Her Four Cowboys

“I don’t even know what an emu looks like,” said Andy, looking around at all of us, “much less the fact that it was from Australia. That’s news to me.”

“It looks a lot like an ostrich,” she said, “but a little smaller. Honestly, it looks like the ostrich’s shorter, less attractive cousin.”

“Okay, I’m seeing it,” Andy said.

She nodded. “Right. So, I was honestly pretty peeved about that quiz and that diagram. I think the closest emu farm is in California. Anyway, there was one day when I had to go to the zoo to do a shadowing of their large animal vet. Sometimes you shadow them for just a day of examinations, and sometimes it’s for an actual procedure. On the day that I went to the zoo, it turned out that I was going to get to shadow on a stomach surgery on a large bird.” She took a sip of her beer and looked around at the group of us. “Five points and a beer for whoever’s able to guess the lucky bird that had the operation.”

“It was a goddamn emu, wasn’t it?” Adam said, grinning.

She nodded. “One more beer for the genius.”

“And what does five points get me?”

I had to snort a little at my dorky little brother and his barely concealed flirting. I had a feeling it was just the fact that Lucy had been even shyer and unaware of the appeal that she’d had, even as a teenager. And this had kept her from seeing Adam’s obvious crush on her. We’d all been aware of it when they were kids. I had a feeling that half the reason my mom kept inviting her to stay for dinner—aside from it being polite after she’d been studying for four straight hours in our dining room—was to give them even more time to spend together. Since then, Adam had usually driven the two of them back from school, and he would usually take her home.

I watched her get up from the table, heading back to the bar. This time, she was accompanied by Andy, who’d decided to help her bring the drinks back from Molly.

It was funny because the clothes that she wore now were almost the same as the ones that she’d worn in high school. The exact combination of jeans and plaid was what I’d seen her in almost every day,s with very little variation. I remembered one Easter Sunday when her mom had been complaining to mine about how trying to get her to wear a dress was pretty much guaranteed to be a battle lost before it had even begun.

Now, a decade later, all I could think about was how incredible it was that the same person, in the same clothing, could look almost entirely different. I would’ve challenged anyone to find someone who could make her look more beautiful than she did in the jeans that hugged her long legs down to the ankles.

“Jesus,” Austin said as he took a sip from his glass of beer. “She’s grown into something, hasn’t she?”

“She’s always been something,” Adam said, his voice sounding soft and fond as he looked after Lucy and Andy.

Austin raised his eyebrows at me as he took yet another sip, not saying anything until the two of them started making their way back to the table.

“So, Lucy showed me a picture of this freaking bird,” Andy said as they started getting closer and set everything down on the table, “and you guys are not gonna believe this. I can’t really believe that you actually operated on this thing.”

She shrugged. “It has a liver, and it had a benign tumor. It needed a surgery like anything else.” Andy passed his phone around, and the rest of us made appreciative noises as we took in the strange-looking animal.

“Man, that’s a weird-looking creature,” Austin said. “According to Google, they’re not too hard to farm.” He looked at me. “Maybe we should talk to the parents about getting some and seeing how we do with them. After all—” he gestured to Lucy, “—now we know someone who has experience taking care of them.”

“I would not go that far,” Lucy replied, her mouth spreading into a smile, “but since that day at the zoo, I did a little more research, and found out that they’re not that uncommon in the States. It might be worth looking into.”

I shrugged, tilting my head to the side, and the conversation finally moved away from emus.

“So,” Adam asked, “do you have, like, a wish list, or something of all the animals that you’d like to work on?”

“A bucket list?” Andy asked.

“Yeah, exactly,” Adam said.

“What, like an elephant’s heart surgery and then spaying a giraffe?” she said, raising her eyebrow.

“Dude, how gnarly would it be to operate on an elephant’s heart? How much do you think that single organ weighs?” Adam asked.