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As I read through my online news feeds I kept stumbling on deadly stories of love gone wrong. Was it the approach of Valentine’s Day that led husbands to shoot wives, wives to stab husbands, and spurned lovers of all kinds to strike out at those who were supposed to be closest to their hearts?
I was lucky to have my loved ones close—Lili, sitting across from me at the dining room table, working on her laptop, and Rochester, sprawled at my feet.
“Take a look at this student portfolio.” Lili swiveled her laptop around to face me. “The assignment was to take photos that represent a particular word, and she chose love.”
Rochester recognized the word love, which I used on him all the time, and he sat up so that I could stroke the silky fur at the top of his head.
“The portfolio isn’t sappy, is it?” I asked.
“Not at all. She went back to the ancient Greeks and their four words for love: agápe, éros, philía, and storgē.”
She pointed to the screen, a photo of a group of parishioners outside a church I recognized as St. Ignatius in Yardley, one town downriver from where we lived in Stewart’s Crossing, a Philadelphia suburb. The word agápe was at the bottom of the photo, along with what I assumed was the same word in the Greek alphabet. “I thought agápe was brotherly love,” I said.
“It is, but it’s also the love of God for man and the love of man for God,” Lili said. She was the chair of the Fine Arts department at Eastern College, where I also worked, and she taught photography classes as well.
She flipped to the next photo, a collage of images of people kissing—a young man and woman, two elderly women, two thirty-something men among them. Éros was at the bottom.
“Romantic love,” I said. Rochester had enough affection for the moment, and he slumped back down on the floor, resting on his side with his legs out.
“Exactly. A bit too politically correct—I think she could have used just one of the images. But she’s a college student so I’ll cut her some slack.”
The next photo was what looked like a group of college students at a picnic. “Philia,” Lili said, pointing to the word at the bottom. “Friendship, affectionate regard.”
The kids were all laughing and engaging with each other, so I figured that was a good match. “And finally, storgē.” Lili pronounced the hard G with a light e at the end.
The photo showed a young woman sitting in a Morris chair at what looked like a coffee shop, breast-feeding an infant. The photographer had lit the photo so that the mother’s dark skin glowed with an inner warmth.
“I can’t say I’ve ever heard of storgē,” I said. “What does it mean?”
“I had to look it up myself. It means the affection between parents and children.”
I nodded. “And again, a bit of political correctness. Breast-feeding in a public space. It’s interesting the way she’s managed to get across her opinions without hitting the viewer over the head. And the photos are all very well-composed.”
“She has a good understanding of light and shadow, too.” She turned the laptop back so it was facing her. “It’s nice to get a student with real talent once in a while.”
She went back to work and I thought about that word, storgē. Family love. There was a time, not too long before, when I’d almost given up on ever experiencing that. When I was married, my wife suffered two miscarriages, and the emotional fallout from those experiences led, in the end, to the computer hacking event that sent me to prison for a year in California, and to our eventual divorce.
Then I had returned home to Stewart’s Crossing, the small riverfront town where I grew up. I curled in on myself like those little caterpillars I often spotted on trees and tried to resign myself to single life. But within a couple of months, Rochester had come into my life, a strapping, enthusiastic golden retriever who wouldn’t let me wallow in self-pity. His love had opened me up again so that when I met Lili, I was ready for her.
Since then, we had become our own family unit. After a stint as an adjunct English professor, then an employee in the alumni relations department, I’d been assigned to run a conference center for the college. Rochester came to work with me most days, and when the weather was temperate we often met Lili for lunch at a café on campus where we could sit outside, Rochester by our feet.
Those days were only a memory in bleak February, though. Valentine’s Day was about a week away, and I’d already come up with the perfect gift for Lili – a covered travel cup in the shape of a wide-angle camera lens. She’d be able to use it to carry tea or coffee on the trek up to school, or have it on her desk as a reminder of her previous career as a globe-hopping photojournalist.
Rochester was even easier to shop for. I’d already bought a couple of hollow bones stuffed with peanut butter. With the addition of a few extra belly rubs, Rochester would be in puppy heaven.
He woke me the next morning at six-thirty to tramp through the misty streets of River Bend, our gated community. The intermittent streetlights always reminded me of the one where Lucy met the faun Tumnus in the first of the Narnia books, glowing octagons atop iron poles, each with a horizontal arm our management company used to drape seasonal flags.
Each lamp was a halo of light, supplemented by security lights on townhouses and the occasional headlights of passing cars. We saw a miniature schnauzer named Robby whom Rochester liked, and after they sniffed each other, the dog’s dad and I let them off their leashes for a romp through the shimmering dew.
By the time Rochester and I got home, the sun was beginning to rise in the east, splaying the streets with shafts of fuzzy gold light. I fed him and then hurried through a shower and got dressed, because we had an appointment that morning I knew Rochester would want to keep.
My friend Gail Dukowski, who ran the Chocolate Ear café in the center of town, had asked us to come down before she opened for a taste-test of new doggie treats she had created. The clothing shop next door to the café had closed, and with the help of her fiancé, she was going to turn it into a dog-friendly annex where humans and their canine companions could hang out together.
Because of food service laws, she couldn’t serve both kinds of clients together, but the architect had put a door between the two rooms, and while bipeds were welcome to order food from the café, quadrupeds would have to stay on their side of the wall. Of course, a lot of people either had service dogs, or pretended that their dogs had a service function, but Rochester and I preferred to err on the side of the law. I was looking forward to the chance order my coffee and food and a biscuit for Rochester, and relax with him and my fellow cynophiles.
I left Lili dozing in bed and drove down into town with Rochester. It was about seven-thirty on a Saturday morning, and the rising sun glittered off the ice on the roads like knife blades. It had been a bitter winter, and I was longing for the first signs of spring, even though we’d have to wait at least a month for those.
As we drove down Main Street toward the café, I was surprised at how sluggishly traffic moved, until I finally saw a pair of police cars with flashing lights ahead of us, right in front of the Chocolate Ear.
I parked a block away and hustled Rochester out of the car, worried about what was going on at the café. Through the glass windows of the next-door space, where the renovation was taking shape, I saw my friend Rick Stemper, a police detective in Stewart’s Crossing, speaking with Gail’s fiancé Declan. Beyond them, a crime scene tech dusted the surfaces for fingerprints.
I assumed there had been a break-in overnight, and hoped the thieves hadn’t gotten away with much. Rochester strained to go forward, but I held him back until Gail stepped out the side door of the café and motioned us forward. She was a slim blonde in her early thirties, and though she was twenty years younger than I was we’d become friends when we both returned to Bucks County at around the same time. I loved the Chocolate Ear, and in warm weather I often spent time at the café tables that fronted on Main Street, Rochester by my side.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s terrible,” she said, holding her arms against her chest. “You know I get up early to bake, right? Declan has been getting up at the same time to work in the new café before he has to leave for the office. This morning I told him, it’s Saturday, stay in bed a while, but he wouldn’t listen.”
She started shaking, and I wrapped an arm around her shoulders. It was cold out there and she was wearing a light sweater, jeans and clogs. “Come on, let’s get you inside,” I said. We couldn’t take Rochester into the kitchen so we climbed the stairs to the apartment above the café where Gail and Declan lived.
It was warm and cozy up there. Gail sat on the sofa in her living room and Rochester sat on the floor beside her, resting his head on her knee. She stroked his occiput, the back of his head, as I looked around.
The room reminded me a lot of the café downstairs. Gail had decorated it with similar Art Deco posters for French food products, and a glass-fronted case held her collection of antique baking implements, from wire whisks to cake pans in unusual shapes.
I sat across from her. “What happened this morning?” I asked.
“I was already in the kitchen when Dec went next door. He came back right away and his face was as white as flour. He said something like, ‘that girl who cleans up, what’s her name?’ and I said that her name was Asya. And then he said, ‘she’s dead.’”
