taken the dog on her own the walk would have been finished in half the time, but that wasn’t what life was about for Harriet.
Glenys needed to maintain her independence and no one else was going to help her.
They walked slowly down the street, admiring the decorations in the store windows.
“I love this time of year.” Harriet slid her arm through Glenys’s. “It’s so buzzy and exciting.”
Glenys was concentrating on where she put her feet. “At my age, it’s just another day.”
“What? No, you can’t think that way. I won’t let you. I hope you’ve written to Santa.”
“Does he deliver new hips or new husbands?”
“Maybe. If you don’t write, you’ll never know.”
“Maybe I should try online dating.”
“It didn’t work for me, but no reason why it shouldn’t work for you. Go for it, but don’t ask me for help with your profile. I’m too honest. You need to present yourself as a twenty-year-old pole dancer.”
Glenys tightened her grip on Harriet’s arm. “Next time, I’m writing your profile. No more nice girl Harriet. How are your adventures going? What was today’s challenge?”
She’d told Glenys about her determination to stretch herself.
“I called someone who is always rude to me.” She was careful not to mention any names. “Normally Fliss does it.”
“If she’s rude, why do you keep her as a client?”
“I never said she was a client.”
“Honey, life is too short to hang on to friends who are rude to you so it has to be a client.”
“She has two dogs and a huge network of wealthy friends. Fliss says we can’t afford to lose her.” Although if it had been left to Harriet she would have done exactly that months ago. Life was too short to have rude clients too.
“So you let her say bad things to you?”
“It’s not that she says bad things, exactly. It’s more that she’s one of those people who thinks no one can possibly understand how busy and appalling her life is. So she is infuriated when I talk slowly. But I’m afraid of speeding up in case I stammer.” Harriet paused as they passed a side street. “She makes me feel small. Not small as in slim and attractive. Small as in less. She makes me feel incompetent, even though I know I’m not. She reminds me of Mrs. Dancer, my fourth grade teacher.”
“I’m assuming that’s not a good thing.”
“I wasn’t the type to talk much in class, so she used to single me out. Harriet Knight—” she imitated Mrs. Dancer’s sarcasm “—I presume you do have a voice? We’d all love to hear it.”
“I don’t see why not talking all the time should be a disadvantage in life.”
But Harriet wasn’t listening. She was looking at the man huddled against the wall next to a Dumpster. She looked at his shoulders, hunched against the wind, and at the defeated look on his face. “Billy?” She checked that Glenys was steady on her feet, and hurried across to him. “I thought I recognized you. What are you doing here?” She crouched down and put her hand on his arm.
“Trying to stay warm.”
“It is a cold one. Tonight is going to be worse. Can you go to the shelter? Anywhere?” She dug her hand into her pocket and pulled out a couple of granola bars. “Can I get you a hot chocolate? Tea?” She talked to him for a while, fetched him tea from the food cart nearby.
When she finally returned to Glenys, her friend was frowning.
“Didn’t your mama teach you not to talk to strangers?”
“Billy isn’t a stranger. I see him every time I walk Harvey. He used to be a university professor, then he had an accident and became addicted to painkillers.” Was that why the doctor in the ER had made a point of telling her he wouldn’t write her a prescription? Presumably he knew how easy it was for pain management to turn to addiction. “He lost his job, couldn’t pay medical bills.”
“How do you know all that?”
“We started talking one day in the summer when I was walking Valentine, Molly’s Dalmatian.”
“So you can’t talk to a guy you’re dating, but you can talk to a stranger on the street?”
“He wasn’t exactly a stranger. I have been walking past him every night for eight months. We always said hello. He was so polite. Then we started saying more than hello. I got to know him a little. Do you know that sometimes, when it’s freezing cold, he rides the train all night, from the Bronx to Brooklyn? How sad is that.” It depressed her that people had to do that to stay warm in New York’s freezing winter. To stay alive. “Anyone can end up homeless.”
“You must have talked to him for a long time to know so much.”
“I did. He was lonely.” She paused. “And I guess I was a little lonely too. I was getting used to being in the apartment without Fliss.”
Glenys patted her on the arm. “You miss her. I understand. I miss my Charlie. It’s the little things, isn’t it? Charlie always used to make the coffee in the morning. Now I do it and I can never get it quite right. And he fixed anything that went wrong in the apartment. He was handy like that.”
Harriet realized she had to stop moaning.
Glenys had suffered a serious loss. She hadn’t lost Fliss. Her sister was still in her life.
“I do miss her, but it was always going to happen one day. The alternative would have been living together until we were ninety, sharing false teeth, and that wouldn’t have been great, either. Since Fliss moved out, I don’t have anyone to cook for.” She didn’t confess that some days she made huge batches of her chocolate chip cookies, or her granola bars, and distributed them to anyone who was interested. And she knew, with brutal honesty, that she was doing it as much for her as for them. She needed to feel needed, and since Fliss had moved out and Daniel had become involved with Molly, she rarely felt needed. She missed having someone to fuss over, to cook for and nurture. There were few people she felt able to admit that to, but Glenys was one of them. “I’m not ambitious in the way Fliss is. I mean, I love our business, but what I love about it is the lifestyle. The dogs. Being outdoors. Doing something I love. Fliss likes the success of it, the growth, the bottom line. We’re different like that.”
“You’re different in lots of ways. Fliss is always in a hurry. She never has time to chat the way you do.”
Harriet sprang to the defense of her sister. “Because she’s building the business. We have the Bark Rangers because of her.”
Glenys stopped walking and Harriet looked at her in alarm. “What’s wrong? Is your hip hurting?”
“No. Right now it’s my heart that’s hurting, and you’re the one hurting it. Your problem is that you don’t see your own qualities.” Glenys waggled her finger.
