Page 9 of September

“Exactly,” Molly said.

Juliet laughed and looked up at the L-shaped bar they’d been sitting at for the past thirty minutes. There was a woman paying a bartender for what looked like three beers. Her long brown hair was swept back into a ponytail, and her eyes looked to match the pulled-back hair that gave Juliet a nice view of the woman’s long neck.

“Jules?” Molly asked.

“Huh?” she asked, returning her attention to Molly.

“It’s wrong that I like her, isn’t it?”

“What? No. You can’t control who you like, Molls. But Idothink that as long as Finley and India are doing their back-and-forth, you’re just going to be heartbroken if you don’t at least try to move on.”

“I know,” Molly replied, sounding disappointed. “But she’s just so pretty…”

Juliet laughed.

CHAPTER 4

Gwen loved her job, but some days were better than others. Today, she was walking five dogs, which was probably one too many when one of them was a giant Great Dane and hadn’t yet learned how to walk on a leash properly and was almost as tall as Gwen.

“Blaze!” she yelled as she tried to get him to stop running off in the direction of anything that moved.

‘I love my job,’she reminded herself.

Blaze was a new client and was still very much a puppy despite his size. At just under a year old, he would run after every squirrel he would see, but he would go after a leaf blowing in the wind, too, and since they were coming up on autumn, Gwen wondered at how fun that might be when they went to the park together, and leaves fell from the trees. She pictured herself trying to hold on to the leash while he ran after brown, red, and yellow leaves that meant him no harm.

An hour later, she had returned all of her furry clients to their homes, with the exception of Blaze, whom she was dropping off on her way home. Without the other dogs around, he was slightly calmer, but not by much. Still, it was easier to walk him solo, and she decided that since he would get even bigger, she might have to make a separate trip to walk him tosave herself the back and arm strain from trying to hold on to him.

“Hi, Mom,” she said when she put her phone to her ear with her free hand after she saw her mother’s name on the screen.

“Honey,” her mother said matter-of-factly how she always did.

“I’m at work. Can I call you back?” she asked as she tried to wrangle Blaze away from the piece of trash he had found on the ground by the trash can.

“You just walk dogs for a living. You can’t talk to your mother while you do that?”

“Nice to talk to you, too, Mother,” she replied sarcastically.

“You know I hate when you call me that.”

“I do,” she said and smirked.

“Your father and I want to talk to you. Can you come by the house tonight?”

“No, I can’t. I have plans.”

“Plans? With whom?”

“Why must my plans involve someone else?”

“Well, if they don’t, then you can move them and come by the house tonight.”

“Mom, it’s not like you’re right down the road from me. It’s hours of driving.”

“We moved back to Louisiana last month to spend more time with our family, and our family doesn’t want to spend time with us.”

“You told none of us what you were doing and bought some house close to Archie right when the twins went off to college. Annabelle lives in Europe. Grant is busy with work. I live in New Orleans.”

“And you’re not busy with work?”