The Happy Ever After Playlist

by Abby Jimenez

  April eighth was the two-year anniversary of his accident. Not the date of his death—he lived a month before he succumbed to his injuries—but the date of the crash. That was really the day his life was over. My life was over. He never woke up. So today could never just be some day.

  The year held a lot of days like that for me. The day in December when he’d proposed. His birthday. My birthday. Holidays, the date of the wedding that never happened. In fact, most of the calendar was a minefield of hard days. One would crest, I’d live through it, and then another one would roll toward me in the constant ebb and swell that was the year.

  Another year without him.

  So I had planned to distract myself today. Have my visit to the cemetery and then be productive. Get some paintings done. Eat something healthy. I’d committed to not sleeping through the day like last year. I’d promised myself I would ignore that the month of April smelled like a hospital to me now and reminded me of fixed pupils and beeping machines with tempos that never changed.

  I glanced at my phone again.

  Nothing.

  Chapter 2

  Sloan

  ♪ affection | Between Friends

  Ten days. I’d had Tucker for ten wonderful, fur-on-my-bedspread, wet-kisses-in-the-morning, tail-wagging days.

  I knocked on the door of Kristen’s house, grinning from ear to ear. When she opened it, she stared. “You fucking did it.”

  “I told you I would.” I beamed, edging past her into the house, not waiting to be invited in. Tucker and her little dog, Stuntman Mike, circled each other, tails wagging, noses to butts.

  She closed the front door behind me. “You walked here? That’s like seven miles, you crazy bitch.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. My reemergence into daylight had been shocking friends and family alike lately. “I have to use your bathroom. Is Oliver awake?”

  “No, he’s down for his nap.” She followed me down the hall. “God, you’re really loving this dog thing, huh? Oh, which reminds me,” she said, “I made him something.” She disappeared and came back a second later holding up a dog tee that read I JUMPED ON SLOAN THROUGH A SUNROOF AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS T-SHIRT.

  I snorted. Kristen ran an online business from her house that sold merchandise for dogs.

  I went into the bathroom, and she tucked the shirt under her arm and leaned on the door frame. Josh wasn’t home, so we fell immediately back into our old roommate habit of never closing doors between us.

  “He’s incredible. I’ve never seen an animal so well trained,” I said. “Somebody must have really spent time working with him.” I washed my hands and looked at my flushed face in the mirror, tucking some flyaway hairs behind my ear.

  “Still no callback from that Jason guy?”

  I hadn’t heard a word from Tucker’s owner. Tucker had spent the first two days peeing in my house despite his expensive antibiotics, and I’d spent two days taking him outside as much as humanly possible to save my carpets.

  It was miraculous how motivating a puddle of dog pee on your floors could be. Seriously. Better than a personal trainer. My Fitbit had never seen so much action.

  I, of course, got no painting done at all while I was walking him. But this body had a tan for the first time in longer than I could remember, and I had to admit that the exercise felt good. So even after his infection was gone, we kept up the walks.

  Today I felt particularly ambitious, so I decided to walk to Kristen’s house to see her and the baby. I figured if I got tired, we could just call an Uber. But we made it, and the victory was glorious.

  “Not a peep from Jason,” I said.

  I’d put up posters with Tucker’s picture at the intersection where I found him, and I’d listed him on a few missing-pet websites. I’d even registered him as a found dog at the Humane Society. And every day I left a message for Jason. I was beginning to think Tucker had been officially abandoned.

  “Soooo, I saved your dog from certain death and he thanked me by jumping on me through my sunroof like a grenade. Give me a call to arrange for a pickup. I have so many questions.”

  “Hi, Jason. Sloan again. Your dog is peeing all over my house from the bladder infection he got from not being let out. It would be great if you came to get him so he can pee all over your house instead. Thanks.”

  “Sloan and Tucker here. While Tucker’s love of expensive food basically makes him my twin separated at birth, I can’t afford to keep feeding him. Think you might be able to call me back?”

  I followed Kristen into the kitchen and gave Tucker a bowl of water with ice cubes in it. Then I sat at the granite counter, and she slid a glass of iced tea over to me. “Can I just say how happy I am that you’re getting out?”

  My mood deflated in an instant, and her steady brown eyes studied me.

  “Kristen? Do you think it’s weird Tucker showed up on the anniversary of the accident? I mean, it is, right?”

  She waited for me to continue, stirring her ice around her glass.

  “Tucker literally fell into my lap. And do you know what kind of dog he is? A Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever.” I ticked the long name off with a five-finger tap on the countertop. “A hunting dog, Kristen. Ducks.”

  Kristen knew better than anyone the significance of that. Duck hunting had been Brandon’s favorite sport. He’d fly out to South Dakota every year for it with Josh.

  “What if Brandon sent him to me?” I said, a lump bolting into my throat.

  She gave me a sympathetic smile. “Well, I do think Brandon wouldn’t have wanted you to be this unhappy,” she said gently. “Two years is a long fucking time to be this sad, Sloan.”

  I nodded and wiped my face with the top of my shirt. I stared bleary eyed at the high chair pushed up against the kitchen table. Kristen’s life was a painful reminder of what mine should have been. If Brandon had lived and we’d been married like we planned, I’d probably have a baby of my own, taking him on playdates with Kristen and Josh’s one-year-old son.

  Kristen had been my best friend since sixth grade. Our worlds had been on the same trajectory since junior high. We’d done everything together. Our lives’ milestones had always lined up accordingly.

  Brandon and Josh had been best friends too. I’d pictured couples trips and having babies together. Buying houses next door to each other. And now Kristen had continued without me. Her life had kept its pace, and mine had crashed and burned when Brandon’s motorcycle did the same. I was stuck in some sort of arrested development, trapped in a continuous loop I couldn’t pull myself out of.

  Until now.

  Something had shifted in me. Maybe it was the routine that Tucker made me stick to, or the walks, or the sun. Maybe it was the thought that this dog was somehow a gift from the man I’d lost, a sign to try. I’d always believed in signs. It just seemed too unlikely to be a random thing. Of all the cars in all the world, Tucker ran in front of mine. It was like he chose me.

  I pulled out my cell phone. “That reminds me, it’s time for my call to Jason.”

  His steady voice had become a part of my daily routine. But this time when voicemail picked up, a robotic female informed me that the mailbox was full.

  A sign?

  I looked at Kristen, who watched me wordlessly.

  That was it. My mind was made up. I thumbed through my phone and found a picture of Tucker and me that I’d taken a few days earlier. I attached it to a message to Jason and sent it off.

  “You’re right. Brandon would want me to be happy. And that Jason guy, if he ever shows up? He can go to hell.”

  Chapter 3

  Jason

  ♪ Middle of Nowhere | Hot Hot Heat

  The plane taxied toward our gate to the clink of seat belts coming undone. The air stopped coming through the tiny vents above us, and I got instantly hot. I peeled off my sweatshirt and plucked at the front of my black T-shirt.

  Kathy leaned in and bounced her eyebrows. “You smell nice,” she said in her thick Aust
ralian accent. Then she felt up my arm. “Ooh! Linea, cop a feel of his arm on your side, he’s so muscly.”

  Linea reached across me to hit her friend with a rolled-up magazine. “The man gives up his first-class seat for that military bloke and to thank him you put your mitts all over him. You should be— Oh! He is muscly!”

  I chuckled. I’d been the meat in a Kathy-and-Linea sandwich for the last four hours on my flight from New Zealand to Australia. Being jammed into a center seat had been well worth the sacrifice. These two strangers were fucking hilarious. I’d been highly entertained the whole trip. Better than a complimentary bourbon and a warm washcloth.

  When we began to deplane, I stood in the aisle to pull down the ladies’ carry-ons.

  “Jason,” Kathy said, in front of me, waiting for her bag. “I have a daughter who’s single. She’s a nurse. She’d love those blue eyes. Ya interested?”

  “If she’s half as gorgeous as you, she’s out of my league.” I extended the handle on her luggage and handed it to her with a wink.

  She grinned up at me. “Cheeky bastard. Good luck with everything.” She turned and started walking. “Thanks for the autograph. I’m gettin’ on Twitter to keep tabs on you,” she said over her shoulder, following Linea out of the plane.

  I smiled after her as I grabbed my backpack from the overhead and stepped back into my empty row to dig out my phone. It had been dead when I boarded. I disconnected it from its portable charger and powered it on for the first time in two weeks. It burst into a vibrating symphony of chimes and pings.

  Back to the real world.

  Fifteen days of backpacking. I dreaded the crap I’d have to sift through after being out of contact for so long. I’d probably have a hundred messages from my agent, Ernie, alone.

  I punched in my pin and started with my voicemails as I shouldered my bag. My mailbox was full. I was four messages in and waiting for a break in the line in the aisle to get off the plane when an unfamiliar female voice came through the phone.

  “Uh, hi. I’ve got Tucker here? He was running around loose in the middle of the street on Topanga Canyon Boulevard? My name’s Sloan. My number is 818-555-7629. Let me know when you want to come get him.”

  Shit.

  I swung my backpack in front of me to dig for a pen. I wrote the number down on my hand and dialed it, doing the math quickly in my head. It was 11:00 a.m. in Melbourne. Six p.m. in Los Angeles.

  Come on, come on, come on.

  “Hello?” a woman said after three rings.

  “Hi, is this Sloan? My name’s Jason. I think you have my dog. Did someone come get him?”

  There was silence on the other end for a moment, and I thought maybe I’d lost the call. I shuffled out of my row into the aisle and pressed for the exit in the crush of other passengers, hoping I’d get a better signal outside the plane. “Hello?” I said again.

  “Yeah, I heard you.” Her voice sounded edgy. “I still have him.”

  I flexed my jaw. Goddamn it. Fucking Monique.

  I stopped in the stuffy Jetway and moved to the wall, holding the phone with my shoulder. I hovered the pen over my hand. “Give me your address. I’ll send someone to pick him up.”

  “No.”

  Huh? “What?”

  “No,” she said again.

  “What do you mean, no? No, you won’t let me pick him up?”

  “You know, you have a lot of nerve. It’s been almost two weeks, and now you decide you want your dog?”

  Two weeks? Tucker had been lost for two fucking weeks?

  “I’ve been out of town. I didn’t have cell service. I had no idea he was missing. I have no problem paying for a reward. Please, just give me your address and I’ll—”

  “No. He’s not your dog anymore. If he’d been at the shelter, his hold would be up and he’d either have been adopted or euthanized. I put up signs, ran his microchip, put him online, I left you a dozen voicemails. I did my due diligence. You abandoned him. So as far as I’m concerned, he’s my dog now.”

  She hung up on me.

  I stared at my phone in shock. I hit Send on the number again and it went straight to voicemail.

  Cursing, I called Monique.

  “You lost Tucker?” I growled, not bothering to lower my voice for the passengers still deplaning.

  “Well, hello to you too, Jason.”

  The click of her heels came through the line. I could almost see her, holding her fucking skinny latte with those huge sunglasses she always wore, shopping bags on her arms while she wasn’t looking for my dog.

  “Tucker’s been lost for two weeks? Why didn’t you look for him? Or put through an emergency call to me? What the fuck, Monique? You’re supposed to be taking care of him!”

  “I work, Jason. And I did look. Sort of.”

  Then I heard a whoosh that sounded like a subway car. “Wait.” Disbelief coursed through my veins. “Where are you?”

  A pregnant pause.

  “New York,” she said quietly.

  “How long have you been in New York?”

  Silence again.

  “Two weeks.”

  I clutched the phone with white knuckles. “We are done. Fucking done,” I hissed.

  “Jason, when Givenchy calls, you don’t tell them that you can’t be in their Vogue shoot because you have to look for your fuck buddy’s dog. I’m sorry, okay? Don’t—”

  I hung up. I’d heard enough. She might as well have lost my child and then run off to do a damn photo shoot. It was that unforgivable.

  I tried Sloan’s number again. Voicemail.

  At a loss for what else to do, I stood by the gate going through the rest of my messages as rain pounded on the floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the tarmac.

  This Sloan woman hadn’t been kidding. She really had tried to reach me. Every day for over a week she’d left me a voicemail about Tucker. I got more and more pissed off as the messages detailed Monique’s complete and utter disregard for my dog.

  He’d been in the middle of the street.

  He’d had a bladder infection from not being let out.

  This lady had posted all over, places Monique could have easily seen the signs had she bothered to stick around to look.

  He’d dived into this woman’s sunroof. What the hell was that about?

  I rubbed my temples. Tucker hated kennels. Monique had been good enough with him, at least in front of me, and I hadn’t had any reservations about it at the time. She told me she’d take him on her runs.

  Stupid, stupid.

  I should have flown him to Minnesota and left him with my family. I fucked up. It would have been a two-thousand-mile side trip, but at least Tucker would have been safe.

  I raked my hand down my face and scratched my beard, tiredly. Fuck, now what was I going to do? This lady stole my damn dog.

  When I finished my voicemails, I thumbed through my text messages and saw one from the 818 number I’d written down on my hand. I clicked it and a picture of Tucker popped up. It was great not knowing you.

  The photo showed a woman with her arm wrapped around Tucker’s chest. I couldn’t see her face. The top of Tucker’s head covered her mouth. She wore black sunglasses and her hair was tucked under a hat. Her arm was covered in tattoos from shoulder to elbow. I tilted my head and studied them, zooming in on my phone. I made out the name Brandon on her arm. Then the screen shifted to an incoming call notification. The 818 number. I scrambled to answer it. “Hello?”

  “If you love your dog, prove it.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not feeling the greatest about keeping your dog if you really do love him. So if you do, prove it.”

  I blinked. “Okay. And how would you suggest I do that?”

  “He’s your dog, isn’t he? Proof that you love him should be readily available.”

  My mind raced.

  “All right, hold on,” I said, getting an idea. I scrolled through the photos on my phone and selected several: Tucker and me a
t the beach, Tucker and me on a bike ride. Then I took a screenshot of my wallpaper, Tucker, sitting behind all my icons. I sent the photos through. “There. Check your messages.”

  Her phone made a shuffling noise. She went quiet for what I knew was longer than it took to see them all.

  “Look,” I said into the silence, hoping she could hear me, “he’s my best friend. He came with me when I moved to LA from Minnesota. I left him with someone I thought I could trust. I love my dog. I want my dog back. Please.”

  She was quiet for so long that again I thought the call had been dropped.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  I breathed a sigh of relief. “Great—thank you. And I’ll reimburse you for your time and the vet bills—”

  “And my ticket.”

  “Your ticket?”

  “I got a ticket for parking in the middle of Topanga Canyon Boulevard when I stopped to get him into the car.”

  I moved the phone away from my mouth and breathed a sigh of frustration. Not at Sloan, at Monique and her ineptitude.

  “Okay, yeah, no problem. Look, I’m really grateful for everything you’ve done for him. If you can just give me a few hours to find a kennel to take him I’ll—”

  “A kennel? Why?”

  “I’m in Australia for two more weeks for work.”

  “Well, who was watching him while you were gone?”

  “Somebody who will never watch him again,” I said dryly. I collected my backpack and went to follow the signs toward customs.

  “Well, I can keep him until you come back. I work from home. It’s no problem.”

  I thought about her offer for a moment. My mind went to the picture she’d sent of her and Tucker and the voicemails about trips to the vet and walks he was going on. She seemed to really care about him. I mean, shit, she’d been ready to keep him. And she’d already had him for two weeks. He knew her. It would be better than a kennel. And there really was no one else. Besides Monique and Ernie, who wasn’t a dog person, I didn’t know anyone else in LA well enough to ask.