“You have any family in Atlanta, if you don’t mind me asking?”
My thoughts immediately went to my parents and the hateful tirade they’d went on before excommunicating me from the family, and again I wondered if I would be as welcomed here if they knew my orientation. It made me feel terrible, thinking that, especially of people who had been nothing but the kindest to me, but the wounds my parents had given me had cut deep.
“Um,” I said, feeling slightly uncomfortable for the first time. I chewed my lip. “Not really.” It was all I could think of saying, but Reynold seemed to catch on that it wasn’t a topic I wanted to discuss.
“Well, sometimes it’s necessary for a person to venture out far from home to get to know themselves,” he said. He tapped his finger onto the stack of fliers. “Come back here and see me after you go give these out, okay?”
“Sure.”
Lee and I took the stack of fliers and went out to his car. It wasn’t raining and the shops weren’t too far up the road, but Lee suggested we drive anyway in case of a sudden downpour. I had no complaints with that, so we piled into his car and drove the short minute up to the center of the town.
Armstrong reminded me of one of those frontier towns you might see in an old western film, with the single main road lined with the general store and the saloon, and horses tied up to posts all along the way.
The drive really was only a couple of minutes, and we pulled up to the curb in front of the small pet store called “Pampered Paws”.
“I’ll go drop some fliers off at the market,” Lee said, pointing down the street. “You go ahead and take care of the pet store.”
I nodded, and went inside the shop. The woman behind the counter was probably in her mid-forties, with red hair, red lipstick and a stone washed denim jacket and jeans bedazzled with metal star sequins and tassels. She had her nose stuck in a tabloid magazine.
“Hi there,” she said, perking up. “Welcome to Pampered Paws, I’m Patty. Is there anything I can help you with?”
“Hi,” I said, surprised by her bubbliness. She made me think me of one of those overly hyper lap dogs that seemed to be vibrating from too much pent up energy. “Yes, there is something you can help me with, Patty. I’m from out of town, and yesterday my cat escaped from me.”
She threw her hand to her mouth. “Oh, no! That’s horrible, I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“I’ve got these fliers here…” I pulled out the stack and showed them to her. “And I was wondering if it’d be alright to hang one in the store?”
“Of course it would be alright! I’ll put them up on the window, and have a few on the counter too. You don’t have a picture of, uh…” She skimmed over the flier for his name. “Of Henry?”
I shook my head. “I rescued him just a few days ago from a flood back home, so I never got a chance to get any photos of him.”
“Oh, poor thing, one storm to the next. Well, I’ll keep an eye out for Henry too.”
“Thanks, I really appreciate that.”
She smiled and nodded, then went to stick up one of the fliers onto the window. I went back outside, and met up with Lee who was walking down from the market. The wind started to pick up again, pushing the trees into a sway and sending leaves and other debris tumbling down the street.
“Did the lady know anything about him?” Lee asked, and I shook my head.
“No… How about at the market?”
“No. Put up all the fliers though, on the bulletin board and right up at the checkout. If someone has seen Henry, they’ll know he’s missing for sure.” He looked up at the sky. “Seems like we’re gonna get another bout of it soon. Let’s head back to the station.”
As we drove down the road, a sudden flash of hard rain hit, and pounded down for a minute before letting up to a light sprinkle. Again, I could only think of Henry somewhere out there. I hoped that maybe he hadn’t gone too far, and had just found shelter and was hiding out from the storm. Maybe he would just stroll back in once the rain was gone.
Reynold was tidying up the shelves when we came inside. “How’d it go?” he asked.
“Put out the fliers,” Lee said. “Nobody’s spotted Henry, but I’m sure if somebody’s seen him, they’ll call about it.”
“Well,” Reynold said, finishing up with the shelves. “Chrissy, if you feel like you need to keep moving on with your journey, I’d be more than happy to keep you updated, and take care of Henry when he comes back. But, um, if you feel like you don’t want to move on just yet, I understand that too.”
“I don’t feel right about moving on at least until the storm is completely gone and I know that Henry isn’t just hiding out somewhere,” I said. “But I don’t want to burden you and your wife, Lee.”
Lee shook his head and held up his hand in a gesture that said, “no trouble at all.” Reynold slung his hands into the pockets of his jeans.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about that,” Reynold said. “This old market has an upper attic, which actually used to be a living area back in my father’s time. It’s just a small space—you could call it a studio—but if you want you can stay there for as long as you feel a need to be in Armstrong. All I ask is that you help out around the gas station.”
His offer completely overwhelmed me. “Wow, sir, I mean, Reynold. That’s incredibly generous of you. Yes, I think I’d like that. Truth is, I do like Armstrong, and I think that maybe there’s a reason I ended up here. Hopefully it wasn’t just to lose my cat.”