A New Leash on Life

by Suzie Carr

  Sally jotted this down, too. “Healthy and boring. You got it, sweetie.” She grabbed her menu.

  Chloe slipped me a glance that sent me spinning. I escaped to the saltshaker this time, twirling it around my fingers and examining the rice grains at the bottom.

  “How’s Josh these days?” she asked.

  “Josh is Josh.” I passed the shaker back and forth between my fingers. “He’s married and has a son named Thomas. Cute kid.”

  She nodded. “Whatever happened to that football career he bragged about?”

  “He played for two seasons in college but then hurt his knee. He fell madly in love with his physical therapist and married her.”

  “I never pictured Josh to be a family man.” Her tone tightened. “He struck me as a lifelong bachelor who would travel and flirt his way through life.”

  “He’s a good dad,” I said, defending him. “He hangs out with Thomas as much as possible. He’s his coach and fix-it buddy. He reminds me of my dad.”

  She forced a smile this time. “Your dad. Now he was a great man.”

  “He was.”

  Chloe sank into the moment with me, tilting her head and nodding. “He was my father figure.”

  I couldn’t imagine my childhood without a dad who loved me. I lowered my guard to comfort her on this. “He cared about you, you know.”

  She pursed her lips and grabbed the peppershaker, fiddling with something now, too. “If only he knew I snuck in every night. Not sure he would’ve taken me under his wing all those times he tried showing me how to fix motors in the garage.”

  “Better you than me.” I hated fiddling with tools and engines. “Josh and I will be eternally grateful to you for sparing us from his mechanic lessons.”

  She stopped twirling her shaker and reached out for my hands. “Those were good times.”

  I pulled back. “All good things end.” I still cried into my pillow some nights over the void.

  She spun the peppershaker in her hands again, and I reciprocated with my saltshaker. Thirteen years of separation from those good times and we had turned into a couple of condiment majorettes.

  “So,” I said, deciding for us both that one of us needed to take the reins on this visit.

  “So.” She looked up and caught my eye. “The shelter’s in trouble?”

  I sat back and released the shaker. What an understatement. “We’re having a few small issues, yes.” I saw her investor mission statement in my mind: “Serving your needs, so you can get back to serving others.”

  “I want to help.”

  I folded my hands under my legs, contemplating her motive. “Why do you want to help me?”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” she shrugged.

  I gripped the seat. “You don’t owe me if that’s what this is about.”

  She leaned in. The lights bounced off the gloss on her lips. “Maybe I just want to be generous.”

  I tore away from her moist lips and down to her slender fingers. “Well, you’re certainly in a position to be.” Where her bio failed to explain, I wanted her to pick up the pieces. I wanted to learn how she went from poor kid without a family to a smashing success. “How did you earn all of your money with everything you had to deal with? Did you win the lottery or something?”

  She backed against the booth with a trail of hurt on her face. “I’m a capable person.”

  I fled to her rescue. “I’m sorry. That sounded wrong.”

  She cushioned me against the booth seat with her downy eyes. “You’ve always pitied me.”

  “No,” I stammered, locking eyes with her.

  A sparkle rested on the strong spokes of her eyes. “Yes, you did. That’s okay. In your defense, I did spend my high school years sneaking into your room, because I had no room of my own. I was homeless at sixteen. I wore your clothes and shoes. I ate dinner with your family. I hung out with your dad in his garage on the weekends.”

  I hated the garage and had avoided it every chance I could. My dad always raked her in every Saturday morning when she’d pass him by on her fake walk up the front driveway. Little did my dad know that she had just climbed down the tree from my bedroom and circled around the front of the house. “I hated that garage.”

  “I loved it. Your dad taught me a lot. I wanted to learn how to fix things in case one day I had to actually fend for myself.”

  I always assumed she relied on me back then to be her savior, to be the one to rescue her from her hardships. “I never knew you worried about that.”

  “Not an easy thing to admit.” She gazed into my eyes. “Just like it’s not easy for you to take help from me, is it?” She smiled and eased into her espresso.

  I spent too many years rebuilding myself for her to waltz into my life and act like she had an edge over me. She’d have to fight me for the upper hand with more than a pretty set of eyes. “I don’t understand your motive.”

  “Motive?” She placed her mug down.

  “You feel guilty and you shouldn’t. We needed to go through the fun just like we needed to go through the breakup. You needed to cheat on me. I needed to be cheated on. You gave birth to a baby. That baby is alive because she is supposed to be. What we went through needed to happen. I don’t hold any grudges. Your actions are just that, your actions. So, if you’re coming here to settle some guilty part of your conscience, you don’t need to. I’m fine with how everything went down. I haven’t given it a second thought in years.”

  She blinked and her eyes watered. “You still hate me.”

  “No,” I slapped the table. “Didn’t you hear anything I just said?”

  “You’re angry still.”

  She stole my grounding again, rendering me incapable of standing tall and prominent against her shortcomings. “I’m not angry,” I said in a whisper. “I have no reason to be.”

  She exhaled. “I want to help as a friend, as a concerned fellow animal protector and lover. I see value in your work. After your segment aired I researched nonprofit, no-kill shelters to learn more about how they can operate under such hopeful guidelines and my heart started breaking. I read stories about how other shelters operated and determined which dogs and cats got euthanized and about the sad statistics of how many animals get dumped off each year compared to how many pets are bought at puppy mill supporting pet stores. We can do better than that.”

  She pinched the edges of a story I lived and worried about daily. “I wish I could save them all,” I said. “I wish I could educate more people. I wish puppy mills didn’t exist. I wish pets were spayed and neutered. I wish people would wake up and realize pets are not disposable. They’re family members with as much of a right to exist as their human counterparts.”

  “If your shelter goes out of business, all of those poor babies could be killed. That tears me up. I can’t let that happen to them.”

  I adored how she referred to them as babies.

  I never considered Chloe to be anything more than a pretty cheerleader concerned with doing proper cartwheels and jumps. I never realized she loved animals as much as I did. However, she always did brush Floppy while we watched episodes of 90210, and Floppy cuddled up to her in the middle of the night instead of me. Whenever we’d go on long walks past the baseball fields, she never failed to stop and pay attention to a dog barking for her, begging for her to pet him and toss a ball. “The way a person treats an animal says a lot about her character.”

  She nodded, even blushed, catching the compliment.

  I got lost in her smile. Before I knew it, she had reached into her oversized bag and slid an envelope under my fingertips. “I don’t know how much you need. It’s just enough to cover some expenses for now.”

  I studied the envelope. “So, how does this work, exactly? Do we agree on an amount and then I pay you back in installments? How long do I get to pay you back? At what interest rate? Are there alternative ways to do these types of transactions like maybe instead of a set amount, you get a percentage of revenue from the
clinic visits?”

  “No,” she said. “This has nothing to do with my company. This is a personal donation.”

  I eyed it, lured by its possibilities. “I can’t accept this. Not from you. It feels like payback and it doesn’t feel right.”

  “This isn’t for you.” She punctuated her words. “It’s for all of those adorable babies.” She inched up closer to me, “Besides, it’s a tax write-off for me.” She pushed the envelope into my reluctant fingers.

  “So what you’re saying is, I’m really doing you a favor by accepting?” My voice had more flirt to it than I wanted.

  “If that’s how you need to look at it, then, sure.” Her fingers lounged a mere inch from mine.

  Lured in by what the money could do, I gripped it and sealed my eyes shut in surrender. “Thank you.”

  Firm and resolved, she patted my hands. “That’s just to get you started.”

  I managed a weak smile to mirror her bright one, feeling a little too much like I had just offered my soul to her for a while. “I appreciate it. I’ll put it to good use, I promise.”

  “So, I’m curious how you get funding to keep the doors open.”

  “Ah, that’s always a challenge. We’re a small, dedicated team who work our asses off. We don’t take days off. We work constantly. If we’re not treating animals in the walk-in clinic, we’re grooming, socializing, training, or cleaning.” I paused, considering explaining the truth behind my new desperate position. “In the spirit of full disclosure, I was getting a monthly donation check and that stopped. I learned my friend was the donor and she is now losing her house because of her generosity.” I sidestepped Chloe’s large eyes and continued. “Then, there’s the whole fundraising piece. We spend a lot of time organizing events to draw attention to the animals up for adoption and to the shelter’s needs for basic necessities and cash donations. Ideally, I’d love to have more time to educate proactively about adopting shelter dogs, about training so people can learn to handle difficult situations with their pets, and about basic health concerns that are easily treatable. I want to do so much, but I have so little time.”

  “And resources,” Chloe finished the sentence for me.

  “To say the least.”

  “Why do you do all of this? I mean you could be working as a vet, earning a better living. Why take all of this on yourself?”

  “Same reason as why you’re here right now. If I relied on others to do this here, some of the greatest animals you could ever meet would’ve never had the chance to play fetch, to go for a run, to brighten up a sick person, the list goes on. We’re the keeper of the keys to their happy lives. It’s a no-brainer for me. I can’t imagine serving in any other capacity. These pets need me. They need my assistants. They need my best friend. They need this shelter and the compassion of others.”

  Chloe’s eyes filled. She pulled in her bottom lip, but her chin still trembled. She shook her head. “Wow. You really struck a chord. I mean, what purpose you have in this world. We should all be so fortunate.”

  “I do feel blessed by it. Even though it’s tough financially, it’s worth it.”

  “It doesn’t have to be so tough financially.”

  Always so ideal. “Orphanages have difficult times raising funds.”

  She cradled her mug. “Tell you what. I’d like to sit down another time with you and discuss more ways I can help.”

  The lid to all I had closed off slowly started to unseal. She reeled me in so easily. “We’ll see.”

  “Okay,” she smiled, accepting my reluctance. “Aren’t you even curious how much is in there?”

  I wanted to rip it open, but would wait until I privately tucked into my truck. “Any amount is going to be helpful.”

  “You mentioned on the news segment that you want to expand?”

  “The reporter tossed that in my mouth. That kind of expansion requires more staff, more resources, more funding that’s just not readily available right now. The community is torn up. They’re focusing their money on themselves right now. Justifiably.”

  “One of the things I could do is start a charitable trust fund.” Her eyes danced, brimming with shine and life. “The Clark Family Shelter could become a model for a no-kill shelter success, offering education, compassion, and rehabilitation.”

  I pictured shiny new kennels, a series of private adoption meet and greet rooms, an expanded medical facility with an additional room for surgeries and a separate one for examinations. I envisioned a classroom for training. My legs bounced. My eyes opened to the bubbly possibilities. I wouldn’t have to stress every month waiting for donations to pour in. I wouldn’t have to charge the electricity bill to the credit card on those months that only had four weeks to them. “Another tax write-off?”

  “I’d rather the animals benefit than anyone else.”

  I sprang to life, erasing bad memories with endless possibilities.

  Chloe’s eyes danced wildly and mine joined in, whipping this way and that, weaving up and down, tangling into a primal beat that revived old memories and sparked new ones. Why did she have to look so damn sexy?

  Accepting that offer would mean she’d own a part of me and we’d forever be cemented together. The void left years ago filled with hope, while my hesitation fought to temper that filling. “I have a lot to consider.”

  “Then, let’s start considering,” she said.

  I sipped my coffee and tried my best not to appear too committed or too concerned with all of the time we’d have to spend together planning this thing out. She rubbed her hands together like she used to do when ready to tackle something really big, like tell off her stepfather or when she would rally the cheerleaders together to show off to the opposing team. Suddenly, I was transported back to the time when I first learned that simple will alone would not protect me from her power to seduce and stir me.

  “How did you get so—” I searched for the right words.

  “Wealthy?”

  I nodded.

  “I didn’t like being a victim or interpreting life through only one lens,” she said, her cheeks, nectarous and full, angled with her words. “So, I opened my eyes widely and latched onto gaining knowledge about the one thing I lacked and that had kept me from being free all along. I studied money.”

  I rested on her words, and when Sally delivered our steaming breakfasts, I devoured mine, escaping into the heaps of golden hash browns and gooey egg yolks. “You’re a survivor,” I said, finally breaking my silence.

  She wagged her head up and down. “I’ve got a daughter who’s twelve going on twenty. I need to be.”

  “Does she look like you?”

  “Not at all. She’s way prettier.”

  Time was a funny thing. It erased things—things that used to get me up in the middle of the night to throw up, things that caused me to break out into convulsive cries without notice, things that made me state such declarations as ‘never again’ and ‘over my dead body.’ Sitting across from the girl who shoveled dirt onto my life and buried my soul, I realized that I no longer felt pain or revenge for these things. Now, excitement burst in me, excitement for times to come, feelings to explore, and buried moments to dig up. Time glossed over the bad and paved a path for future travel. My hard exterior disintegrated. Now, I sat spooning eggs into my mouth, a naked spirit waiting to be lifted to that level where my toes curled and my heart galloped.

  “Is she a cheerleader?”

  “Gosh, no.” Chloe laughed. “I’m lucky if I can get her to wear sandals with her school skirts. She’s all about hammering nails into tree houses and building bonfires.”

  “I’m happy for you,” I said, lifting the hook off the door to my heart, freeing her from my rage, my confusion, and my hardened spirit.

  “Thank you,” she said, stirring her oatmeal. “I just want to forget about the hard feelings if we can and start fresh. I hope you’ll let me to help you.”

  I needed her, and this reliance placed me in a strange position fa
r outside comfort. “Under one condition.”

  She spooned some oatmeal between her moist lips, the same lips I nibbled on countless times. She wiped her mouth, then asked, “Condition?” She laughed. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

  “We treat this only as it is.”

  She cocked her head. “What is it exactly?”

  I rose and tossed a twenty down on the table. “Business.”

  I left her to her half-eaten bowl of oatmeal and the playful smile resting on her lips. I walked out of the door and to my pickup truck across the street, stepping out strong, confident, and in control of this new situation, and more than a little excited at the prospect of getting to know this new Chloe.

  I turned the key and the engine rolled, refusing to turn over fully. I tried again. After five attempts, gasoline stunk up the inside. Chloe turned in my direction, staring straight on. I counted to twenty and tried again. More angst from the tired engine. The truck did this to me every once in a while. My mechanic couldn’t figure out why. Each time it happened, I’d climb out, open the hood, stick a screwdriver in the choke, and start her. I sat for several long minutes pretending to text. Chloe chatted with Sally, sipped more espresso, jotted something down, looked in my direction, and finally got up and headed to the bathroom.

  When she disappeared, I jumped out of my truck, screwdriver in hand, and got to work on getting Big Red out of her slump. When I sat back in the driver’s seat and turned the key, she still refused to turn over.

  Chloe showed up at my side not long after, strutting her long legs under a short skirt. “Want a lift?”

  “I don’t need a lift,” I said. “I climbed out of the seat again and walked back to the hood. I readjusted the screwdriver.

  When I came back up, Chloe swayed that sexy look my way, the one where her eyes lowered and her lips curved into a half smile. She moved in closer to me, and with her thumb, rubbed my cheek, not hiding the sultry chuckle playing around inside. “You’ve got some black stuff on your face.”

  She smelled like I’d remembered, like fresh flowers on a spring day. She wiped, and I looked down, down past her neckline to the soft curve of her breasts, a view accentuated by her revealing scoop t-shirt. She pulled away. “All gone.”