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One Egg

Episode 2 of 3 of Found Tortoise, Very Calm by Tara Kincaid · free to read

Neither of them called her Rocco, and one of them turned out to be Omar’s wife.

She sat down at my patio table at ten to nine with a manila folder. Omar arrived at nine with a different manila folder. They had driven separately.

“His name is Big Steve,” she said.

“It’s Rocco,” Omar said.

“The kids voted.”

“The kids were four.”

The barista set down my coffee. The cup said Rocco, then a slash, then Big Steve.

Omar opened his folder first. Vet records from a clinic across town. Sulcata. Sixty-four pounds. Microchip, followed by a fifteen-digit number. Sex, M.

I read it twice. It was the most organized thing anyone had ever handed me.

“She doesn’t have a chip,” I said.

“It says right there that he does.”

It did say that. It was very hard to argue with fifteen digits. His wife’s folder held the posters the kids had made. The reward on every one was eleven dollars and a lollipop.

I wanted to give them the basket. Two kids and sixteen days of posters. But the vet had scanned her twice, and the vet had no reason to lie to me.

At nine-thirty a man about my age walked onto the patio with paint on his hands and no folder at all. He crouched next to the basket.

“Hey, Pearl,” he said.

The tortoise went on eating the hay I had brought. She had not looked up for the Ortegas either.

“I’m Josh Zeller,” he said. “She got out last Thursday. My neighbor was feeding her while I was at my sister’s wedding. I got back Saturday and saw your post.”

“Do you have photos?”

“Of her? Not really. She looks the same every day.”

“Records?”

“Somewhere. I’ll look.” He watched her for a while. “Are you giving her fruit?”

“I tried a strawberry once.”

“Don’t bother. She won’t eat it. I never gave her any.”

That was nearly what the vet had said. It was also what every care sheet online said. I had read six of them by then. Anybody could have read six.

Behind us, the Ortegas were discussing whether Big Steve had ever been a real name.

Josh stood up. “I’ll come back next week,” he said, and left with his hands in his pockets.

I didn’t like how calm he was. Omar had cried twice. A man who loses a sixty-one pound tortoise should at least sweat.

That afternoon Priscilla called me into the bathroom.

The laundry had been living on the bathroom floor since the basket changed jobs. In the middle of the pile, in my gym shorts, sat a white egg the size of a table tennis ball.

“Your tortoise laid an egg in your shorts,” Priscilla said.

I called the vet. She didn’t sound surprised.

“Females can lay without a male,” she said. “It’s probably not fertile. Probably, because females can store sperm a long time. What I care about is whether there are more stuck inside. Bring her in Monday and we’ll X-ray her.”

“Can a vet get it wrong? Boy or girl?”

“On young ones, all the time. Plenty of Roccos turn out to be Rosies.”

I hung up. Priscilla was holding the egg in a paper towel.

“So she’s definitely a she,” she said.

“The vet sounded very sure.”

“And his records say M.”

“The vet says they get it wrong on young ones.”

“So Omar might be wrong about the M,” Priscilla said. “Or he might be wrong about the tortoise.”

She sat on the edge of the tub. It was eighty-five degrees in there. She had stopped wearing socks at home.

“We discussed a cat for two years,” she said. “You got a tortoise in an afternoon. And she’ll outlive you. I’m not sharing a bathroom with her for seventy years.”

“It’s been nine days.”

“Next Saturday she goes home with somebody.”

“And if I’m not sure who?”

“Then get sure.”

She wasn’t angry. That was the worst part. She had the voice she used for car repairs.

On Monday the X-ray showed nothing else inside her. She was fine. The vet said to give her a deep box of soil and sand anyway, so I built one out of a storage tub and two bags of topsoil. The tortoise dug in it for an hour, laid nothing, climbed out, and sat in the laundry.

Wednesday night, a new reply came in from a man named Felix Whitcomb.

He had attached a photo of a hand-drawn diagram of her shell. Every plate was there, in colored pencil, numbered, with a key. Across the top it said Duchess. Underneath it said Lost eleven years ago, never stopped looking.

On the back edge, on the left side, he had drawn a small notch.

I had never noticed a notch. I took a flashlight into the bathroom and knelt in the hay.

The notch was there, exactly where he’d drawn it.

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