."

      
Steadily, her voice as flat as it could be when she had to raise it over the dryers and the barking, she said, "
Then get me help
."

      
Agreeably, as if he'd never consider asking the unreasonable of her, he said, "I'll grab someone off the floor when the dog comes in," and left the room with the air of a man who has just solved a major problem with much aplomb.

      
Brenna closed her eyes, momentarily overwhelmed by the impossible.

      
Then she picked up her clippers and went to work.

~~~

Twenty minutes later she presented Flowers to Ginger Delgaria, a pleasant woman who had come to Brenna since Flowers' first puppy cut. Flowers, by this time tucked into the nook of Brenna's elbow with a sulky expression pasted on her face, merely stared at Mrs. Delgaria without bestirring herself to move; Brenna had to hand her over. The woman gave a rueful shake of her head. "I see her mood hasn't improved."

      
"They're all like that today," Brenna said, absently rubbing her forehead as she filled out the charge slip for the cashier, already calculating how long it would take to have the waiting Sheltie finished; she'd finished dematting before the bath, but the dog had way too much hair for its owners to handle, at least not without a judicious amount of trimming and thinning. Like a woman with just the right makeup...no one could see where the work had been done, but people could definitely appreciate the difference.

      
The Sheltie would take too long, that was the answer. And there was the Cocker in for a cut-down; she hadn't done the dog before and wasn't encouraged by her behavior in the tub. And Roger's new appointment still hadn't shown—

      
"—feral dog pack," Mrs. Delgaria was saying.

      
Brenna looked up at her, unable to reconcile the words with the neatly professional woman before her.
No, don't ask. Give her the charge slip and go get the Sheltie.

      
She asked. "What did you say?"

      
"You haven't heard? I'm surprised. It's been in the news since last night." Mrs. Delgaria shifted Flowers into a more protective hold that Brenna didn't think was coincidental. "And you live out toward the lake, don't you? That's where they're supposed to be. If you've got animals out there, you'd better make sure they're put up safely."

      
Sunny
. Numbly, Brenna held out the slip. "I don't listen to the radio much," she said. "Thank you for mentioning it."
Sunny the hound
. Poor dumb Redbone reject would stand there with her tongue hanging out, happily watching the canine visitors approach and never know the mistake until they bowled her over and chewed her into little pieces. She glanced at the clock. Two hours till her shift ended and not even then, if this new dog was other than what Roger said it would be.

      
Get the Sheltie started. She grabbed the stand dryer and wheeled it over to the table, which she swiftly adjusted to height. Then the tools, ready to hand; she snapped a #7 blade onto the clippers, pulled out her good thinning shears from the locking toolbox where she kept her personal gear, and hunted out the wide-toothed comb and a couple of different brushes. In moments the dog was on the table, losing the last of his matted hair and voicing his displeasure in high-pitched complaints from behind a nylon muzzle. He wasn't nearly as tough as he thought he was, but she was in no mood for the toothy pinches he commonly dealt out.

      
Definitely one of those days. The
if I had my own shop
days. She wouldn't book this many dogs at once, not without the right kind of help.
And no one allowed to book dogs against my say-so
, she thought grimly, back-brushing the generous tufts of hair between the dog's toes and scissoring them to neat round paws.

      
But she never approached the thought too seriously. Years of her brother Russell's dismissive comments, of her parents' unintentional discouragement—though now only her mother was left to fill that role. "Let someone else worry about the bills," they'd say, her father with loving protectiveness when he was alive and her mother—now and then—with the assumption that Brenna couldn't handle the load. "Russell will tell you."

      
And Russell would. "Can't see you doing the accounting for your own business," he would say, and of course he knew, what with his partnership in the small carpet and flooring store in Brockport. "You haven't got a single class under your belt outside of high school."

      
True enough. But not how she'd wanted it, either.

      
She clipped the Sheltie's nails and pulled the muzzle off; just the thinning and a little trimming to go, and he'd be fine with that.

      
Feral dogs
. A pack of them. What was that all about?

      
She worked in a suburb north of Monroe City, but lived fifteen minutes northwest of that, between Lake Ontario and the city. Definitely rural—but generally tame. A handful of coyotes, not as many stray cats as there used to be, lots of small farms no longer supporting anything but a handful of cows or horses, plenty of farmland owned in modest lots but leased to larger operations.

      
Her own place had taken that role over the years, and even now the old north pasture was in corn for Bob Haskly—the lease paid her winter's heating bills in the old farmhouse. But the right-side pasture, hilly and divided by the creek, had only ever been pasture and still was. Maybe next summer she would get another horse; right now the field was fallow, recovering from some hard grazing from Emily's last batch of cattle.

      
Plenty going on in her part of Parma Hill, but never had feral dogs played any part. Nothing more than your basic random stray, half of whom seemed to find their way to Brenna for feeding and grooming before Brenna passed them along to the local animal advocate group for placement.

      
"Brenna, you in there?"

      
Think of Emily, and Emily arrives.

      
"Be out in a moment," Brenna said, taking one more pass through the Sheltie's thick ruff with the thinning shears and then shaping the result. She stepped back to give him a critical eye, found a tuft she'd missed, and tucked him under her arm to step into the tub room and turn off the last dryer. The Cocker behind it gave her a bright and manic eye. "Best you change your attitude," she told it, and went out to the counter area to stash the Sheltie in one of the two open-wire crates stacked for finished dogs.

      
"What's up, Emily?" she asked, reaching for the charge slip and doing a quick calculation of the extra time she'd spent on the mats.

      
"In town for project supplies," Emily said. "As usual. Those girls go through crafts like they were born to sell little old lady cut-outs for people's front yards. You know, the kind bending over with all their pantaloons showing."

      
Brenna stopped writing to look up. Emily, with her honey-blonde hair drawn back in a hasty pony-tail, not a trace of makeup on her slightly too-wide, slightly too-large blue eyes, looked back at her quite seriously, but there was a trace of humor hiding at the corner of her mouth. "Solemnly swear," Brenna said, "that you will never allow that to happen."

      
"Sheep, then," Emily said. "Lawn sheep."

      
Brenna gave a firm shake of her head. "Lawn skunks at the most." She finished the charge slip and stuck it in the proper cubby slot behind the counter, noted the date and the Sheltie's new wart on his customer card, and dropped it in with the others to be re-filed. "No project supplies in
Pets!
, unless they're going to build you a cow out of rawhide bones."