Continued, Life A Love Story
Flo puts down the pen and massages her hand. She could write more, she really could! But here is the doorbell and she goes to see who’s there. It’s Denise, her next-door neighbor.
“I hate to bother you,” Denise says, and Flo opens the door wider and gestures for her to come in. But Denise says, “Oh, I’d love to, but I’m in the middle of a recipe and I’m out of one of the ingredients.”
“Would I have it?” Flo asks.
“Sumac?” Denise asks.
“Say what?”
“Sumac. It’s a Middle Eastern spice. Kind of tangy.”
“What are you making?”
“Oh, just some chicken dish. That’s all I ever make is chicken anymore. I’m tired of cooking.”
“Me, too,” Flo says.
“Well, you’re entitled,” Denise says, and Flo knows Denise means by virtue of Flo’s age. She considers telling Denise The News, but elects not to.
“Can you watch Champ while I run over to the grocery store?”
“Course I can.”
“I’ll go and get him,” Denise says. “Thank you.”
Flo knows Denise’s dog doesn’t like to be left alone anymore and she’s glad she can babysit him.
He has been a friend of hers since the day he came home as a six-week-old befuddled little speck of white.
They’ve gotten old together; it wouldn’t surprise Flo if they could share some of their medications.
Sometimes of an evening they’re both sitting on their front porches and Champ will look over at Flo and she thinks he’s saying a mouthful in a gaze.
Oftentimes, the dog will amble on over and sit by her and they’ll have a conversation, each commenting in their own way about what they see.
Champ might see a squirrel run up a tree and tense up, but he just doesn’t have it in him to run after anything anymore.
But “That’s the way, Champ,” Flo will tell him.
“You watch him!” She likes to think that preserves his dignity.
Sometimes Champ seems to think he sees things that are nothing at all, and Flo tells him the same thing, “That’s right, you watch, now!
” And he does, his gaze steady, his bearing as proud as a marble lion.
Flo likes to give Champ potato chips, just a couple.
It makes her laugh to hear him crunch them exactly like a person.
Here comes Champ now, held in Denise’s arms and carefully deposited in Flo’s front hall. “I’ll be back soon,” Denise says.
“Don’t rush,” Flo says.
She closes the door after Denise and looks down at Champ staring up at her with his cloudy eyes. She pats her leg for him to follow her into the living room, but he stands firm. “You want to go on the porch?” she asks him, and there goes his tail moving back and forth like a windshield wiper.
“Okay,” she says. “Let me get my sweater.”
Outside, Champ thumps down at his place near the top step, one of his paws crossed over the other as elegant as Alistair Cooke on Masterpiece Theatre. Flo sits in the rocker and moves back and forth. Nothing like a rocker, really.
“Champ!” Flo says.
He turns toward her.
“Would you like to come up here and rock with me?”
Champ cocks his head like she’s asked if he wants a cookie, but makes no move to get up.
She pats her lap. “Come on up, it’s nice.”
Now he looks away. Not interested. Well, you can’t expect someone to like something just because you do. Especially if you’re a dog who sees another dog walking down the sidewalk who apparently needs a good dressing down.
Champ rises up on stiff legs and goes to the edge of the porch step. He barks—one, two, three times—and then watches through squinty eyes as the dog and the owner keep walking.
“Good job, Champ,” Flo says. “I agree that dog was up to no good. I always did say you can’t trust a wiener dog. They rely too much on their cuteness, and next thing you know they’ve dug up all your dahlia bulbs.”
Champ puts his muzzle on his paws, closes his eyes. Denise told her the other day that mostly what Champ was now was a rug, but she said it with deep affection.
“Are you bored, Champ? Do you want to go for a walk?”
No response. What would he say, if he could talk? She can just imagine it: Nah, thanks, Flo, but a walk just isn’t the same anymore. Maybe you feel the same way.
Flo says, “I kind of feel the same way, but you know, even if you go slow, you can still have a good time. Maybe even a better time than when you hurry along. You see more.”
True, she imagines him saying. And there’s nothing like those smells you encounter. Why is it that you people never give us enough time for smelling?
“Oh, come on, Champ,” Flo says. “Sometimes when I used to walk you, you would sniff at something seemed like for twenty minutes straight. I’d hold the leash all patient for a while, but then we really did have to move on.”
You humans don’t understand because your sense of smell is so poor. You’re missing a whole universe of things.
“I spect you may have a point. We certainly like smelling flowers.”
They’re all right. But I’ve rolled in some things that—
“I know. You don’t have to go into details.”
And after we go to all the trouble to perfume ourselves, you humans wipe it off.
Flo looks up into the sky. “Isn’t it a lovely day, though? Look at that sky.”
No response from Champ, not even an imaginary one. He’s sound asleep. Not a bad idea, a little nap with the warm sun on her face and the breeze so gentle. Something Flo has learned later in life is the value of a nap, how you awaken fresh and all start-overish.
Flo starts to close her eyes but then she hears a car horn beep and there is Denise coming up the driveway. She climbs Flo’s porch steps and lifts Champ up into her arms.
“Hold on,” Flo tells her, and she goes over to lift one of Champ’s ears to whisper into it, “I love you.”
Thank you, Flo. I feel good. I think I want a marrow bone.
To Denise, Flo says, “I think he just told me he wants a marrow bone.”
“He always wants a marrow bone.”
“Well, I was right, then.”
“Thanks for watching him, Flo.”
Back in her house, Flo makes a cup of ginger tea. She’ll drink it, then go back out on the porch and maybe take that nap after all.
But here comes the sound of someone coming up her front porch steps again. Denise must have forgotten to tell her something. But when Flo opens the door, she sees another woman standing there, that serious-faced woman she’s noticed who lives down the block.
“Sorry to disturb you,” the woman says. “I’m Teresa McNair, your neighbor, and my cat is under your porch, and he won’t come out.”
“Well, let’s us corral him,” Flo says. “I’ll take one side, you take the other.”
It doesn’t work. The cat slips past both of them and climbs the tree on the boulevard. Teresa says, “I can’t lose him. I just got him! I haven’t even named him!”
“You’re not going to lose him,” Flo says. “I’ll get some food, maybe we can tempt him down with that. Keep an eye on him; I’ll be right back.”
Flo goes back into the house filled with an invigorating excitement; there is nothing she likes more than helping people.
She opens a little can of salmon, dumps it onto waxed paper, and takes it back outside.
“Come over here by the bushes and hide,” Flo tells the woman.
“I’ll make a trail of salmon that leads right to you. ”
Teresa walks slowly over to the bushes in front of Flo’s house and Flo can tell she doesn’t believe this will work. Well, they’ll see.
Flo goes to the base of the tree and calls up, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty.” She sees the flick of a white tail, some green eyes peering down.
“Come and get it!” Flo says, making the trail, and then she walks back up onto her porch with extreme nonchalance.
Eat it or not, I don’t care is what she wants to convey.
She thinks that if there’s one thing cats don’t like, it’s for them to be told what to do.
Sure enough, after a few seconds here comes the cat cautiously scaling down the tree.
When it reaches the ground it begins eating.
Flo bets Teresa wants to run after it, but she holds her position.
When the cat is directly before her, eating the last offering, she grabs him.
“Thank you!” Teresa cries. “I live just three doors down. I’ve got to go to work, but after that, may I come back and thank you properly? Say, six o’clock?”
“Why, sure,” Flo says, and goes back inside. Maybe she should put a little color on her face if she’s going to be doing all this socializing.
In her makeup drawer, she finds an unopened sample tube of Pecan Peach lipstick.
It’s ancient, from when Avon used to come calling, and wasn’t that always a pleasant break in the day, the Avon lady sitting beside Flo on the sofa in her nice dress and spreading out all her wares on the coffee table in such a way that you wanted everything?
Flo tries the lipstick and finds it still works well enough.
There’s all kinds of old makeup in the drawer; Flo was never very good about throwing things away.
She digs through the drawer for a while, remembering how she used to get ready to go out with Terrence and when she came downstairs with her makeup on he would say, “Well, don’t you look nice?
” And Flo always thought he’d had no idea what she’d done to look nice, patiently putting on the mascara and the rouge and the lipstick.
He didn’t care. He just liked that she looked nice.
But here was the thing about Terrence. She could be absent of any makeup at all, and he would still tell her she was beautiful.
That was mostly in her younger years, but even when she got old he would tell her she was beautiful, and that warmed her far more than the compliments he gave her when she was young.
Everybody’s beautiful when they’re young, even if they don’t know it.
And isn’t it funny, it seems to Flo, that mostly they don’t know it.
Mostly they complain about their faults that no one else even sees.