Chapter 12 Rosie
ROSIE
Carol and I stood looking at the back of my car. “Well…”
“Yeah. Well… Got any ideas?” she asked.
“Yeah. A hope, a prayer, and a heave-ho?” I looked at her hopefully, and she just shook her head at me.
“You do remember that I told you he gets chompy, right?”
“I don’t believe that,” I informed her. “He’s been nothing but sweet.”
Carol shot me a look like I’d miraculously grown two heads.
“I have an idea,” she told me, and she started walking back to the shelter.
She didn’t say anything about me following her, so I stayed next to my car, trying to figure out how the heck we were going to lift an almost 200-pound tortoise if her plan didn’t work.
I reached for my phone in my back pocket before I realized what I was doing.
Only once I had scrolled to Wesley’s contact did I freeze.
I would normally have called him without hesitation.
I would have asked him to help me load Lionel up and get him to his new home while I ran to the hardware store so I could start his outside enclosure.
Carol had shown me what they had built at the shelter, and while there was no way we could disassemble and move it, she was there when they built it, and graciously offered to help me since her shift was now over.
I had built my TV stand by myself with a butterknife since I didn’t have a screwdriver in my first apartment after college.
Wesley almost had a coronary when he noticed it was just the tiniest bit crooked, and chastised me about how I could have hurt myself.
I informed him it was a dull knife, but that really didn’t help my case.
The next day, he dropped off a toolbox he had put together—that was still sitting in my garage.
Untouched, if I were being honest. Me and tools didn’t mix—shouldn’t mix.
“Well, come on, then. You don’t have to bite me to get to her. Yeesh.” I heard Carol scolding Lionel, and saw as she held the door open as he very slowly went through it. She was still mumbling her displeasure about him when she got to me with a large piece of wood in her hand.
“I was thinking we would use this like a ramp and tempt him with his favorite snack, but I think he might just come willingly. He basically took my finger off when I tried to keep him inside.”
“He would never,” I told her as I scanned to see where Lionel was. He was only about halfway to us, and it looked like he was distracted by a patch of grass still clinging to life in the winter months. It probably helped that that winter had been mild so far.
“You have blinders on, but who am I to judge? Let’s see if this works.”
We quickly assembled the wood from the ground to the trunk of my car. Thankfully, I had a hatchback, so it wasn’t like he would be sitting in a dark trunk. I didn’t think he’d fit anywhere else like the front or back seat comfortably.
Lionel had made zero progress, and didn’t seem much interested in me now that he had found a mid afternoon snack.
“I’ll go get some fruit. He can’t have it often, so he goes crazy for it.”
Carol took off back toward the shelter again, muttering as she passed Lionel. And I did see the way he extended his neck and made a move to bite her. I couldn’t help but chuckle, and almost like he heard me, he started to move toward me, leaving his snack behind.
Minutes later, Carol was back, but it turned out the snacks were unnecessary, as he started to walk the ramp without any instruction. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she said as she reached down to move the board. While she was distracted, Lionel made a move toward her coat pocket.
“Ouch! What the…” She shrieked, and I had to bite back my laugh.
“Jesus, you overgrown toddler. Here…Here… Just take the snacks. No need to be such an ass.” She scolded Lionel while emptying strawberries and raspberries onto the floor.
He moved his attention away from her and onto what he really wanted.
“Are you sure you want him?” she asked me again.
“Absolutely.” 100 percent sure.
? ? ? ?
Getting Lionel out of the car and into my house was more of an effort than getting him into the vehicle.
He decided my lawn was his own personal smorgasbord, and no amount of coaxing would deter him.
We spent around an hour and a half trying to persuade him to come inside so we could make our way to the store, and I was highly considering getting a babysitter for my tortoise.
“You’re being stubborn,” I told him as he munched on some wildflowers that were half dead but apparently still acceptable for consumption.
“Do you not want a warm place to sleep? We are losing daylight here,” I explained.
“Not even a few hours in, and you have me questioning my sanity as I’m on my lawn, trying to reason with a tortoise. ”
“I tried to tell you he is a bit of a dick.”
“Yeah. That’s going to make him listen to us.” I glared at Carol. Sometime over the past hour and a half, we had created a bond, and I felt a thread of friendship start to weave its way through me.
“What was it you said before? A heave-ho and a prayer?”
“Something like that.”
Like he understood our words, Lionel abandoned his wildflowers and started making his way toward my front door. I sent up a prayer to whoever might be listening. Thank you.
“Rosie, are you aware there is a rather large reptile on your lawn, making its way inside your house?”
I whipped around at the sound only to realize it was Mr. Hansen, my neighbor, holding his mail, looking at Lionel with a look of puzzlement on his face.
“Oh, hi, Mr. Hansen.” I waved.
“Larry, please.”
He had been my neighbor since I bought my house.
It was nothing special, but when I hit thirty, I didn’t want to rent anymore, and figured that if I bought a manageable place, I could always sell it or rent it out if the market wasn’t a seller’s one.
His wife had passed away from breast cancer a few years before I moved in, and his children were grown.
“That’s Lionel. He’s…Well, I guess he’s my new housemate,” I told him. It didn’t feel right to call Lionel a pet. He already seemed like so much more than that.
“Well, as long as you’re aware.” He waved the mail in his hand at me and started back toward his own house.
“You big oaf. Don’t you want to stay here?
It’s nice inside, I promise,” Carol told Lionel while standing on the front step, waving her hands in a moving forward motion, like that would convince him to go faster.
If I had learned anything over that past hour, Lionel had one speed, and that was his—slow.
I decided to go inside and see if there was anything in my fridge that would entice him to come in. Once I moved, we were once again humbled by the fact that Lionel followed me right inside.
“Well, shit. Why didn’t we think of that?” Carol asked as she followed us, closing the door behind her.
“Let’s go to the store, and make it quick. I have a feeling he’s going to eat my sofa if I leave him for too long.”
“Oh, he absolutely would. Better than my fingers, though.”
Like he heard us, he made the move to bite at Carol’s fingers.
“Son of a bitch. Lionel, will you knock it off?” She moved to hide behind me, and I swore that Lionel smiled.