Emily Mayfield, part 15: Life

A year after their first date and five months before their wedding, Steve dies from an aneurysm. There were no symptoms, no warnings, no history. Just death, instant and painless …. for Steve.

Emily moves through the funeral and her finals in complete shock. She misses the spring altogether. But summer’s heat breaks the shock and releases her rage. For the second time in her life she has loved with all her heart, and for the second time in her life that love has been grabbed away from her by God. Her anger is debilitating. Suzanna, worried for her daughter’s life and sanity, calls Stuart.

Stuart journeys to Hawthorne to spend a long and difficult week with the Mayfields. When Emily sees him for the first time wearing a priest’s collar, she goes ballistic. Suzanna uses all her maternal power to force Emily to stay in the room and talk with Stuart. They spend six days and six nights talking, Emily railing against God, Stuart listening and accepting and guiding her through her pain to some resolution. By the end of the week, Stuart’s gift to Emily is helping her commit to keep on living, and to make a life for herself. The week’s gift to Stuart is a realization of the limits of his power, the knowledge that he cannot fix life for people. He can listen and console, but he can’t fix it. Not for anyone, and not ever. That knowledge is the foundation of his worth as a priest/counselor.

Emily finishes vet school and accepts a job as assistant vet in a private practice in Clearwater, Florida. She stays there as assistant for six years. When the senior vet retires, Emily buys out his practice and renames the facility Mayfield Veterinarian Hospital.

Emily honors the lessons she learned from Stuart and Steve: the delights of the body, the deliciousness of life on this planet, the value of play. She has men friends and women friends. The men she dates and beds and keeps at a comfortable distance. The women she feeds (Suzanna’s heritage) and shares hopes and jokes with. But her life is shared with her four-legged companions. They are her partners.

At 52, Emily is ready for a bit more of the playing and deliciousness. That’s why she advertised for an assistant. But Stuart has a nephew who just graduated from vet school at Tufts University in Medford, MA, (Boston). And for reasons that Stuart won’t go into, the nephew needs a job. Really. Stuart has never asked Emily for a favor, but he asks for one now: hire his nephew for one year (four seasons). Emily agrees reluctantly, but with her own proviso: if the nephew in any way endangers a patient or compromises Emily’s practice, Emily can and will dismiss him on the spot.

Deal.




(This completes Emily Mayfield, DVM.)

(Stay tuned for Mayfield Animal Hospital’s peerless receptionist, Estrella Angelita Maria de Ramon)