When I stopped talking, Abigail didn’t say anything, so I turned to her where she was arranging a garland that looked like a trail of spiders I found at a garage sale this summer.She was doing it so the spiders appeared as if they were trailing up to a big, opaque, black glass vase filled with little gourds.
She was also watching me with a funny look on her face.
That was, she was doing that until I caught her eyes.
And then she wiped her face clean and remarked, “I cannot imagine Tonks doing that.”
I looked at my dog, who was in her Groove dog bed (yep, went back to the feedstore), gnawing on a rawhide, then returned to Abigail.
“Me either.”
Before I could inquire after the expression she’d wiped from her face, she asked, “So what’s he going to teach Tonks to do?”
“He’s got a few more basic commands we’re going to start on that she doesn’t know but will need to know when we get into the big stuff.Like ‘come,’ ‘drop it,’ and ‘leave it.’Then we’re gonna get into ‘wait,’ which apparently isn’t the same as ‘stay.’After that, ‘defend,’ and obviously ‘release.’”
“So ‘defend’ is different than ‘attack?’”
“‘Attack’ is what Artemis did.It’s offensive.‘Defend’ would only happen if I was being attacked.”
“Now I know why everyone talks about what a shit-hot trainer he is,” she muttered just as Tonks let out a half-hearted roo-roo (the rawhide was a thing) and the bell over the door rang.
We both turned that direction, and I saw who I thought was the woman Hutch had been talking to at the Art Center opening (they’d been a ways away, I only caught part of her profile, but this was confirmed by the stroller she was pushing).She was with another lady who had fantastic, thick, lush auburn hair.
“Gird your loins.Incoming,” Abigail said under her breath for some reason, since she’d not once said that when another customer came in.
As such, I felt my shoulders jerk back.
“Bree?”I whispered, because both those women were certainly beautiful.
I was suddenly wondering where the rubber bands were.
“No, but I think for you…worse.”
I was confused as I watched them smile at us in a friendly way with the redhead throwing a little wave at Abigail before they started perusing our wares.
“Hey, ladies.Can I help you look for something?”Abigail called.
They both quit peering at a three-foot-tall, retro, winking black cat in a bowtie painted on wood shaped as, yeah…a three-foot, retro winking, sitting cat, to us.
“Uh…hey,” the redhead said.
“Hey,” Abigail and I greeted at the same time, but Abigail’s syllable was wobbly, like she was laughing.
Or choking.
“Okay, I didn’t apply for the CIA not only because I never wanted to be in the CIA, and possibly with my family’s Soviet history, wouldn’t get in anyway, but because I’d suck at being a spy,” the blonde with the baby said.
More confusion, this time about her statement, at the same time I was intrigued about the Soviet history mention.
She wheeled her stroller (cute, dressed-up-against-the-cold baby sleeping in it) through our displays with the redhead bringing up the rear, and when she made it to us, she stuck her hand out to me over the stroller.
“Nadia Riggs,” she said like I knew who she was.
I took her hand.“Hi.”
“Doc Riggs’s wife,” Abigail added.
Where had I heard that name before?
