6.1

Staci

My life that Spring could be summed up as:

Well.  Well, well, well.

The progression: (And you’ll know when you get to the wellwellwell part.)

I was innocuously introduced to the staff at my uncle’s vet clinic.  Sure, there were dogs barking in the background and that general dander-ness was in the air, but as I stood behind the counter shaking the hands of the animal-paw-print-scrub-wearing office workers, I still felt pretty much clean.  And I felt pretty confident that I would be able to maintain that.  Because I was the niece.  The from-out-of-town niece.

I was wrong about that.

I worried just a tad at first that the staff would know about me.  I wondered if Uncle Dave had told them anything about anything.  From the moment I met Vicki and Lauren and Dr. Moss and Dr. Hanson and Viktor the part-time groomer, I knew that they were all simply too busy to ever talk about anything outside of work, and that the only thing they knew, or cared to know, about me was that A) I had two functioning hands and B)…well, there was no B.  Five minutes after I had come into the clinic and been introduced by Uncle Dave, he took off toward the back of the building to get some coffee, and Vicki led me into the “cleaning closet,” i.e. my new home, wherein I was to go in and out of scores of times per week for the next nine months of my life.

The staff basically just dug supplies out of cardboard boxes from various janitorial/veterinary supply sources, never taking the time to organize or shelve anything.  Vicki said they’d been waiting on me to do that.  Vicki was not supremely nice.

So, before I could even start my new job of cleaning the vet clinic, I had to clean the cleaning closet.  It kind of felt like a joke for a few seconds.  I had imagined answering phones: Front Range Animal Health, Staci speaking, how may I help you? And giving treats to Yorkie puppies, and oats–or whatever horses munch on–to horses.

But not cleaning cleaning closets while my six bosses bossed me to come clean stuff before I could even finish cleaning the cleaning closet!

In the first four hours of my job I had:

A)  Flushed a toilet that everyone but me knew was never, under any circumstance, supposed to be flushed (because why would you flush a toilet?!) and flooded a bathroom.  And mopped it up.

B)  Spilled some sort of Iodine solution on my new, cool, retro-looking tennis shoes.  Completely permanent.

C)  Accidentally let an aggressive, unneutered  dog out of an exam room, who then attacked a pug in the hallway.

D)  Helped myself to a soda from the fridge that it turns out had “been in there for years, and is Dr. Hanson’s emergency diabetic soda that he keeps on hand.”

E)  Asked Lauren when her baby was due.

Lauren was not pregnant.

But she totally looked pregnant.  I was just trying to make small talk.  And she looked pregnant!  She did!  It was like:

I mean, come on!!

First day.  First afternoon.

And the next day, after everyone had gone home for the day and Uncle Dave was somewhere in the back with the barking over-nighters, I made my way into the lobby.  A few minutes earlier, Vicki had stood in the doorway of the cleaning closet where I was unpacking paper towels.  She was putting her coat on and avoiding eye contact.

“Staci, I hate to tell you this, but our last patient of the day has left you a little gift out in the lobby.  I know you just mopped out there, but…well, if you could just get that…and I’m out of here; gotta pick up the kids from school.  See you tomorrow.”  And she was gone.

“OK,” I said, to myself, basically.  I walked down the hall toward the lobby to see what kind of gift awaited me–what kind of cleaning supplies the gift would require.  Maybe, I thought, Vicki has left me an actual gift!  Maybe she doesn’t see me as a flushing, soda thieving, sloppy, careless, insulting, inexperienced kid.  Maybe she’s left me some Amish bread.  With a little tag that says, “Welcome to the family.”

But I knew it was probably just another circular pile o’poo, warm and maybe flecked with teeny white worms.  Or a bright yellow puddle.

Oh, but it was neither.

Some beast had, from what I could tell, vomited the full contents of its nervous stomach all over the floor and then sat in it while wagging its tail, smearing the vomit in a wide arch, somewhat like a windshield wiper.  Then said beast had, as evidenced by the paw prints leading across the foyer and to the door,  trotted through its vomit on the way home.

I backed myself onto a bench and stared.  Then I cried, then I started laughing really hard and hiccupping, but still kind of crying again when I noticed my Iodine shoe.

My uncle stuck his head in, stared at me, blinked, looked at the floor for several seconds, then disappeared.  A few moments later her rolled the mop and bucket into the room, clapped his hands twice and said, “Chop chop!  Dinner’s waitin’!”

Say it loud.  It hurts so good.

Well.  Well, well, well.

6.2

Uncle Dave, DVM, is my mom’s youngest brother, but not her youngest sibling.  Mom is one of seven kids.  She has one older sister, one older brother, two younger brothers, and two younger sisters.  They’re all like really close together in age too.  Like boom, boom, boom.  Boom, boom, boom, boom.  And they all kind of had kids of their own around the same time, except for Mom.  She married later in life and had a baby later.  I mean, there’s a very real possibility that I was her last egg.  And then she and Dad were just really happy with, and sometimes very confused by, their one little me.  They strapped me into whichever used Volvo wagon and toted me about.  I spent a lot of time alone, but not necessarily lonely.  All of my cousins, on both sides actually, were at least eight years older than me.

You wanna know what my primary form of entertainment/ what I did for fun was from roughly three through eight years of age?  I played in my hamper.  It was a big hamper–mauve wicker with a padded lid, and I was a very small girl.  I’m sure at some point the hamper was used for clothing, but I only remember it as “Staci’s playhamper,” all one word.  I spent hours in there–days, probably months collectively.

I wish I could get back into my hamper.  I wish I had just stayed in there.

6.3

I finished my last semester of high school in Colorado.  My Mom wasn’t going for the GED thing, no way.  Everything was a blur.  I drove one of Uncle Dave’s trucks to school for five months, made zero friends, didn’t want any.  I worked most Mondays through Thursdays 4-7pm, 1-7pm on Fridays–Seniors could leave early on Fridays if they had a good enough GPA, and most Saturdays all day.  I had absolutely no social life, but I had very little quality self-pity time because I was, literally, up to my elbows in…whatever.  I learned a lot, though, and Uncle Dave actually paid me real money, and Aunt Martine fed me a lot of quinoa and lentils, but that’s cool, and the staff at the clinic pretty much just ignored me, and that’s totally cool because I totally preferred that to speaking and making an idiot of myself, and at night I wrote letters to Tyler and then ripped them up.

They were any combination of:

Dear Tyler,

Dear Ty,

Tyler,

Ty,

Words cannot express how much I

You’ll never know how much I

I just want you to know that I

think about

love

miss

respect

regret

hurt

you, and I

think

hope

wish

have decided

wonder why it is

that we

can

cannot

should

should not

could

could never

should always

be

together

apart

.  Please

understand

remember

forgive

forget

love

me.

I never mailed one.  I never called.  Never e-mailed.  Never texted.  And in late winter, when the clocks were still back, and the sun left Denver so early, disappearing behind those jagged mountains, and evenings were epic, and I should have been thinking, thinking, thinking, all I ever did was try not to.