Jillian ended the call and set her cell down on her desk. A quick glance at the clock—as well as the quiet emanating from the hall—told her it was late, well past time for her to go home. But going home was still hard. It had been only a week, and walking through the door was excruciating, knowing Boo wouldn’t come bounding to meet her. The house seemed so quiet and still; she had a hard time being there alone. Angie had gently suggested they look into getting another dog, and Jillian wasn’t against the idea, but she wasn’t ready. It would feel too much like she was trying to replace Boo.
Instead of going home, Jillian found other things to do to take up her time. Her father was the biggest beneficiary, as she ended up at his house more often than not, sharing dinner with him or just drinks. She popped in on her brother at the real estate office, sat across from his desk and chatted with him between his phone calls. Even her mother reaped the rewards of her desire not to go home: Jillian had stopped by the cemetery three times this week. The groundskeeper shot her a look of worry yesterday.
She was going to have to face it. She had to go home, get back to her regular life. Maybe she needed to spend more time in her studio. Sketching always helped her to clear her mind, to think straight. Maybe that was a good, logical step.
The heels of her hands pressed into her eyes, she set her elbows on her desk and sighed heavily.
“Bad day?”
The voice startled her, jerking her muscles. Blinking the blurriness from her eyes revealed Lindsey standing in her doorway, hand out in apology.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” she said, stepping into the room. They’d become friends in the weeks since Lindsey had begun working at the school, and one often popped in on the other to say hi.
Jillian waved it off. “It’s no problem.” Truth be told, she was happy to see a friendly face.
“Are you okay? You look pale.”
“I’m fine. Tired. And the vet’s office just called to tell me I can pick up Boo’s ashes.” Annoyed at the tears that filled her eyes, Jillian swiped at them with the back of her hand.
Lindsey perched her butt on the corner of Jillian’s desk, her expression sympathetic. “I can see why you’d be upset. That’s a tough one.” She smelled good, Jillian noticed, musky and exotic. Her hair was pulled back in her usual no-nonsense ponytail, and her brown eyes were gentle.
“I guess if I get this over with, all the hard stuff will be done and I can start moving on.” With a shrug, she added, “I don’t know why this has been so hard. She was just a dog.”
“Hey.” Lindsey’s eyebrows met just above her nose. “That’s enough of that. Don’t minimize your grief. Boo was a big part of your life. Mourning her does not make you weak.”
Jillian gave a curt nod, not trusting herself to speak.
“Do you want me to go with you?” Lindsey’s suggestion surprised Jillian, and she looked up at her with watery eyes.
“Would you?”
“Of course. Maybe having a friend with you will make it easier.”
“Maybe it will.” Jillian offered up a smile, then began gathering her things.
“Let me grab my stuff and close up my office. Meet you in the parking lot?”
Jillian watched her go, trying to ignore the fact that the navy blue running pants hugged Lindsey’s ass in a rather pleasing way. Shaking her head, she pushed the thought out of her mind.
“And?” Lindsey sat forward on the edge of the picnic bench. “Was I right?”
Jillian couldn’t help but grin at the childlike anticipation of her friend. Dipping her head in assent, she said, “I do believe you were.” Giving the cone a spin with her wrist, she licked what few little chocolate candies remained into her mouth.
The sight of her beloved dog reduced to a bag of ashes that fit into a box the size of an index card had threatened to pummel Jillian into a quivering mess of emotion, but Lindsey’s quiet support kept her upright and to the car. There they sat, Lindsey keeping a warm hand on her shoulder, squeezing and rubbing until she’d pulled herself together. When Jillian turned red-rimmed, apologetic eyes to her, Lindsey had shifted the car into gear and drove. No words were spoken until Lindsey hit her turn signal to pull into the Abbott’s parking lot.
“What are we doing here?” Jillian had asked.
“Life Lesson Number Seventeen: no problem is so big that it can’t be made at least a little bit better by eating an ice cream cone with sprinkles.”
Now they sat on a picnic table in very—surprisingly—comfortable silence, eating ice cream and people-watching. It wasn’t until Jillian had chewed and swallowed her last bite that she looked Lindsey in the eye.
“What?” Lindsey asked, squirming in her seat when Jillian didn’t speak.
“I just . . .” Jillian looked down at her hands, back up again, cleared her throat. “I needed a friend today. If not for you, I’d probably still be in the parking lot at the vet’s bawling my eyes out.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re not. Ice cream is way better than tears, don’t you think?”
“Way better. Thanks, Lindsey.”
“You’re welcome, Jillian.”
It was another ninety minutes before Jillian made it home. Eventually, Lindsey took Jillian back to the school to pick up her car. There, an awkward hug goodbye, each of them acting as if they were coated with a noxious powder they didn’t want to transfer to the other. Not thinking about Lindsey—about her warm eyes, her full lips, her comforting sense of humor—proved easier said than done on Jillian’s drive home.
Angie’s car in the driveway surprised her.
Jillian still felt punched in the gut every time she walked in the door, to not be greeted by a bounding, excited projectile of dog so happy to see her it was as if she wanted to crawl inside and share her skin. The keys made a loud noise when she tossed them onto the counter, and Angie came right downstairs.
“Hey, you. I was wondering where you were.”
Jillian tried not to feel guilty about the concern that darkened Angie’s face.
“Everything okay?” Her gaze landed on the sleekly polished wooden box, and the darkness was replaced by clarity, by understanding, and by sadness. “Oh, babe. Why didn’t you call me? I would have gone with you.” She took Jillian in her arms and held her.
The embrace felt comfortable and familiar, while at the same time uncomfortable and stifling, and Jillian forced herself to relax. “You’ve been so busy at work. I didn’t want to bother you. Lindsey went with me.”
“Lindsey the phys ed teacher you’re always talking about?”
“I’m not always talking about her,” Jillian said, her hackles rising just a bit.
“You do, sometimes.” Angie grinned to take any sting away. “It’s fine. I’m glad you weren’t alone.” She reached for the box, rubbed her fingertips over it gently. “It’s so small,” she murmured.
“That’s the first thing I thought, too.”
“Should we scatter her ashes or keep them in the house?”
Jillian blew out a breath. “I don’t know. I sort of want her here with us. At least for now.”
“Agreed.” Angie picked up the box and went into the living room, Jillian following her. Along the way, she snagged a framed photo of Boo as well as her plaid collar. At the fireplace, she arranged it all in a neat little setup that brought yet more tears to Jillian’s eyes. “There. How’s that? At least for now. If we decide later we want to do something different, we can.” She wrapped an arm around Jillian’s shoulders and squeezed her close. “Okay?”
They stood that way for a long time.
For the next couple of weeks, Jillian busied herself by spending extra time in her studio. When she missed Boo, sketching her seemed to help reduce the pain until it was just a dull ache. Nearly a dozen half-sketches littered the floor in the room now, failed efforts to reproduce her from memory. Jillian had never excelled at drawing living, breathing things. Human or animal, she had trouble getting the right detail, the right shading. She preferred to stick to inanimate objects. Fruit bowls. Landscapes. Vases of flowers.
Eyes were particularly hard for her. For many, it was hands. The details of the human hand are extremely precise and incredibly difficult to emulate. For Jillian, it was the eyes. Human or animal, she had trouble sketching them so they didn’t look like the eyes of a cartoon character. Eyes showed depth, thought, emotion. The ones she drew seemed . . . just flat. Today was no exception. Shaking her head in disgust, she tore another sheet from her easel and let it drift to the floor so she could start again.
Gazing out into space, she stood still for a long while, then turned back to the paper and began to work without thinking about it. She’d finished the eyes, big and dark, and had almost completed work on the upturned nose before she stopped to look at what she was doing—and realized that she wasn’t drawing Boo at all.
The sketch was good. The eyes weren’t perfect, but they were some of the best eyes she’d ever remembered drawing. She stared and stared, uncomfortably aware that they were Lindsey’s.
After a few moments, she sighed heavily, ripped the paper off the easel, crumpled it into as small a ball as she could, and tossed it into the wastebasket. With a growl, she focused on the apple sitting upon her desk, and began to draw that.
“I appreciate you coming by to help me, Angelina.” Her mom stood on a step stool and handed her a gravy boat from high up in the cupboard. Angie wrapped it in a sheet of newspaper and set it in the box on the kitchen table.
“It’s no problem,” Angie said. “But why are we boxing up dishes?”
“I bought some new ones.”
“Of course you did,” Angie said with a knowing grin, pretending to dodge the mock glare she was tossed. Alice was notorious for changing her décor often and on a whim. Dishes were no exception. “Who’s getting these?” The dishes they packed had been around for a while, even by Alice’s standards, mostly because they were pretty. Simple cream with a very subtle baby rose pattern around the edges.
“Since you and Jillian got the last ones, these will go to Maria. She still has those cheapo Corelle ones I gave her when she first moved out.”
Angie nodded. Jillian loved the thick stoneware set Alice had given them a couple years back, heavy and solid with a green stripe around each piece.
“Speaking of, how is Jillian? I feel like I never see that girl anymore.”
Angie almost told her mother to join the club, but knew she’d come across as whiney and a little bit pathetic. Besides, she didn’t want Alice to know. “She’s hanging in there. It’s been hard for both of us, but harder for her. Boo was her baby.”
Alice clucked her tongue as she shook her head. “You poor girls. You tell Jillian I want to see her face soon.”
“I will. She’s been really busy.”
Something in Angie’s tone must have poked at her mother because Alice stopped what she was doing to look down at her daughter. “What’s going on?” she asked in her usual blunt way. It was something both loved and hated by each member of the family. If Alice wanted to know something, she didn’t sugarcoat the question.
The half-shrug Angie made did nothing to move things along as she pretended to fiddle with the arrangement of things in the box. When she looked up, Alice stood still, a hand on her hip, an expectant look on her face. The frustrated breath of a child unable to pull something over on her mother pushed from Angie’s lungs.
“It’s nothing. She just seems kind of, I don’t know, distant lately.”
With a nod of her head, Alice went back to work, fishing a matching creamer and sugar bowl out of the very back of the corner cupboard. “I forgot I even had these,” she muttered to herself. “Don’t you think that probably has to do with losing Boo? It’s only been a few weeks.”
“Yeah, that’s probably it.” Angie wrapped the creamer in newspaper, the tiny lid in another smaller piece.
“Everybody handles death differently, honey.”
“I know.” Angie watched her mother flexing the fingers of her right hand, a subtle wince etched across her features. “You okay, Mama?”
“Fine. Fine. Damn arthritis is acting up today.”
“What can I do?”
“My pills are up on my nightstand. Can you grab them for me?”
“You got it.”
Angie entered her parents’ bedroom for the first time in as long as she could remember. It was their sanctuary, always had been. With four kids, they’d needed one. Angie and her siblings were rarely allowed in once they’d passed age five or six. Now, as she looked around, she took note of things she wouldn’t normally see. Her father had a magnifying glass to help him see the print of the cookbooks and paperbacks on his nightstand. His slippers lay neatly on the floor, but they looked like grandpa slippers. His dresser still held his Old Spice cologne, but also a roll-on bottle of Absorbine Jr. for his aching muscles, as well as an Icy Hot pain patch.
Alice’s dresser and nightstand told a similar tale, of a woman who was no longer young. Her reading glasses were folded neatly in their case next to a stack of magazines. The remote for the small TV was also there, and Angie knew that if she clicked it on, the volume would be set somewhere between “Way Too Loud” and “Stun”. Lately, she and her siblings had been turning down the volume on their parents’ electronics. Prescription bottles sat in a tidy row near the remote: blood pressure, cholesterol, restless leg syndrome. And arthritis; she picked up the bottle and shook two tablets into her hand.
As she turned, her mother’s dresser caught her eyes. The hairbrush had collected more gray hair than brown, and on the corner of the dust-free surface sat a framed black and white photo from Alice and Joe’s wedding day. Angie picked it up, ran her fingertips over the smiling faces of her parents, and wondered how it was possible that they seemed so very young then, and now so very old. Gazing at the photo, she thought about Jillian’s mother, how young she’d been when she’d died, and how lucky Angie herself was to still have both parents—even if they weren’t the vital, unbreakable people she had thought they were.
Her parents were getting old, and there wasn’t a thing she could do to stop it. This wasn’t exactly a news flash for her, but for some reason it felt like it.
And in that moment, Angie felt every one of her forty years.