Teddy stared up at her and yawned. He wasn’t going anywhere. Brydie reached down into her jacket pocket. She’d prepared for this. “Here,” she said, handing him a treat.
Teddy gobbled it up, and this time he followed her.
“Nice trick,” Nathan said.
“Well, he’s no agility master,” Brydie replied. “But he will walk for treats.”
“When I got Sasha, she was almost a year old,” Nathan said. “One of the doctors bought her from a breeder without knowing anything about Irish wolfhounds. He actually thought she’d be a good apartment dog.”
“Really?” Brydie asked, incredulous. “She’s huge!”
“Some bigger dogs do okay in apartments,” Nathan replied. “But not wolfhounds. He was getting ready to have her euthanized because she ate his expensive leather couch.”
“That seems extreme.”
“I agree.”
“So you offered to take her instead?”
“I did,” Nathan said. “And when I got her, she was a mess. She wasn’t house-trained, and once I came home and she’d chewed out of her kennel and was sitting on my kitchen table eating what was left of an entire roasted chicken.”
Brydie looked down at Teddy, suddenly feeling very lucky. “I guess getting into the trash is pretty minor compared to that.”
“The agility classes helped with her destructive behavior,” Nathan continued. “I read up on wolfhounds, and realized she needed more stimulation than she was getting. It’s why we go to the park so much.”
“She’s probably not too thrilled about having to stay off her feet for a while,” Brydie said.
“No, not at all,” Nathan replied. “But she should be healed up by next week.”
“That’s good.”
“So I was wondering,” Nathan said, pausing as they walked. “I was wondering if next week you and Teddy might like to come over for dinner with me and Sasha.”
There were those flutters again, and Brydie struggled to concentrate. “Are you sure Teddy won’t hurt her by accident?” was all she could think of to say.
Nathan laughed, gesturing down to Teddy, who’d promptly taken advantage of the pause in their journey and fallen asleep. “I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”
“Well . . .” Brydie said, drawing out her response as long as she could. She didn’t know why she was looking for an excuse to say no, when all she wanted at that moment was to say yes. She wanted to kick herself with one of the heavy combat boots she was wearing. “Okay, that sounds like fun.”
“How’s Saturday for you?”
“Perfect.”
“Great,” Nathan said. He took her elbow and guided her and the sleepy pug to where those in costume were lined up. “I’d better make myself scarce. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I’ve given you an unfair advantage.”
He replaced his Phantom of the Opera mask and was gone, vanishing back into the crush of people. Brydie took her place in line, last, behind two women dressed up as a cat and a nurse, respectively. Brydie couldn’t be sure, but she’d wager that each of their costumes had the word sexy somewhere in the title.
“Did you see Dr. Reid just a minute ago?” the cat asked the nurse.
The nurse nodded. “He’s the hottest phantom of any opera I’ve ever seen, that’s for sure.”
The cat turned away from Brydie, so she had to strain to hear what she said next. “Do you think he’s with that . . . woman . . . behind us?”
“Her?” the nurse whispered. She peered around the cat to catch a better look at Brydie. “I doubt it. She looks older than him.”
“I don’t know what I’d do if I found out he had a girlfriend,” the cat continued. “I mean Dr. Reid is the only reason I come to visit my aunt.”
“I know what you mean,” the nurse replied. “And in a few weeks he’ll be off the rotation, and we’ll be stuck with that horrid old woman . . . what’s her name?”
“Dr. Sower,” the cat said with a giggle.
“Oh, that’s right! What a name!”
The two women burst into a fit of laughter, until the nurse jabbed the cat in the ribs and said, “Shut up, the judges are headed this way.”
Brydie was relieved by the distraction as three judges came into view and began to view her costume. She tugged on Teddy’s leash just enough to get his attention and then handed him a treat. Teddy snapped it up and she now had his full attention.
“What an adorable dog,” one of the judges said. “Oh, and he’s a lion! How cute!”
“And you’re the lion tamer, I suppose?” said another judge, looking Brydie up and down. “Well, show us what tricks your lion can do!”
Brydie hadn’t prepared for there to be a performance aspect of the costume competition. She doubted very much that any of the judges would be impressed with Teddy’s trash-eating or snoring capabilities, and she was keenly aware of the two women in front of her watching her every move, their eyes narrowed so that they were nothing more than slits on their faces.
Brydie fished the last treat out of her pocket and held it up in the air for Teddy to see. He stared at her for a second, confused. Brydie began to panic. She looked like an idiot standing there holding a treat out to a dog with a coif of polyester hair surrounding his head. She considered placing the treat back into her pocket, picking Teddy up, and darting out of the cafeteria before she could be embarrassed further, but instead she lowered the treat just a bit and said, “Up, up, up!”
To her surprise, and the surprise of everyone watching, she was sure, Teddy stood up on his hind legs and began to beg, his tongue lolling out of the side of his mouth and catching on his lion’s mane.
“How positively adorable!” the first judge said. “I’m giving you the best in show for the dog costume portion.” She handed Brydie an envelope, and the judges moved on.
Brydie leaned down and gave Teddy the treat. “I’m going to bake you the biggest batch of peanut butter banana cookies you’ve ever seen,” she whispered to him.
When she stood back up, the cat and the nurse were still staring at her. Maybe it was the thrill of winning or maybe it was because Dr. Nathan Reid wanted to have dinner with her next Saturday; Brydie didn’t know, but as she passed the two women, one dressed as a cat and one dressed as a nurse, she couldn’t help but say just loud enough for them to hear, “I guess you really can teach an old dog new tricks.”
November
CHAPTER 13
IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE BRYDIE BENSON HAD BEEN on a date. Her marriage to Allan lasted almost thirteen years, and she figured that going on a date, especially the first date, had probably changed since Allan took her to the movies on their first date more than a decade ago.
After Brydie’s father died, her mother jumped back into dating with both feet. She even started a singles group for middle-aged women called Fabulous at Fifty, and they met every week at Ruth Benson’s house to drink cocktails and talk about the men they were dating. When her mother brought a man she was dating into the bakery one day just a month after her father died, Brydie felt as though she’d been slapped.
“I can’t believe you’re dating already,” Brydie said to her mother on the phone that evening. “Dad has barely been gone a month.”
“We all grieve in different ways, Brydie,” her mother had replied.
Brydie rolled her eyes into the receiver. “And your way of coping is to bring a sixty-year-old investment banker named Collin into my bakery before noon?”
“Collin is a great catch,” her mother said. “If you’d just give him a chance.”
“Don’t bring him back into my bakery.”
“Oh, you mean the bakery in the building I own?”
“We’ll move.”
Her mother sighed audibly. “Let’s not fight right now. You couldn’t possibly understand what I’m going through.”
Brydie had wanted to throw her phone into a batch of triple-fudge brownies. She’d just lost her father. Her father. The person
she was closest to in the whole world. The last thing she wanted was for her mother to be looking for a new one.
But Brydie soon realized that her mother wasn’t looking to replace her father. She was looking for a distraction, and when Brydie moved back home after she and Allan got divorced, her mother thought Brydie needed one as well.
“I’ve found you the perfect man,” her mother said a few days after Brydie moved in. “His name is Steve Landon, and he’s a senior partner at my realty company.”
“No,” Brydie replied. “Absolutely not.”
“You’ll love him,” her mother went on, ignoring her. “He’s good looking, owns his own home, and he has all of his own teeth and hair. What more could you ask for?”
“The ink isn’t even dry on the divorce papers yet, Mom,” Brydie said. “Could you at least wait a couple of weeks before setting me up for my next one?”
Her mother agreed, somewhat stiffly, and Brydie tried to relax for the first time in months. A couple of months later, her mother threw a party, and Brydie came home to a house full of real estate agents, drinking and eating the croissants she’d made to have for breakfast the next morning. She gathered up the rest of the croissants to hide in her bedroom and was close to making her escape when her mother cornered her in the hallway.
“Brydie, honey, there you are! I’ve got someone I want you to meet,” her mother said. “This is Steve, the guy I told you about!”
Brydie had a croissant in her mouth but managed to choke out a “hello” before she tried to get past them both and to the safety of her room.
“Don’t be rude,” her mother hissed, grabbing her by the arm. “He came here just to meet you.”
“Well, I didn’t ask him to do that,” Brydie hissed right back. “All I want to do is go to my room and go to sleep.”
“You can sleep when you’re dead.”
For some reason, her mother’s words cut right through her, and it caught Brydie off guard. “Fine,” she said, relenting. “I’ll go talk to him.”
“Good girl,” her mother said. She took the croissants out of Brydie’s hands. “Finish eating that first.”
Brydie followed her mother and Steve out into the living room. He’d been older than she’d expected, his hair a distinguished salt-and-pepper mix. He was older than she, but younger than her mother, an indeterminable spot between thirty-five and forty-five. “So, my mom says you’re a partner at her company?” she asked.
“The newest partner,” Steve replied.
“Congratulations.”
“So, how come I’ve never seen you,” he paused, tapping her arm lightly with his beer bottle, “come in to the business to see your mom?”
“I own a bakery,” Brydie replied.
“Oh really?” Steve asked. “Your mom never mentioned that.”
“What a surprise.”
“Where is this bakery?”
Brydie shifted from one foot to the other. She’d responded so automatically, she’d forgotten she in fact did not own a bakery. Not anymore. “It used to be on Caraway,” she said. “But we closed a few months ago.”
“Oh?”
“We weren’t bankrupt or anything,” Brydie said quickly. For some reason, it was easier for her to admit that it was her marriage that had failed and not her business. “My husband and I got divorced, and we decided it was best to go ahead and close. Neither one of us was willing to give it up to the other one.”
“Sort of like when King Solomon threatened to cut the baby in half,” Steve replied. “Better for no one to have it than let one person have it all.”
Brydie nodded. She had never thought about it that way, but it was probably a pretty accurate analogy. “Yeah,” she said, smiling despite her resolution to remain annoyed. “Something like that.”
“I’ve been divorced for almost five years,” Steve said. “It gets easier.”
“Thank you.”
Steve sat his empty beer bottle down on the coffee table. “You know, this isn’t really my scene. Want to get out of here for a while?”
Brydie thought about it. She didn’t even know this guy. For all she knew, he could be the next Buffalo Bill, interested in her size 12 skin suit. But the truth was that she wanted to be anywhere but here, even if that meant taking a risk on a potential serial killer. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”
The next morning Brydie woke up in Steve’s house, in Steve’s bed, on the other side of Jonesboro. When she had tried to leave, he’d woken up and told her how beautiful she was and how much fun he’d had, and it was all Brydie could do not to burst into tears in front of him. She let him think it was because she was so happy and so flattered by what he’d said to her, but really it was because she felt like she was dying inside. Worse than that, she felt like she’d just cheated on her husband.
Her mother wanted to know all about it. “Tell me everything,” she’d said to Brydie. “Will you see him again?”
“No,” Brydie replied. “I don’t think I’ll see him again.”
“But why not? He is such a nice guy!”
“He is nice,” Brydie agreed. “But I’m not ready.”
“With that attitude, you’ll never be ready,” her mother replied. “I know it’s hard . . .”
“It is hard,” Brydie said, cutting her mother off. “It is hard. How can you go from Dad to someone like Collin?”
“I loved your father,” her mother said, her tone softening. “But I like Collin. We have fun together. And it’s not like your father was perfect. He had his faults.”
Brydie didn’t think so. “Everybody has faults,” she said. “But he was a good dad. The best dad.”
“He was a good dad,” her mother conceded. “But he was a terrible husband.”
Brydie rolled her eyes up to the ceiling in her bedroom and tried to think of a way out of the conversation. “Mom,” she said finally, “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“Your father was an alcoholic,” her mother continued, ignoring her.
“Mom,” Brydie said. “Stop.”
“No,” her mother said. “You need to hear this. Maybe you’ll stop putting your father up on a pedestal. He wasn’t the man you think he was.”
“Mom,” Brydie pleaded. “Stop, please.”
“He fell off that ladder when you were sixteen because he was drunk, Brydie. He was drunk before noon during the week. He was trying to hang Christmas lights in October.”
Brydie knew her father drank. Sometimes he did drink too much. But it wasn’t as bad as her mother was making it out to be. It wasn’t. “I have to go,” she said, standing up.
“Brydie.” Her mother took her hand and pulled her back down onto the bed. “Your father was a nice person, a good person. He was just bad at being a husband. Allan is the same way. He’s not a good husband. He’s not the right husband for you.”
Brydie shook her hand free and fled, locking herself in the bathroom until she heard her mother retreat from the bedroom and leave the house. That was the day Brydie packed her bags and left for Memphis. That conversation was the reason the relationship with her mother had been strained since she left. It was the reason she avoided her mother’s phone calls and the reason she didn’t go home.
Now Brydie was less than a week away from her first real date since the divorce, with someone she actually liked, and she hoped those same feelings wouldn’t return. The Sunday after the Halloween party, Nathan found her while she was visiting Mrs. Neumann. They’d exchanged phone numbers, and they’d agreed Brydie and Teddy would be at Nathan’s house about 7 P.M. for dinner and a playdate for Teddy and Sasha.
She hadn’t told anyone about the date—not Elliott and certainly not her mother. She didn’t want to answer questions. She just wanted to keep it to herself—a reason to smile when there was a lull in her day and she had a few moments to think about it.
At work, there were no lulls. They’d transitioned from Halloween to Thanksgiving on the first of November. All of the ghosts, and
witches, and mummies were replaced with pilgrims and turkeys and filling the regular orders for weddings, baby showers, and other events.
“Who gets married in November?” Rosa asked as she filled a tube of red icing to hand to Lillian, who was busy making red roses on the top tier of a wedding cake. “Summertime is for weddings. I have never understood getting married in the cold. It starts a marriage off cold, if you believe that sort of thing.”
Brydie shrugged. “I got married in July. But my best friend got married in February. There was an ice storm the day of her wedding. Half of us had to spend the night in the church.”
“And your friend is still married?”
“She is.”
“Good for her,” Rosa said.
“Are you married?” Brydie asked. It wasn’t normally a question she’d ask someone she hardly knew, but she figured it couldn’t hurt since they were on the subject.
Rosa shook her head. “No, I’ve never been married.” She turned around to look at Lillian and then said, her voice scarcely above a whisper, “Lillian’s father is my younger brother. He and his girlfriend had Lillie when they were still just kids themselves. They couldn’t care for her, and our parents are dead. So I took her. I was just twenty.”
“Wow,” Brydie replied.
“It wasn’t even something I thought about. She’s family, and I already knew I’d never be able to have children of my own,” Rosa continued. “I adopted her, and then when she was three I found out she was on the autism spectrum.”
Brydie stared at Rosa and then stole a glance at Lillian, who hadn’t moved from in front of the cake she was decorating. “Do her parents ever . . . do they ever see her?”
“No,” Rosa replied. “They moved to Florida, and they don’t visit. But they did get married, and we keep in touch through phone calls and emails. They have three children now. It would just be too confusing for Lillie to try to explain it to her.”
“I understand,” Brydie said, even though she really didn’t. She couldn’t imagine having a baby and not wanting her. She felt a twinge of jealousy knowing that Rosa’s brother and his wife had three more children—three more chances—to be parents. She must have been staring hard at Lillian, because after a few seconds of being lost in her thoughts, she felt Rosa’s hand on her shoulder, warm and reassuring.
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