Verwandte Artikel zu Still Life with Elephant

9780767926775: Still Life with Elephant
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0767926773 ISBN 13: 9780767926775
Verlag: Broadway Books, 2007

Inhaltsangabe

Can a badly abused elephant halfway across the world help a woman win back her cheating husband? In this funny, heartwarming story, the author of the beloved novel Horseplay presents another smart, memorable heroine and the animals—and men—she loves.

Neelie Sterling never did listen well to the conversation around her. Always preoccupied with an inner monologue, she sometimes missed things. She was happy when Matt, her veterinarian husband, told her he was getting a collie; she liked dogs. He had said colleague, to help with his busy practice. The problems start when the pretty blonde “collie” calls Neelie to say that she is pregnant with Matt’s child. Sent into a tailspin, Neelie throws herself into her horse training business until she discovers that Matt is part of a group planning to leave for Zimbabwe to rescue a badly injured elephant. Thinking she could win Matt’s heart again, Neelie manages to get included.

The trip is dangerous, exhilarating, and revealing. Neelie learns about herself as a wife and a woman. Back at home, she discovers secrets everywhere—with her parents, with Matt, even in training an elephant. Fighting to keep her life from unraveling as she struggles to gain the elephant’s trust, she ultimately learns that healing can be mutual.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JUDY REENE SINGER is a dressage competitor, horse trainer, and all-around animal lover. She is a frequent contributor to international animal rescues and is currently foster mother to two elephant babies. Judy has written about the equestrian world for more than a decade, and was named top feature writer by Chronicle of the Horse in 1996. She holds degrees in English and Psychology, shares her home with cats, dogs, and an African Grey Parrot, and enjoys making her friends and family fat with baked goodies.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One


WHEN MATT first mentioned her, two years ago, I thought he said he was getting a collie. And I thought, Great, I love dogs.

I get like that—a little vacant, listening with half an ear. I hear a snatch of conversation and convert it into something else. I misunderstand things. Sometimes I’m not listening at all. I can’t help myself. I have a chronic preoccupation with an inner dialogue that leaves little room for the outside world. I practically go deaf when I get nervous. I’ve been this way for a long time, and maybe that was some of our problem.

“The frog is woebegone,” he would say.

“Frog?” I would ask.

And he would put his hands on his hips and give me that look, before repeating himself. “I said, I won’t be gone for long.”

***

So she called me, my husband’s colleague—that’s what the collie turned out to be. She called to tell me she was pregnant.

Even though I had a radio blasting—I always keep a radio playing nearby—I heard that well enough. There is no mistaking when someone tells you that she and your husband are pregnant.

“Neelie?” she started, then continued in musical tones. “I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you, but Matt couldn’t bring himself to do it and you need to know. Matt and I are pregnant. About three months now.”

Isn’t that just too cute? Matt and I are pregnant, the way couples announce it nowadays. When I was a kid, the wife got pregnant and the husband got a big pat on the back. Now they are pregnant together. So inclusive. Except for me, of course. Matt’s wife.

They had been in love for about a year and a half, she said. Maybe two, she couldn’t be sure. Which meant it started just a few months after he told me he was taking in a collie to help him with his lions. Lions. I seem to remember that I heard “lions.” Which is not so far–fetched; Matt, after all, is a veterinarian, and he sometimes helps out at a wild–animal sanctuary about ten miles from us.

He was taking in a colleague to help him with his clients.

And his love life. She apparently was taking care of his love life as well.


***

Her name was Holly, and she was a small–animal specialist, and she was recuperating from a divorce, looking to relocate from Colorado, and wanting to join a practice in New York, in the small town where her parents lived. Where we lived. I found all of that out at the welcoming dinner I cooked for her in our home. She looked like she had just breezed in from a day on the Aspen slopes. Blond hair, lean workout body, crisp blue eyes. Big–Sky blue eyes, although I know Big–Sky is really Montana. She mentioned that she liked crafting. I was surprised, because she looked so outdoorsy.

“I’d never take you to do crafting,” I said.

“Rafting,” Matt said, exchanging glances with her.

“White–water rafting,” she said, tossing her blonde, Colorado–outdoor–sun–bleached hair, her Big–Sky eyes now looking vastly amused at me. Of course. Who does white–water crafting? In my defense, I was whipping the cream for a lovely chocolate–cream pie, which is my signature dessert. Which she declined, because she DIDN’T LIKE CHOCOLATE.

I mean, come on.

I guess she wanted to keep that lean, sinewy–cat, predatory figure, because she was certainly still on the prowl. I just didn’t know it.

I had a slice of pie, and Matt asked for a very thin slice, which he never did, he loves my pie, and maybe I should have sniffed out something suspicious right then and there.

They worked well together. Matt always said that. She just seemed to anticipate what needed to be done next, and had it finished before he asked. She was full of energy and great ideas. She was a good surgeon, she was a good diagnostician, she was good with the clients.

She was very good with Matt.


***

I love horses, and that’s how Matt and I met. It was ten years ago. I was twenty–eight and had a decent private practice as a therapist with a master’s in social work. I owned a horse, though I rarely rode him. I was in one of those stupid circular dilemmas that horsepeople get into. I needed to work to pay for my horse’s upkeep, but couldn’t ride him much because I was working such long hours to pay for his upkeep. So he was more of a pasture potato.

His name was Mousi, which was short for Maestoso Ariela, which, I must admit, is a weird name for a male horse, but he was a Lipizzaner, and they are named for both their mothers and fathers. It’s a very egalitarian way to do things, like the Norwegians, who do it with “sen” and “datter” tacked onto their surnames. No one gets left out that way.

Mousi was colicking. He was sixteen, and he was my whole world, and now he was nipping at his sides and rolling back his upper lip like a wine connoisseur at a tasting. I knew right away it was the sign of a belly ache. My old veterinarian had just retired, and I needed to find someone new. Matt had been practicing in the area for a while, and I had heard from horse friends that he was good and cute. I mean, a good vet and cute. But he was also good and cute. He came out to the barn right away, which is very important for a colic, and quickly got Mousi comfortable. I liked the way he worked. Quiet and sure of himself, gentle with Mousi, and very skillful when he had to pass the nasogastric tube to pump warm water and mineral oil into Mousi's belly.

“I guess he was a quart low,” he joked, as Mousi’s colic eased.

I liked his sense of humor.

When we were finished, I grabbed my wallet to pay him.

He said, “Doodle gate?”

“Is that like Watergate?” I asked. “With cartoons?”

“Watergate?” He gave me a puzzled look. One of those puzzled looks that tip me off that I haven’t really heard things right.

“Date,” he said. “Do you date?”

“Yes,” I said, embarrassed, busying myself with something crucial, like arranging the bills in my wallet in denominational order.


***

We liked each other right away. I didn’t demand much from our relationship, and he was distracted most of the time anyway, busy building the equine part of the practice. I wasn’t quite there, he wasn’t quite there, and it was a good fit. We fell in love. We got married.

Six years later, he bought the practice out from the retiring senior partner. It was a large practice by now, and getting larger. Things were going great. And then we tried to have children. It didn’t happen for us, and we even went to a fertility specialist, who tested everything from the hair inside our nostrils to the carpeting in our bedroom. After several long months, we found ourselves sitting in his office, facing him at his desk, while he sat with our papers in front of him, a potentate holding court, handing out the grave pronouncement of infertility. Matt had sperm clowns, he announced. I immediately pictured Matt’s testicles hosting a kind of Comedy Central, and giggled a little. Matt and the fertility doctor both looked at me. There is nothing funny about a low sperm count.

But I guess those clowns came through when he needed them.


***

After Holly and I spoke, I hung up the phone. Actually, I didn’t hang up, I just put the phone down on the kitchen table and walked away from it, walked out of the house and straight to the barn, like one of the zombie people in Dawn of the Dead....

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Verlag
Broadway Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2007
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0767926773
ISBN 13 
9780767926775
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
288
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Verantwortliche Person
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