At her parents’ new house, Tess had a bedroom that she’d never spent enough time in for it to feel like hers. Still, it had a newer, more comfortable bed than the worn-out spring mattress at Nonna’s, as well as a full-size closet that could be just for her.
But Tess suspected that even if her father had been a more nurturing man than he was, she’d still live with Nonna. If she added up all the weekends and holidays and summers she’d slept over at Nonna’s ever since she’d been born, it was no wonder the thousand-square-foot, century-old house felt like the natural place to be. Her grandfather not being around anymore was still taking some getting used to though. He was the real reason she’d come home from Europe as abruptly as she did.
Just a month ago, back in early October, Tess had been finishing transient work with a grape harvest on a small farm in Switzerland. She’d had a considerable stash of Swiss francs saved from a summer spent working in terraced fields overlooking Lake Geneva, the Alps in the distance.
Before she’d gotten the call about Nonno’s heart attack, she’d been making plans to backpack into Belgium. A friend, a Spanish girl she’d worked with earlier in the year, promised a few months of work in one of the most picturesque towns in the world—Bruges, Belgium. As one of Europe’s best-preserved medieval towns, Bruges received floods of winter tourists and promised backpackers like her an opportunity for temporary work in a new and remarkable corner of the world.
As she cycled into the outskirts of the Hill, Tess remembered back to a few hours before she got the news about her grandfather. Nonno had been in critical condition but was awake and alert. It was time to get home, her dad had said. Using nearly every franc she’d earned over a long, hot summer, Tess packed up her belongings and flew out of Geneva International Airport on the first open flight. He died when she was somewhere over the Atlantic.
Her dad met her at the airport in St. Louis, smelling of cigarette smoke and looking thinner and older than her sixteen months away warranted.
“He was glad you were coming home,” her dad had said.
Now that Tess was home to stay, she was determined to make a success of the business she’d dropped out of vet school for two years ago. Tess didn’t need to become a skilled surgeon to help animals the way she wanted to help them. Holistic animal therapy was an emerging and exciting field. From therapeutic massage to essential oils to natural foods and products, Tess had become a believer in natural healing for pets. Not finishing vet school didn’t make her a failure.
If only her track record for not sticking with things wasn’t so long. Or something her big, loud, and vivacious extended family had a knack of reminding her about. Like the fact that she’d quit ballet in preschool or gymnastics in kindergarten. Soccer was a second-grade failure; scouting, a fourth-grade one. She’d dropped out of yearbook in the tenth grade. She ended it with her first serious—too serious—boyfriend during junior year and her second one as a senior. She’d left the Catholic Church in undergrad. Tess was pretty sure grumblings over that one had been heard in Argentina. Most recently, she’d walked out of vet school her second year.
That had been the breaking point. Right after that, she quit the biggest, most important thing of all—her family—and took off for Europe.
Narrowly missing the overturned trash can as she pedaled into Nonna’s driveway, Tess reminded herself that what she was doing now was different from all those other things.
She was good with dogs. Dog training was the one thing she’d been introduced to as a kid that had stuck with her. And she’d been more than good at it. Her mentor, Rob, had told her so often enough.
Tess had been ten when she’d been allowed to shadow him for a day—several years younger than Rob was comfortable taking on, but he’d made an exception when he’d heard how dog crazy she was. According to her mom, Tess’s first word after mom had been daw for dog, and her first animal sound had been ruff.
Over several years of shadowing him whenever she could and trying out what she’d learned on her extended family’s pets, Tess had become a skilled trainer. She’d learned how to read most dogs simply by studying them. It was a language that was hard to put into words, but she picked up on their movements, their body stance, the energy in their eyes and in their bodies, the position of their tails and the way they held their heads and ears. It all melded together into a dynamic picture, and she was usually good at communicating back.
The suitcase Tess took along on the business calls she’d been making the last couple of weeks had a binder full of her training success stories: dogs who’d been hard-core counter surfers and dogs who’d all but refused to potty train until Tess had figured out how to reach them. These sort of training behaviors tended to be relatively easy successes for her.
Figuring out why dogs were scratching off the hair behind their ears, why they didn’t sleep comfortably through the night, or why they were biting incessantly at their feet were harder questions to answer but didn’t always require the costly services associated with vet visits. And deciphering these sorts of problems had become Tess’s passion.
Remembering a few of the amazing dogs she’d worked
