“We should get moving,” Maya said with a smile, as she made a noise partway between a clicking and a kissing sound, and her three dogs jumped to their feet. “See you around,” she said cheerfully, and started to head down the street with the dogs.
Clark looked at me, and I met his eyes for a moment, then looked away. Under normal circumstances, I would have been flirting with him—or at least saying full sentences like a competent human being. But under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have been walking dogs in a fancy dress. I wouldn’t have been spinning out, with no idea of what I was going to do with my summer. And until I figured it out, I knew I shouldn’t be flirting with random dog owners, no matter how cute they were.
So I gave him a quick nod, then tugged on Jasper’s leash, and we turned and walked in the other direction. And even though I was pretty sure I could still feel his gaze on me, I didn’t let myself turn my head, or even look back.
? ? ?
“Dog walking?” Toby asked, her jaw dropping open. “Like, with actual dogs?”
“Actual dogs,” I confirmed as I looked around the museum courtyard, all marble and palms and a gentle, trickling fountain. “It surprised me, too.” When Maya had asked me if I wanted the job, I’d only hesitated for a moment before saying yes. After we’d left Clark and Bertie, we’d walked the dogs for another twenty minutes, and halfway through I’d given up and taken off my shoes, holding my heels and walking barefoot on the pavement. Maya slowly gave me more leashes as we walked, until I was handling all four dogs by myself. She’d been cheerful and encouraging, even though I had a feeling that my complete lack of experience with dogs had been evident. But I’d been surprised by how peaceful it had been, toward the end—when all the dogs had done everything they needed to and sniffed every available tree—when we were all walking in silence and I could feel the sun on my arms and shoulders. I realized that I’d been so focused on making sure the dogs were okay—which was minute-to-minute work, with dangers of cars or squirrels or other dogs around every corner—that I hadn’t really been able to think about my own situation. And how nice it had been to get a break from the inside of my head.
Toby had seemed thrilled to see me, in person and unkidnapped, and once she verified that I was fine, started complaining about how bored she was. Apparently, it had been a slow day, and since she was still memorizing her docent script, she wasn’t able to give any tours, so she had walked around, familiarizing herself with the paintings and sculptures.
“So,” Toby said, tilting her head as she looked at me, “is this a formal dog-walking service?”
“Ha ha,” I said, glancing down at myself. I’d changed into flip-flops but was still wearing the dress—it seemed easier than going home and changing, and it was going to need to be dry-cleaned anyway.
“I like it,” Toby said, gesturing to me with a flourish. “Andie Walker, dog walker.”
I hadn’t even put that together until now, and I groaned. “Oh no,” I said, shaking my head. “That sounds like something from one of your romantic comedies.”
“Don’t knock the romantic comedies.”
I looked around the courtyard of the small museum, more than ready to change the subject before Toby could start lecturing me about the merits of Sleepless in Seattle again. “Want to give me a tour?”
Toby grinned and straightened her blue blazer. I noticed there was a crest with a P on it sewn over one of the lapels. “Certainly,” she said, in her most grave and serious voice—it had dropped about an octave—and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “If you’ll follow me, miss . . .”
I followed her past the courtyard and into the museum itself, bracing myself as a wave of memories hit me hard. I actually didn’t need a tour at all, since I knew the Pearce really well. My mother had been an artist by training and had volunteered there for years, organizing the kids’ art program. I’d spent hours there when I was younger, listening to my mom talk through her art-appreciation class, her holiday ornament-making class, her intro-to-sculpture class.
It had never seemed fair to me that I had no artistic talent whatsoever, whereas my mom could conjure whole worlds with just a paper and pencil, or a tiny bit of clay. I’d seen her turn squares of paper into cranes that could fly and packing peanuts into hippos. It was like she was the one person who knew there was a unicorn waiting to be set free from the paper clip. In addition to her framed pieces, which had been all over our old farmhouse, she’d done drawings everywhere—directly onto the walls. She would sketch absentmindedly while she was on hold on the phone—rabbits and huge fire-breathing dragons sharing a beer while a grizzly bear tended bar. Tiny pink mice chasing one another around the walls of my room, keeping up a running commentary about my snoring. An abstract series of lines that turned into waves, that turned into a town, then a city, before the waves came back and everything went back to lines again and then disappeared. That one had been by my mother’s bedside, and I’d wondered ever since if she’d drawn it years ago and I’d only noticed it after she got sick, or if she’d done it after her diagnosis. Although her bigger and more polished pieces had been the ones she was proudest of, it was the farmhouse drawings I thought about first when it came to her art. But the fact that my dad hadn’t told me we were moving, just had me dropped off from camp at our new house in Stanwich Woods, had meant that I hadn’t been able to see them one last time. I hadn’t gotten once last glance at the bashful bear peeking around the corner of the study. He’d always been there, so it was like it had never occurred to me to really look at him, not realizing that one day he might be gone.