Monday came in the way only Mondays do: with protests, regret, and a vow to do the next weekend better. Clothes, breakfast, vitamin gummy; brush teeth; coat, backpack, shoes. That was the morning routine. But Sam waved off the backpack and sat down on the floor to tug at the Velcro fastenings on his sneakers.
The order didn’t matter, as long as he walked out the door with both. That’s what I told myself. But I drew the line at superhero capes.
I didn’t think his teacher, Ms. Hernandez, would appreciate it. But mostly I was worried that some of the kids might make fun of him. Or try to take it and wear it themselves.
Considering that he was still working at making sense of Sean’s death, and that Sean had called him Super Sam, I would have done almost anything, offered any bribe, in order to keep that cape at home.
I pulled it out from the collar of his coat and then turned him around so I could undo the tie beneath his chin.
He batted my hands away.
“Why don’t we leave this at home today?”
“Because I can’t be Super Sam if I don’t wear it. And I have to practice for Halloween!”
“You know what? Superman didn’t always wear his cape. But even though no one else knew he was Superman, he knew it. And that was the important thing.” The other important thing was that I’d gotten the knot undone and the cape lay in a puddle on the floor behind him.
I leashed Alice, then she and I walked Sam to school past 1920s farmhouses and bungalows with wide front porches; storybook brick Tudors from the 1930s with their arched front doors and steeply pitched roofs; and brick colonials from the 1940s and ’50s in sizes small, medium, and center-hall large.
Here and there, raised ranches from the 1960s and a rare split-level from the 1970s made an appearance. And—often whispered about, but largely ignored, like a sprawling seatmate on a regional plane—a few mini mansions bumped up against county height restrictions and strained against the outside edges of their too-small lots.
Alice and I walked back home along her preferred route of boxwood- and liriope-lined walkways. Chris Gregory and his Maltipoo joined us.
Chris walked his dog around the same time I walked Alice, along the same route. There were dozens of Chrises in our neighborhood. People you talked to because you were walking in the same direction. People you shared your life with for ten or fifteen minutes every day.
My out-the-door-at-the-very-last-possible-minute schedule assured that I was usually heading into the school with Sam while Chris had already dropped off his son. Although, once or twice, I’d managed to see his son ignore him as he’d waved good-bye.
I’d found out Chris was a professor at one of the local universities and a fountain of knowledge about all things Boy. He wore a leather-billed baseball cap over his sandy hair and had a penchant for pairing Northwestern T-shirts with his cargo shorts.
He slid a look toward me. “How are things?”
I shrugged. “You?”
“Same. I wanted to offer, with Sean not there, if there’s anything you need help with. Kristy was always asking me to do things around the house. You know—change a lightbulb, kill a fly.”
His wife, Kristy, had died several years before.
Chris and Kristy. What could be cuter?
But she must not have been handy like I was. Sean and I had an unspoken agreement. The person most bothered by something became the person responsible for the fixing of it. So when the towel rack in the bathroom started tilting toward the floor or the front door started to stick, Sean got out a hammer or a wood file and went to work. But when the fridge started gurgling or the air conditioner stopped working, I got out my multimeter, my power drill, and my set of screwdrivers and unfastened the panels labeled Do Not Open—Danger of Electrocution so I could take a look inside and figure out what was going on.
Sean had been the first one to comment on the dripping faucet. It wouldn’t have taken me long to fix it, but that faucet had been his.
Chris’s hazel eyes crinkled at the corners as he slanted a smile at me. “It would make me feel useful again. And I’ve got this great set of screwdrivers.”
That made me smile.
He glanced at his watch, then inclined his head. “Anyway. Just let me know. Sorry to ditch you, but I’ve got to go.”
As his stride lengthened and his pace quickened, I wondered what it would be like to establish a life with someone so normal. So solid. Someone who was exactly what he seemed.
Alice and I looped toward home. Along the way, a garbage truck stalked us, halting with a grinding shudder and starting up again with a hydraulic hiss. When it drew even with us, we stepped from the sidewalk into a yard, waiting for it to pass.
Alice tensed.
I tightened my hold on the leash and ordered her to sit.
That’s when I remembered.
Trash!
I hadn’t put out the trash.
I’d meant to. But the previous night I’d been focused on the police report. And that morning there’d been the issue of Sam trying to leave the house with his cape around his neck.
Alice’s muscles bunched and then, before I could take any deterrent measures, she’d whipped the leash from my hand and was off down the road, scampering after the truck, legs a-blur.
“Alice!”
She didn’t used to run after garbage trucks. She only started after Sean died. We all had our ways of dealing with grief. Without Sean as her alpha, her preferred method was to pretend that she’d forgotten all of her obedience training.
“Alice, stop!”
Skidding to a halt just before our house, she sat down—with an odd, sharp bark—in the middle of the street, just the way Sean had taught her to do on command.
A pleasant surprise.
As I recovered the leash, she stretched her neck up and let out another short bark. The garbage truck disappeared around the corner, two garbage men hanging on to the back.
I trudged up to the house, scowling at the yellow fall crocuses that had magically appeared the previous week in the front yard along the fence. They were supposed to have been spider lilies. I knew that because Sean and I had planted them with Sam.
I hated fall crocuses. When crocuses pushed up out of the earth in the spring, it was cause for celebration. When fall crocuses did the same, they seemed like latecomers, irritatingly out of season. The party? It’s over. Ended months ago. Everyone’s gone home!
I was so focused on despising them that I almost ran into my trash cans.
But I hadn’t wheeled them out. I was certain I hadn’t. I flipped the lids shut and hauled them back up the driveway anyway. God bless Jim. He must have rescued me. Again.
I’d thank him later.
As I came back around the house toward the front yard, a gas company van drove up. Slowed. Parked on the street in front of the house.
Men in white coveralls popped out of the back as if it were a clown car. One of them waved me over.
“Can I help you?”
“Is emergency.”