Lisa finished covering the cakes in cling wrap and put them in the freezer.
“I’m in,” she said, untying her apron. “Just let me shower first.”
“As you wish,” Dad said as she grabbed a cookie, took a bite, and gave him a crumby kiss as she passed by on her way to the staircase.
“Wanna beer?” Dad asked me.
“Yes, please.”
We sat out on the back patio, staring at the view and sipping our beers while chatting about work, his as an architect, and mine as a writer. Since I was little, I’d been fascinated by the drawings I used to find in my dad’s home office, each one telling its own complicated story. Mazes of math, systems, and structures. For a time, he and my mother thought I’d follow in his footsteps. They didn’t realize until much later that all of the perusing I was doing was setting the stage for my own career. I wasn’t trying to decipher what he was building, I was using his creations as settings for stories. Down his carefully drawn passageways lived families, lovers torn apart and coming together, best friends plotting escapes from any number of villains. When he finally figured it out, he began giving me his cast-off drawings, which I then used to draw all those characters into.
“How’s the latest novel going?” he asked. “Hit the midpoint yet?”
I grinned and took a long pull from my bottle. My parents had always been good listeners, taking in what I told them intently. Being invested in who I was and what I was interested in. When I began to take storytelling seriously, they learned the terms, asked questions, and bought me books on the subject. They understood it was important to me and encouraged me to keep experimenting and learning. And when they divorced, an event the three of us had dubbed the world’s most amicable divorce in history, both continued to keep asking and spurring me on. Despite their split, we somehow remained a threesome of sorts. The Three Musketeers – even when we each lived in a different state.
“Midpoint done and dusted,” I said. “The end is in sight.”
“Itching to get back to it?”
I laughed. He knew me well. Being so close to the end made it hard to stop, even for a couple nights away to celebrate my little sister’s big birthday.
“It’s killing me,” I said. “But it’s good to feel this anticipation. It means I’m on to something. If it were easy to set aside, then I’d be worried.”
He lifted his bottle toward me and I clinked it.
“What else?” he asked. “How’s B getting along?”
I showed him a picture the dog sitter had sent just this morning and then sighed. “Not gonna lie. The end is nearing and it’s not easy to watch.”
“She’s a good girl. Been there for you through a lot.”
I nodded, thinking back to how she’d climbed into my lap the day I’d returned home after my mother had died. She hadn’t left my side for days, her big brown eyes constantly seeking me out, silently asking if I was okay. And then later, when Nadia left, she had nudged me every day, asking me to take her for a walk, as if it were her who needed to get out of the house, not me. Losing her was not going to go well for me.
“She has. I’m heartbroken thinking about her not being around anymore.”
“Have you considered getting a puppy? To help maybe ease the blow? And the emptiness?”
“I did, once,” I said, finishing off my beer and setting it on the small glass table between us. “But it almost felt…”
“Traitorous?”
“Yeah.”
“I get it. Well… loss is a part of life. Part of having a pet. Part of being human.”
“And it sucks.”
“Damn right it does.” He finished his beer and set it beside mine. “What about women? Have you met anyone new of note?”
An image of Lior, wet from the rain and sitting beside me in the back of a cab flashed in my mind.
“Not really, no.”
“No?”
He peered at me and I shrugged, turning my face away, but Marley had gotten her keen sense of seeing people from him, and I’d walked right into his casual beer on the patio chat-trap.
“No,” I said a little more vehemently than I’d meant to.
