An Unexpected Grace (18 page)

“You go to thrift stores?”

“All the time.”

S
urrounded by a chain-link fence, the dog park was a grass field, large enough for soccer games, with dead, trampled patches. A bed of scraggly day lilies grew behind a spigot and concrete drinking trough. Beside it, a woman was reading a newspaper on a weathered wooden bench and ignoring what must have been her black Lab, who galloped across the grass to Grace.

Hey! You're a delicious babe!
he panted. He whined and pushed his face toward her. His black-spotted tongue swung from the side of his mouth; you could tell he was about to lick her somewhere. Grace might have snapped at him, but she only flattened back her ears.

When he rudely sniffed her bottom, she whirled around and gave him a look that said,
Oh, pul-eeze!
She sat down and leaned against Lila's leg.

She waved her arms at him. “Shoo! Shoo!”

Unwilling to give up, the Lab practically inhaled Grace's armpits.

“Don't get worked up. He's trying to meet her,” Adam said. “She needs to make friends.”

“Not with a pushy, insensitive dog. He's coming at her too fast.”

As if he intended to come at her faster, the Lab drooled on Grace's Holstein spots.
Oooooo! What a luscious cow!

Grace gazed across the field as if she'd left her body and would stay away till the thug was gone.

Adam looked on with an indulgent smile. “Grace isn't scared. She's shy. This is new to her. You're being overprotective.”

“After all Grace has been through, she needs protection. Can't you see she doesn't like him?”

“She will if you'll let her get used to him.”

“I don't think she likes the park.”

Ignoring Lila's concerns, Adam took off Grace's cow costume and unlatched her leash. “Come on, girl!” He started running across the grass.

As the Lab chased him, Grace trotted after them and slowly caught up. She limped, but nothing like before Betsy had worked on her leg—and the more Grace ran, the stronger she looked. Right before Lila's eyes, Grace seemed to get more limber.

Soon she was circling the park with Adam and the Lab. The sun sparkled on her golden head and swishing tail, and she was glowing with energy and health. She looked more beautiful than Lila had ever seen her.

And Grace was smiling.
Whoopeee! Look at me! I've never been free to run before!

Adam shouted, “What'd I tell you? She loves it here. You should have brought her here every day.”

“I know.” With regret at having been so wrong, Lila stuck a fork into her steaming slice of humble pie. She gladly took a bite and swallowed.

Thankful to Adam for introducing Grace and her to the park, Lila agreed to have lunch with him without stopping to consider what it might mean. Only when they got to the La Luna Café did it hit her that she was practically on a date with a man she hardly knew.
Oh, my. Well . . .

Tired from running, Grace curled up under the outdoor metal table. As people bustled by with shopping bags, a waiter in a stiff white jacket that pulled too tightly across his chest came to take Adam and Lila's order.

“Smoked turkey on wheat. Mayo, mustard. Whatever you've got, put it on. And a bottle of water. Everything to go,” Adam said.

The waiter scribbled in his pad and turned to Lila. “And?”

“I'll have the camembert on wheat with avocado and sprouts. No, wait. That's too much fat.”

“Live it up. It's Saturday,” Adam said.

“Is the tuna salad organic?”

“I'll have to ask.” The waiter gave her a look that said asking was an imposition.

“Never mind. I'll have the sliced chicken. Whatever.”

“Drink?” the waiter asked.

“Do you have bottled tea? Oh, forget that. I'll have water like his.”

The waiter disappeared before she could change her mind again.

“You obviously have trouble making decisions,” Adam said.

Only when I'm nervous.
“There's a lot to choose from.”

Adam tossed his menu on the table and tilted back his chair on two legs. “Let's get this getting-to-know-you thing over with fast, all right?”

“Are you type A?”

“I don't like wasting time on small talk. Okay if I ask you questions?”

“Depends on what you ask.”

Adam shooed away a yellow jacket that landed on his wrist. “So where'd you grow up?”

“Santa Fe.”

“Siblings?”

“I wish.”

“Was it hard being an only child?”

“Not too bad. My parents threw fantastic birthday parties. One year my father built a teepee for my slumber party.”

“So you were spoiled?”

“Hardly. And you just sounded critical again.”

Adam chuckled. “Sorry.”

Lila smiled. With her thumb and index finger, she twirled the teaspoon on her paper place mat. “Any siblings on your Pennsylvania fruit farm?”

“Two brothers. Thank God there were three of us because my mother made us take care of her garden. She grew enough veggies to feed Bach's twenty kids.”

“Imagine folding their towels.”

“I don't even want to think about it.”

“Are you a musician?”

“Nope. I teach astronomy at Sonoma State.” As a busboy clattered dishes in a metal bin, Adam crossed his arms over his chest. “The first time I looked through a telescope, I had to keep refocusing because Mars was traveling across the sky so fast. I couldn't get over the motion and silence up there in the dark. Blew me away.”

So there went the uptight engineer with mechanical pencils lined up in his shirt pocket. “I've never looked through a really powerful telescope,” Lila said.

“I can show you sometime.”

An image of her and Adam—squinting through a lens, close together in the dark—flashed through Lila's mind, and her Horny Guttersnipe leapt up on the table and tangoed. Her spike heels clicked around the place mats and her feather boa floated in the air. Lila urged her,
Get yourself under control.
Breasts jiggling, her Horny Guttersnipe threw back her head and chuckled with abandon.

“You dating anybody?” Adam asked.

“No.” As Lila rested her arms on the table, she decided to go ahead and lay her relationship with Reed facedown in the street to writhe around in all its blood and gore: “I lived with a man for a long time. We split up six months ago.”

“What happened?”

Squirm. “I found out he had another girlfriend.”

“Sounds like a winner.”

“I'd been thinking about breaking up for a long time. She just forced the issue,” Lila said. “But I hate to tell you—most men are jerks. If they don't cheat on you, they shoot you.”

“Whoa! Does ‘sweeping generalization' mean anything to you?” Adam asked.

“I'm right, though.”

“I'll bet on some distant island in the middle of nowhere you could find
one
decent man.”

“Maybe.”

“Women aren't always perfect, either. I lived with a compulsive shopper for five years. I broke up with her because I didn't want to be in debt for the rest of my life.”

“Very wise of you.”

“That's what I thought.”

“Something must have drawn you to her, though.”

“She was pretty, fun, smart. She was always interviewing interesting people. If she hadn't been so irresponsible, she'd have been great.”

Lila wondered how Adam would compare the girlfriend to her. At least they'd gotten their dismal pasts out of the way.

The waiter set their lunches on the table in a paper bag, which was a clean and honest white.

Adam picked it up. “Let's go.”

 

At the Pet Stop, Albert Wu was washing his front window with a squeegee like you find at gas stations, a sponge on one side and a rubber blade on the other. He dunked the squeegee into a bucket of soapy gray water and smeared it around on the glass. Outside in the sunlight, his beaver toupee looked exhausted, like it had built one dam too many. Albert wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his shirtsleeve.

“We're looking for a treat for Grace,” Adam said.

Albert smiled so his face crinkled. “Check out the bin by the counter. We've got rawhides, all kinds of biscuits, anything a dog could want.” Albert wiped his squeegee's sponge across the glass again.

Inside, Adam held a desiccated pig's ear out toward Grace. She sniffed it with ebullience.

Lila screwed up her face. “You can't give her that.”

“Why not?”

“I feel sorry for the pig.”

“You can see Grace loves it. You need to give dogs what they like.”

Normally, Lila would have argued with Adam, but he'd been so right about the dog park that she gave in with a wince.

Magnolia, Albert's cockatiel, let out a piercing screech.

Adam went to her perch and stroked her chest. She cocked her head and peered at him sideways. “Bad day, bird?”

Lila smiled.

“You're prettier when you do that,” Adam told her.

“Do what?”

“When you smile. You seem more approachable.”

“Thanks.” Lila wasn't sure how approachable she wanted to be. If her heart had been a piece of paper, it would have had something fluttery, like “eeeeek,” written on it.

 

The Unitarian Universalist Church looked like a giant rowboat turned upside down. Around its stern was a brick wall; Adam said he'd looked over it by chance and discovered the garden, whose entrance was a gate of iron swoops and curlicues that would have made an interesting painting.

He led Lila and Grace down a gravel path to a wooden bench under an apple tree. The garden was like Eden minus the snake. Fig and pear trees were starting to bear fruit next to the walls, and lavender and roses grew in beds. In one corner was a sundial on a stone pedestal; in another, an Ionic-column fountain, dripping water from its capital into a mossy pool. Inside the church, someone was practicing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “the land of the free” traveled, forte, through the air.

Lila unhooked Grace's leash, and she plopped down on the gravel. Adam handed her the pig's ear, which she took with an ecstatic chomp. He sat on the bench, and they unwrapped their sandwiches in the same companionable quiet as when they'd bathed Grace.

“Why don't you have a dog?” Lila asked.

“Used to. A blond Lab kind of like the dog at the park. Named Hubble. He died a few years ago.”

“Why haven't you gotten another dog?”

“I wanted Grace, remember?”

“Are you ever going to forgive me?”

“The jury's still out.”

“I said I was sorry.”

“I want to see you grovel.” Adam smiled.

Lila smiled too, even if it did make her look approachable.

When they finished their sandwiches, they wadded up the paper wrappers and put them and the empty water bottles into the bag.

Adam threw it into a garbage can behind a camellia bush. “Know how this sundial works?”

“Not really.”

“Okay, when the earth turns on its axis, the sun seems like it's moving across the sky.”

“Right.”

“So the sun casts a shadow from this iron stick. The shadow points at the time.” Adam rested his finger between Roman numerals I and II, etched in the stone around the dial's base. “For the time to be accurate, you have to set the sundial right for your latitude and aim it directly north. But that's not hard to do. I made one of these in Boy Scouts.”