“You know, you said a few weeks ago that you and Dustin were thinking about getting a dog…” she muses, “Maybe this little one coming along was meant to be.”
“I don’t know about that,” I shake my head, “She’s cute, but she’s still not fully weaned, we’d have to bottle-feed her, and neither one of us is home during the day…”
“I’m here,” she offers, “I could do it. Just give me instructions, a schedule like you do for Brianna, and I can take care of her for you.”
I lift my eyebrow. “You sure?”
“I could never have pets growing up,” she admits, scratching the pup under the chin, “And they’re not allowed at my apartment. So truthfully, my motives are a little selfish, I’d get to have a pet sort of vicariously through my job.”
She peeks at me with a sheepish smile, and I laugh. “I can’t exactly fault you for that, I know if I were in your shoes, I’d be desperate for a little fluff in my life. I will say it’s fine by me, but we’ll have to check with Dustin.”
Ava gives me a sidelong glance and snorts. “Please, one look at these puppy-dog eyes and he’ll be a puddle.”
I laugh again. She’s learned pretty quickly what a marshmallow my partner is. Not that she’s any better, as evidenced by the next words out of her mouth: “It just breaks my heart to think of anyone abandoning an animal like that.”
I sigh. “Yeah, me, too. But people are like that sometimes. With the way we treat each other, it’s hardly surprising that animals would get some of it, too.”
Ava glances at me, and I wonder if the bitterness in my words was palpable enough for her to have picked up on. “You’ve probably seen some pretty awful stuff in your line of work,” she says softly.
“I have,” I admit, “But not just at work, either.”
She looks confused. I glance at Brianna and lower my voice. Even if she’s too young to understand, this conversation just doesn’t seem appropriate for little ears. “Growing up in the Midwest and being a boy who kissed other boys didn’t exactly win me any favors,” I explain, trying to phrase things as delicately as possible.
Ava goes wide-eyed with understanding. “Oh.”
I smile bitterly. “Let’s just say there’s a reason I ran away at seventeen and never looked back.”
And it was true. I’d scraped together as much cash as I could, and two weeks after my seventeenth birthday, I’d snuck out one night, hopped on a bus across the country, and never spoke to a soul from my hometown again, parents included.
The one good thing they ever taught me is that family isn’t always blood.
“I guess I’ve been pretty lucky,” Ava muses, “Other than a catcall here or there or the occasional drunk making a grab for my ass when I was working at the bar, I’ve been pretty sheltered from human ugliness.”
She says it almost apologetically, like she feels guilty for not having been subject to more atrocities in her life. I shake my head at her. “That’s not a bad thing, at least as long as you’re still cautious.”
She nods, and I go on: “I mean, I think you’re far too smart to let your experience make you naïve, you know there’s crazies out there. But that doesn’t mean you should feel bad for…I don’t know, not having looked straight into the cesspool of humanity’s worst.”
A silence falls over us both for a long moment. “You know,” Ava says finally, “I think having someone like you in her life will help keep Brianna from seeing some of that, too.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Well, because you have seen it, more than your fair share, and that means you’ll fight that much harder to keep her safe from it,” she explains, “Kind of like my mom did for me.”
“You said before that it was just the two of you growing up, right?”
She nods. “Yeah. I never knew my father, and my mother has made it clear that that was a conscious decision she made for the better. Apparently, he belonged in that cesspool.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
She shrugs, “I’m not. Mom was great. Money was tight, sure, but I never had to go without anything I needed, and she made sure I knew I was loved.”
She smiles wistfully. While I haven’t said anything about it, Dustin had told me about her mother’s death. Since I haven’t spoken to my own family in over ten years, I can’t exactly empathize, but I can certainly sympathize.
Well, I can’t empathize exactly, but Sarah’s loss still cuts like a knife sometimes. Her little girl looks so much like her that sometimes it’s almost painful. When I’d moved here, a dumb, desperate kid from Nebraska, Sarah had been my first friend.
She’d helped me finish high school and even helped me get a few loans to get started at the local community college. She’d been there for me and taken me in as family when I had no one else in the world, and when she started building a family of her own, there was a place for me there, too, first in my friendship with Dustin and then later in my goddaughter.
Sarah’s loss…it had been more than the loss of my best friend. She’d been almost like my guardian angel, this big-sister force, despite the fact that I was several months older. Her death had ripped a hole in my world, one that I’d never expected to be mended by her widower husband.