“That’s a very good idea,” I said.
CHAPTER 28
CAMILA
“Can you move the chairs back to where they were the first time?”
Jason looked at the row of chairs he had just finished arranging in their third configuration of the morning, and then looked at me with an expression of complete composure.
“Of course,” he said with a smile, and started moving them.
I watched him for a moment. He had been doing this since eight in the morning — the chairs, the trestle tables, the banner that had required three attempts to hang straight because the shelter’s walls were not, it turned out, as level as they appeared. He had climbed up and down the step stools without complaint, changed the streamers from yellow and green to blue, yellow, and white when I decided the original colors clashed with the shelter’s signage, and had eaten his lunch standing up because I’d needed him to hold something while the glue dried.
He was doing all of it with a smile that I could not find anything wrong with.
That was the part I kept running up against.
I had expected, or maybe hoped, that Jason would be difficult to have around. Inconvenient. That the proximity would confirm something, make some obvious statement about who he was and why I had been right to leave.
Instead, for four days, he had slept on an old couch with a gun in his hand. He had eaten from tins without commentary. He had driven me to the shelter every morning, and stayed all day, and drove me back and did it again the next morning, as if he had no other life to return to.
I looked around the shelter — the paper chains Jason had spent an entire yesterday evening cutting and linking while Audrey held the tape, the hand-lettered signs that Jess had made, the enclosures that had been cleaned until they gleamed, Sparkles’s cage decorated with a small blue bow that had been Jason’s idea and that I had pretended to find excessive while privately finding it completely appropriate.
I thought about the dogs.
For four days Jason had been training them — not in anything complicated, just small, achievable things, building on whatever each animal already knew. Two of the border collies could now sit and stay on command. A beagle named Paco could follow a treat through a figure-eight. And Sparkles, who had arrived unable to eat or be touched, had learned to walk in a line with two other dogs, following Jason’s hand with a focused trust. She had decided that this particular person was safe.
He had done all of that with treats and patience and the specific quality of attention he gave to things he cared about — the quality I had fallen in love with when I watched him on the floor of a shelter in New Jersey with a golden retriever on his face.
And I had seen him earlier with the turtle.
The shelter’s turtle was ninety years old, arthritically slow, and had an established reputation for biting anyone who came within reach. I had watched Jason sit beside its enclosure for forty minutes this morning while I was on the phone, holding a piece of lettuce with immovable patience, waiting. By the time I’d hung up, the turtle was eating from his hand.
Audrey had seen it too. She had pointed at Jason and mouthed something at me across the room that I chose not to read.
The thing that was bothering me — and I could at least admit to myself that it was bothering me — was not Jason specifically. It was the pattern.
Sparkles had trusted him. The turtle had trusted him. The border collies. Paco the beagle. Jess, who had been running Happy Hopes for eleven years, called him a natural within two days and had begun consulting him on the training schedule as if this were simply his role now.
And Audrey.
Audrey, who had spent an entire year being furious on my behalf — who had hit him with a sandal, who had called him a loser to his face, who had saidfuck Jasonon a beach in Paradise Island with such conviction that it had felt like the beginning of something — was now arriving at the shelter every evening and spending two hours teaching Luna to high-five while she and Jason came up with increasingly elaborate additions to the show that they refused to tell me about.
They were laughing together yesterday. I had seen it through the window.
I stood in the middle of the shelter’s main room and looked at Jason moving chairs back to their original positions for the thirdtime, whistling under his breath, and felt a question forming that I didn’t have an answer to.
What were they all seeing?
Had I been broken so thoroughly that I couldn’t see what they saw?
Or was I the only one still seeing clearly?
Jason finished the chairs, stood back, and looked at the arrangement.
“Better?” he asked.
I looked at the room. “Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
