A Last Goodbye (6 page)

At some point in the festivities, Ali noticed that Mrs. Hastings was seated with her parents, sipping a glass of champagne and chatting away.

“What's the dog sitter doing here?” Ali asked Sister Anselm, who happened to be with her at the time. “I thought she was supposed to be up in the room.”

“During the rehearsal I heard your mother telling her that she had to come down for the reception.”

“Great,” Ali said. “Where's Bella?”

“Over there.” Sister Anselm gestured with her glass. It took a moment for Ali to spot the dog, contentedly sacked out on Leland Brooks's tuxedoed lap.

“Don't worry,” the nun added. “Leland has her in hand, and Bella appears to be perfectly well behaved.”

“I don't care what anybody says,” Ali insisted. “That dog is not going to our dinner.”

“Of course not,” Sister Anselm agreed calmly. “As matron of honor, I believe it's my duty to see to it. I'll have a word with Mrs. Hastings.”

The reception was wonderful. The bride and groom cut the cake, with Colin watching from the sidelines and shaking his head in disappointment after the newlyweds each had their bite.

“I thought you were going to smash it in each other's face like they do on
America's Funniest Videos
,” he complained to B. “Why didn't you?”

“Because your grandmother would have killed me,” B. answered.

When they went down to dinner, Bella was nowhere in evidence. The food was great, the service was excellent, and everyone was in high spirits. Once dinner was over, it was still relatively early, but Ali was done. She and B. called it a night and went upstairs, where Mrs. Hastings assured them that she had just taken Bella out for one last walk and everything was shipshape.

Athena had come up earlier and done her Santa Claus turn. With B's help, Ali dug out their collection of Christmas presents and arranged them on the coffee table under and around the tree. Among them they found a small holiday gift bag with Bella's name on it and with a tiny stuffed Christmas bear inside. The card claimed the bear was from Santa, but Ali knew it was really from Mrs. Hastings.

In the bathroom, Ali found a silver box with a lush white ribbon on it. Inside was a beautiful nightgown and negligee, which she put on immediately. Out in the bedroom, she found B. sitting on the love seat with Bella dozing beside him. He whistled when Ali emerged.

“That's my girl,” he said. “Did anybody ever tell you you're gorgeous.”

She smiled back at him. “Thank you. Compliments like that might help you get lucky, especially on your wedding night, but what do we do about the dog?”

“Ignore her?” B. suggested hopefully.

That proved to be easier said than done, ­especially once they turned the lights out. The only solution that worked was for them to let Bella hide out under the covers while Ali and B. stayed on top.

At five sixteen the next morning, they decoded another piece of Bella's history when Colin and Colleen pounded on the door, ready to open their stockings. At the sound of their urgent knocking, Bella scrambled out from under the covers and shot off the bed, barking like crazy. By the time Ali had her robe on, B. had scooped up the dog and opened the door.

“I just realized, Harriet didn't have a doorbell,” he said sheepishly, holding on to the dog as Colin and Colleen bounded into the room, shouting “Merry Christmas” at the top of their lungs.

“I'll get dressed and take her for a walk,” Ali offered. When she and Bella left, B. was still standing guard in front of the mantel, telling the kids they couldn't touch their stockings until after their parents appeared.

Ali and Bella made a quick trip of it—down, out, and back. When they returned, several more bleary-eyed adults had been added to the mix—Bob and Edie as well as Chris and Athena. While Bob and Chris dragged in extra chairs from their rooms, B. got on the phone to room service and ordered a sumptuous breakfast: fruit and cheese platters, baskets of breakfast breads, carafes of coffee and pitchers of juice as well as two chocolate milks for the kids. On hearing that, Ali realized B. was taking yet another giant step up the road to being what Colin called an “epic” grandfather, as chocolate milk was something Colin and Colleen were allowed only occasionally as a special treat.

Once the adults were comfortably seated with coffee cups in hand, the kids tore into their stockings. That was followed by an hour-long jumble of Christmas present unwrapping, complete with an appropriate chorus of oohs and aahs. Even Bella got into the act, happily nosing into her gift bag, dragging out her toy, and then instinctively giving the thing a furious shake that would have broken the bear's little neck had it been a living creature.

The gifts B. had helped the kids choose turned out to be a beautiful leather wallet for Chris and a tiny bottle of name-brand perfume for Athena, neither of which were items that could have been purchased out of their own limited budgets. Two embossed envelopes with Bob's and Edie's names on them contained certificates for shipboard credits on the Mediterranean cruise they would be taking in April. At last there were only two gifts left under the tree. Colin picked up the small gift-wrapped box and handed it to Ali. “That's from Colleen and me,” he said proudly. “We picked it out all by ourselves.

Inside, Ali was surprised to find a bottle of ink—Mont Blanc ink, to be sure—but she was puzzled. Although she hadn't used a fountain pen in years, she thanked the twins with an enthusiastic hug. At that point Colleen dashed back to retrieve the last package: a gift bag with the distinctive Mont Blanc logo on the outside. “This one's from B.,” she explained.

There were two boxes hidden inside the tissue-filled bag. One contained a tiny red fountain pen with a single ruby on the clip.

“It's beautiful,” Ali said. “Thank you.”

B. nodded. “Take a look at the other one.”

The second box contained note cards—Mont Blanc note cards. “I'm not sure if I remember how to use a fountain pen,” Ali said.

“You'll need to practice, then,” B. suggested. “But in the meantime why don't you open the box of cards?”

Ali did. Inside the box, just under the layer of protective tissue, was a check, one written on B.'s personal account. The payee was the Amelia Dougherty Scholarship Fund, a charity that Ali had been charged with running for the last several years. The eye-popping amount of the check was enough to fully fund four-year scholarships for at least two students.

“Thank you,” Ali said, leaning over and giving him an appreciative kiss.

“You're welcome. It's sort of a combination ­wedding/Christmas present. I suppose we'll be doing a lot of that from now on.”

“But I thought we agreed we weren't giving each other presents,” Ali said.

“Changed my mind.”

“But I didn't give you anything.”

B. waved his hand in a gesture that encompassed the whole room, including all the people and the litter of opened packages, torn paper, and discarded ribbons. “You gave me all this,” he said. “That's good enough for me.”

B.'s cell phone rang somewhere in the room, and it took some time to unearth it. “Hey, Stu,” he said when he found it at last. “Merry Christmas.” He went out into the hall to take the call while Athena supervised the kids in a quick cleanup of wrapping debris.

A moment later a grim-faced B. popped his head back into the room and crooked his finger at Ali. “Bring Bella,” he said. “We're going for a ride. Everybody else, take your time. Just lock the door when you leave.”

“Where to?” Ali asked as she and Bella joined him in the corridor.

“North Las Vegas,” he answered. “The Mount Charleston Nursing Home. Stu tracked down Harriet's son, Martin Reid—not Marvin. That was his address on the
RETURN TO SENDER
sticker. Some more digging on Stu's part turned up calls to the nursing home. I'm guessing that's where he's stowed his mother. According to Stu, Martin has also been systematically emptying his mother's bank accounts.”

Grateful to have the information, Ali didn't ask how Stu had happened to unearth that information. She was better off not knowing.

The nursing home, once they found it, was a grubby one-story building in a blighted section of town. Looking at the sad landscaping and the trash-littered front yard, Ali had a bad feeling about what the quality of care might be as they walked through the sliding front doors. She was relieved to find that inside, the place was clean and bright. The red-haired woman seated at the reception desk greeted them cheerfully.

“Good morning,” she said. “How may I help you?”

“We're here to see Harriet Reid,” Ali said.

The woman typed a few letters into her computer. “She's in room two twenty-two. That'll be down the hall and to your left. You'll both need to sign in, but just so you know, we don't allow dogs in here.”

“Bella is Harriet's dog,” Ali said firmly while B. dealt with the sign-in sheet. “She's been lost. We found her on the street, where she was about to get run over. We wanted Harriet to know that we found her and that she's all right.”

The clerk thought about that for a moment and then made up her mind. “After all, it's Christmas, isn't it?” she said. “What can a few minutes hurt? If the head nurse gives me any grief about it, I'll tell her you snuck the dog past the front desk without my seeing her. She's so little, it would be easy to miss her.”

B. and Ali started down the hall. They had taken only a few steps when Bella began pulling on the leash, her tiny feet scrabbling on the polished tile floor. Realizing that the dog must have caught Harriet's scent, Ali simply let go. Bella skidded out of sight and into room 222 before Ali and B. made it as far as the doorway.

Inside the room, an elderly woman, slouching crookedly and belted into a wheelchair, dozed in front of a single window that opened onto the street. With a sharp yip, Bella launched herself into the air from the middle of the room. In one impossible leap, she landed in the sleeping woman's lap.

Harriet awakened with a start. Then, realizing Bella was really there, the undamaged half of her face broke into a smile of pure joy. She pulled the dog into a tight one-armed embrace. As tears poured down Harriet's one good cheek, the squirming dog, whimpering and wagging, licked them away.

For several moments, Harriet had eyes only for Bella. When she finally looked up and saw Ali and B., she shook her head. She pointed first at Bella and then at them before managing a garbled one-word question: “How?”

Remembering that a stroke had affected the woman's ability to speak, Ali answered what she supposed had been asked.

“We found her in the street,” she said.

Harriet ran her hands over the dog's still-­prominent ribs. She shook her head and then made a gesture of raising a spoon to her mouth.

“Yes,” Ali said. “I think she has been hungry. But we're feeding her. She's getting plenty of food now.”

The woman nodded. For a time she struggled to force another word from her lips. At last it came out. “Son,” she said, then pointed at Bella.

“Your son was supposed to take care of Bella?” Ali asked.

Harriet nodded. The half smile disappeared from her face, and she resumed her desperate struggle to speak. “Bad,” she uttered with difficulty. “Bad boy.”

“That's one of the things we wanted to talk to you about,” B. said, joining the conversation for the first time. “We have reason to believe that Martin may have been stealing your money. He's stopped making payments on your condo, and he's been emptying your bank accounts.”

Harriet turned her gaze to B.'s face and gave him a long stare. She struggled to get out the next word, but finally she managed it. “Police?” she asked?

“No,” Ali said quickly. “We're not police. But would you like us to report him to the police? We could do it anonymously, through an elder abuse hotline. They could look into the situation and, if necessary, appoint a guardian—a trustee, most likely, to look after your financial situation.”

After several moments of thinking the situation over, Harriet nodded her assent. “Yes,” she murmured, with some effort. “Yes, please.”

For another moment the room was silent. Bella had settled down and was curled into a contented ball in Harriet's lap. Absently, Harriet ran her hand over the dog's body, then looked up at Ali again.

“Son . . . mean . . . to Bella,” she managed.

Ali nodded. “We believe that, too,” she said. “We think he has been.”

“You take?” Harriet asked, pointing first at the dog and then at Ali. It was an eloquent if brief plea, and there was no mistaking it. There was a large old-fashioned electric clock on the wall. In the ­silence that followed, they all heard it ticking.

Finally Ali nodded. “Yes,” she said at last. “We'll take her.”

Struggling with one hand, Harriet lifted Bella up out of her lap and held her out to Ali.

“Thank . . . you,” she said, patting the dog's head once as Ali took hold of her. By then, unbridled tears were streaming down Harriet's weathered cheek.

“Go,” she commanded urgently. “Go now.”

With Bella whimpering and struggling to squirm out of her grasp, Ali turned and did as she'd been told. Walking down the corridor, they heard the sounds of a woman sobbing brokenly in the room behind them.

“At least she got to say goodbye,” Ali whispered through her own sobs.

“Yes,” B. said with a nod. “They both did.”

“Well, Merry Christmas, buddy,” she added. “It looks like we just got ourselves a dog.”

Author's Note

D
ogs have always been an important part of my real life and my fictional life as well. According to family legend and at least one photo, I learned to walk by clinging to the back of an immense farm dog named Nicky. As a first grader in Bisbee's Greenway School, I found a stray puppy, an ugly little mixed-breed mutt, on the street after school. I took it home, telling my mother that the dog had “followed” me there. The truth is I carried it for much of the way. My mother looked at the dog and said, “No. Absolutely not! We are not keeping it.”