‘Sure. I’ll go check on the patients.’
She looked up at him. ‘Hey, did that kid’s mum ring back about Jane Doe? Those pups are getting bigger by the day. They’re a month old now … we’re going to have to think of fostering them out in a few weeks if an owner doesn’t show. We can’t put them in the dog run out back unsupervised; the other animals will trample them. Or worse.’
‘Nothing so far. To tell the truth, me and Jane Doe have got a bit of a thing going. I’d miss her, especially with Poppy going back to Sydney this evening.’
His sister grinned. ‘Tell me something I don’t know. But no matter how much I love you, which is quite a lot most of the time, and not at all when you’ve been helping yourself to the contents of my pantry, we’re not keeping eight labrador pups.’
He headed next door to the sleepover room where cages lined the walls. Cats ignored him from various small cages on the upper tiers, as did a western black snake who’d swallowed a fake egg, and an overweight mouse doing circuit work on its wheel. The furballs in the big low pen weren’t ignoring him, however. He could hear their beating tails and their yips from the door.
‘Hey, Dad.’
‘Popstar! I didn’t see you there. You all packed? Only a few hours ’til I need to take you down to the train station.’
His daughter had crawled into the pen and was seated in the corner, her lap covered in squirming pups.
‘All sorted. And … I’m so pleased I stayed until the last possible minute, because you will never guess what’s happened!’
‘Try me.’
She spun the fattest pup, the brown male, around to face him. Sleepy eyes stared up at him, then drifted to a snoozy close.
‘No,’ she ordered. ‘Wake UP, Maximus. Show Dad your new trick!’
She plopped him on all fours, and he promptly splayed on the ground like a bag of sand.
‘Come on, Maxie, you’ve got this,’ she urged, and lifted him up again. He teetered on all paws for a second, then staggered like a drunken sailor towards the pyramid of fur that was his brothers and sisters.
He grinned. ‘He can walk, finally. He is the fattest runt ever. You want to help me weigh them?’
‘Sure. Pass me the scales and I’ll do it in here. I already cleaned out the pen and gave them fresh bedding.’
‘You’re a champ, Pop,’ he said, squatting on the floor beside her.
‘I know.’ She grinned up at him, and he almost commented on the makeup that was missing from her eyes, the absence of teen-pouty-face he’d grown used to over the last year, but managed to stop himself at the last second.
‘This one’s called Max, huh?’
‘Yep. That’s his name because he’s the biggest, even if he is the slowest to learn anything besides feeding.’ She lowered the pup into the bowl of the old kitchen scales they used for small animals. ‘Eight pounds? Dad, how ancient are these scales? Australia’s been metric for about a hundred years.’
‘I can convert, Miss Smartypants. Those scales belonged to your great grandparents, so show some respect. You named them all?’
‘Uh-huh. The three black ones are Angus, Bingo and Carmelita. The yellow ones are Frodo, Pumpkin, Kylie and Doofus.’
He wrote the weights down in the chart—weighed words in his head while he was at it—each one of them a whole lot heavier than a plump pup.
He’d put this off long enough. Any longer, and his daughter would be on a train heading north and he’d miss his chance. ‘Pop.’
‘Yes, Dad?’
‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about what happened in my office that day, and now you’re leaving, and well … I should have said something sooner about, you know, why Kelly was in the clinic digging up old gossip.’
‘About you and Mum?’
Boy. No wonder he’d left bringing it up for so long. This washard. He pushed the scales to the side and sat on the floor next to the cage. ‘Your mum was a student teacher at my high school when I was in my senior year.’
Poppy made a gagging noise. ‘You really don’t need to tell me this, Dad.’
He smiled. ‘Relax. This is not the beginning of a birds and bees talk. Just hear me out, will you?’