Animal Eyes

“Fuck!” I said to myself on the highway.

A third of the way into a drive to Maine, I winced when realizing that Sue’s ashes were at the house. It was the final day prior to the one-year anniversary of when my life was bifurcated: With Sue and After Sue. Well, not technically, as she died on November 11th, “Eleven Eleven,” but she first stopped breathing in my arms on October 19th after gasping out her final words: “Call 911.”

October 19th was a doomsday in Sue’s life: one of her best friends had inadvertently killed someone while behind the wheel on the day in the late ‘80s, Sue’s sister had committed suicide on the day in 2007, and Sue’s life had effectively ended on the day as she never regained consciousness during the twenty-three days afterward that she kept kicking sheets off her frail yet immaculately tanned frame in the intensive care unit. When checking my call history, the revelation that I had dialed 911 at 4:44 p.m. earned an instantaneous double take, Sue’s fascination with the number four forever marred by a haunting asterisk.

A month earlier fall had arrived plummeting me into a depression for nearly a week as the rectangular slabs of golden hour light poking through the kitchen blinds transported me to the final weeks of Sue’s life. Of her sitting in a wooden chair and chatting with me as I cooked butternut squash soup, something she could swallow with minimal discomfort, or so she claimed, incapable of complaining about her deteriorating health. Of her pausing the television, clearing her throat, and melodically saying, “Come iiiin!” every morning as I knocked on her bedroom door for a pre-work hug, Sue whispering her slow count to ten and concluding each embrace by mentioning how our oxytocin levels had just increased, a ritual she’d perfected with her cat Tobi. Of her agreeing to an impromptu trip to an Indian restaurant, our final meal dining out together, my recommendation to order a mushy eggplant curry sparking her interest. Of her farting loudly in the hallway and momentarily pausing to tilt her head and listen as she sarcastically pretended the hardwood floor had creaked. Of her being alive, the thing I wanted most and couldn’t have.

I had to regularly remind myself of the abundant blissful things that occurred in Sue’s absence: my annual trip to The Masters, a vacation where I swore I glimpsed her waving to me streetside in Malibu, publication of my second book, and the numerous friends whose camaraderie helped mask the loneliness that intermittently debilitated me. No matter how challenging it could sometimes be, the best pick-me-up was consciously electing to be grateful as often as possible, a tactic I learned from her via osmosis.

Julie, one of Sue’s closest friends, had suggested I visit her in Maine for company on Doomsday 19th, a way to source joy rather than dwell on the melancholy. Instantly taken with her proposal, it was my idea to scatter Sue’s ashes into the lake from Julie’s dock. And now I’d forgotten them.

“It’s fine,” I said to myself moments later on the highway. “Now I’ll have to return next year to do it.”

Upon arriving, I handed Julie two floral bouquets and gave her husband, Kevin, a pumpkin-flavored whoopie pie. We chatted during a New York Yankees playoff game, Kevin agreeing to stay up past his bedtime to watch our mutual favorite team attempt to get one victory closer to a World Series appearance. At the pace of a sloth stuck in quicksand, Julie flipped through a photo album Sue plastered with self-deprecating sticky note commentary to document their trip to Los Angeles together in March 1996. Butter, the family dog, began barking like a rusty chainsaw starting up during a commercial break.

“You know why she’s barking at that guy, right?” Julie asked me.

“Why?” I asked, clueless.

“We have a racist dog,” Kevin said. “Butter hates black people.”

“Seriously?!”

“That’s what her nightly barking fits at the TV have in common,” Kevin said, Butter’s vitriol having been scrutinized at length before arriving at the unfortunate conclusion. “You’re lucky you’re a white dog,” Kevin said while petting her as I cackled.

“Tomorrow is Butty’s birthday,” Julie affectionately said, mentioning how she was a “good girl,” a confounding statement given the pup’s time as a Ku Klux Klanimal.

“Figures she’d be born on Doomsday,” I said under my breath.

The television camera lingered on Juan Soto, the Yankees’ light brown-skinned Dominican right fielder, as Butter barked out some epithets. Kevin then yelled at her and pointed to her bed, conveniently out of sight of the television. A few minutes later Butter passed out, permitting us to anxiously watch the game without her cacophony accompanying the Cleveland Guardians’ excited fanbase.

“What is a Guardian?” I asked.

“Yeah, hmm,” Julie said. “Sort of like a parent, right?”

“Like, they might as well be the Cleveland Chaperones then,” I said. “Look at all the fans wearing their old Indians jerseys. Nobody likes this stupid-ass name.”

“Do the Native Americans actually care?” Kevin asked, his inner Butter wanting to call them Injuns. Or likely something far worse.

“The Seminoles sure don’t. Look at Butter,” I said while noticing her inconveniently charcoal-colored nose resting like a black olive on the side of her bed. “Bet she’s dreaming about her time as George Wallace’s lapdog.”

“She’s probably thinking about how Rosa Parks took her seat on the front of the bus,” Kevin chimed in.

“Butter stopped reading Roots after the chapter when the Civil War ended,” I said, giddy to keep the joke going as the Yankees tried to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. “She thought Beloved was too cheerful” left Julie recoiling.

“We actually moved to Maine for Butter because there aren’t any black people here,” Kevin joked.

“Except that one soccer team,” I said. “Man, she musta hated them!”

“Right, Lewiston won the state title!” Julie said. “I believe they were Somalians. There is a large community of them up there.”

“Funny enough,” I said to switch the subject, “for as pure of heart as Sue was, she did have one forbidden word she liked to say, or at least acknowledge. I was telling Julie about this in our group chat recently.”

“Oh, boy,” Julie, slightly punchy from an espresso martini, added, neglecting how the upcoming reveal had nothing on Butter’s latest dream where black dogs had to drink from separate water bowls.

“When we were in public and saw a retarded person once, Sue was trying to draw my attention to the guy but didn’t know what word to use. It led to her calling them ‘lollipops’ in public. As in, ‘Is that guy licking a tennis racket drunk or a lolli?’ I wound up sharing this term with various people who all dug the weird power it gave them.”

Meanwhile, the Yankees hung on to win the game as Butter reminisced about the days prior to Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier. When I turned on my left side to pass out, my final thought in advance of arising on Doomsday was, “I wish I’d known about Butter’s racism because I definitely wouldn’t have forgotten to bring an apartheid-themed cake to celebrate Sue’s demise.”

★ ★ ★ ★

While waiting for Julie to get ready the following morning, I relaxed in the dining room staring at the lake, the red, orange, and yellow leaves on the trees reflecting off the clear water, a flock of desultory ducks floating around on a spring-like seventy-degree day. Sitting in a felt chair beside a chaise longue opposite the table, it dawned on me that a therapist could have a session with a supine patient while the family ate, or even more scandalously, a cuckhold could watch the hired help fuck his wife as Julie, Kevin, and their two daughters enjoyed a pot roast and yearned for the days when strangers weren’t inexplicably sodomized by the dinner table, or were too impatient to at least wait for them to eat dessert in the living room. In need of a seltzer refill (and most importantly, some imagination decompression for my overtired head), I read a meditative Buddhist poem next to the refrigerator.

Breathing in, I see myself as a FLOWER
Breathing out, I feel FRESH 

Breathing in, I see myself as a MOUNTAIN
Breathing out, I feel SOLID 

Breathing in, I see myself as STILL WATER
Breathing out, I REFLECT things as they are 

Breathing in, I see myself as SPACE
Breathing out, I feel FREE

It asserted itself as a natural mantra for the day, a way to be in the moment with one of the most mindful people I knew, and to celebrate someone we both profoundly loved and missed, a woman whose own inner peace imbued her with the stoicism necessary to persevere through myriad struggles, including the one that killed her, by battling them with brain tricks. But first, another little lady had to be celebrated.

“Should I leave BET on for Butter?” Kevin asked in jest before departing to see his and Julie’s younger daughter, Desiree, play in two soccer games.

“Ya know,” Julie delusionally pondered, “I wonder if she actually barks at darker-skinned people because she likes them. My old mailman, Ferguson, who is a dear friend of mine, loved Butter so much he called her Brown Butter. She even barked at him.”

“That’s what started it all,” I said, finding it sweet that whenever returning to Rhode Island to see her family, Julie also made time to see Ferguson. “I’ll drive, by the way,” I told her. “Need to give you a ride in the white powertrain.”

It was the nickname bestowed on the RAV4 I’d bought a couple weeks prior, its cheekiness in honor of the master color that now felt like it had been clairvoyantly christened in Butter’s honor. We opted to eat at the nearby diner where Kevin and Julie had treated Sue and me to dinner the previous July to celebrate my birthday. A middle-aged man held the door for us as we walked in.

“That’s the first time in my life I’ve held the door for a Yankees fan,” he said. “Guess I’m finally maturing.”

“I’m proud of you,” I said while Julie chuckled then questioned if my purple Yankees hat was dark gray.

I had remembered to bring the pouch housing Sue’s talismans to show Julie, a collection of items pervaded by trademark Sue qualities, among them her first pacifier (Sue the nostalgic saver), a tiny SpongeBob Christmas figurine fastened to a Saint Christopher pendant (Sue the mixer of the sacred and profane), her mother’s bobby pins (Sue the devoted daughter), and one invaluable item she’d gotten me, a tiny wooden owl she bought in Maine on my fortieth birthday, not only as a marker for the day itself, but as a keepsake of my favorite animal (Sue the giver and animal lover).

I had also remembered to bring seven boxes containing Sue’s things—two boxes of Barbies and one box of Barbie accessories, her Peter Pan collection, the shirt she wore to see Taylor Swift on the “Eras” concert tour (the infamous “rain show” in Foxborough), a multitude of unused lipsticks, Hello Kitty tchotchkes, a poster Julie gave her thirty years prior, hair clips (or “clippies,” as Sue called them), and on and on. It had taken me until the week prior to seeing Julie to conclude the mission I’d tasked myself with of either keeping, gifting, donating, or tossing Sue’s paraphernalia, a project I’d begun four days after she died, my initial thoughts being: Who needs a half dozen glue guns? Then I moved on to batteries and old hair salon appointment cards and cat medicine. That poor cat still had so many pills to take even though they expired in 2009. I’d always loved throwing stuff away, purposely calling trash “detritus” so Sue would mock me, one English major peeved at another for using unnecessarily ornate words, or so she felt. “I bet she ate glue as a kid,” I thought to myself, and then imagined her asking me if I did too, a crutch of hers summoned to test how much of an Old Man Since Birth I was, me honestly replying that I hadn’t, and her shaking her head from side to side while invoking her ingrained line for such occasions: “I really did marry my dad,” insult-praise I relished, especially since her dad was one of her heroes.

“Need more coffee?” our waitress, who resembled a Guardian (aka Native American), asked us.

“No thanks, I think we’re good,” Julie replied.

“Speak for yourself!” I jokingly said in too forceful a tone.

“WHOA!” the waitress said while refilling my cup. “Gotta be careful with this one!”

Julie and I finished eating then chatted for a half hour until recalling that we could continue moving our mouths in Rockland, a town Sue and I visited and fell in love with six years prior. Our first stop was the Breakwater Light, a lighthouse perched at the end of a milelong stone walkway across the harbor. Joking about the incessant vanity license plates in Maine, a ladybug latched itself onto Julie’s pink shirt, her in shock because I’d seen one in Georgia on Sue’s birthday and one in Los Angeles on my birthday, the latest arrival completing a trinity of serendipitous sightings on the year’s most significant dates.

“The weather has been terrible for the last few weeks,” Julie said. “We lucked out.”

“Now there are two more of them on your other sleeve,” I informed her.

“What the heck?!”

“Maine Magic,” Sue surely would’ve said if she had resurfaced for our gala with nature.

A standoffish yet nonetheless endearing seagull guided us early in our walk, Julie insisting I photograph it up close. Sue loved listening to and feeding seagulls whenever she crossed paths with them, stomping her feet on beach sand in excitement when they cawed from above, and now we couldn’t help but ponder if her transmogrifying energy had begun inhabiting Maine’s seabirds to check in on us. Julie’s feet got soaked when one high tide breaker leapt over the slabs, yet she refrained from complaining about how they failed to dry the rest of the day, the type of small stakes fortitude I cannot muster.

The afternoon was a simulacrum of Saturdays with Sue: walking, shopping, storytelling, laughing, and rushing to find nearby bathrooms, Julie mocking me when I emerged from one by asking, “Flushed twice, huh?” A drunk man referred to us both as ladies when we visited an antiques store, Julie spotting a cabinet she’d sold and talking to the co-owner about it. The man divulged how countless people expressed interest in purchasing it, but it wasn’t for sale, on hand to display the deceptively expensive glass pieces ensconced within it. However, the woman who bought it from Julie had been enduring the recent deaths of her husband and mother in addition to her stepmother barely surviving a near fatal car accident that fractured her skull, the way the trauma was matter-of-factly shared earning my respect as it had been my own mechanism to not court sympathy when discussing Sue’s death with strangers, too self-conscious to want to hear any worthless platitudes as feedback or project my sorrows onto the unsuspecting.

“Do you regret selling it?” I asked Julie afterward.

“Actually, I don’t,” she said before adding, “which is surprising, because I regret everything.”

I found a framed drawing of a male lion, one of Sue’s most prized animals, and knew it belonged in my home, especially since the photograph of two kissing seals, which I’d hung in between poster-size photos of Sue at the Hollywood Bowl and me at Augusta National Golf Club, had been purchased in Rockland as well, the image one I liked to pretend depicted our union in an alternate life. As I paid, Julie noticed ceramic turtles and plastic frogs garnishing opposite sides of the register, living and inanimate animals cropping up wherever the day took us. Observing signs had long been an obsession, but the innumerable ones glimpsed as Year 1 A.S. progressed were indefatigably powerful and primal, a declaration to be present, to cease worrying and focus on the simple pleasure that is existing like when I stood in the yard wearing my bathrobe eating a peach and listening to the birds chirp harmonies as Sue spied on me from the open kitchen window and recapped watching me by regarding it as an adorable snapshot of our newfound cohabitation, to refill and restore my heart with what I loved most, and to not lose sight of how everything that matters takes time, the life-affirming little things along the way consistently helping to ease the suffering and a reminder that the adages your parents were told by your grandparents were told by your great-grandparents were told by your is the truest wisdom, owl-level wisdom, the kind that no matter how much you resist it along the way to your inevitable enlightenment, you will ultimately cling to it because it’s the most essential way to remain hopeful about being alive. 

Julie posed for a photo beside a prodigious Egyptian statue, also not for sale, and then we walked Main Street, my inherited knowledge about good coffee prodding her to get a bag of Ethiopian (too acidic), her dislike of monopolies urging me to buy a book in an indie store rather than on Amazon (too logical), and us both unable to forgo a cartoonish lion sticker with a “Roar!” thought bubble (too cute).

“Art museum gift shops are a huge guilty pleasure for me,” Julie said as we both persisted in fighting like hell to be fools with our money, an uncomplicated task with stops aplenty on one of New England’s most charming promenades.

“I paid eight bucks for that strawberry pin,” I’d tell her fifteen minutes later.

“You do love them though,” she said. “I bought eleven-dollar paper napkins.”

“Good grief!”

“I’m kind of obsessed with them right now.”

“Gotta get what you like. What’s your favorite fruit?”

“Ya know, growing up I didn’t eat fruit because of the texture.”

“How immature,” said a man unaware that in a half hour he would buy a small jar of fourteen-dollar preserved lemons from a business owner who scanned as a misanthrope.

“Introverts can own businesses too,” Julie said when the conversation shifted. “You wouldn’t know cuz you’re such an extrovert.”

“Not really. Unless I have an audience.”

“So,” Julie said later during our dinner in a dimly lit farm-to-table joint playing outlaw country music, “you still thinking about finding someone new? Other than your girl Dua Lipa, of course.”

“Been thinking about paying for a dating app in the new year,” I said when my laughter ebbed. “I miss the companionship more than anything. I’d gladly sacrifice playing records a few nights per week to play with a girl’s hair and watch the shows she likes on my couch instead.”

“It’ll happen,” Julie said, the one assurance I’d heard from all my other female confidantes, an optimistic affirmation I immensely appreciated each time.

“I get too in my head about how I’ll scare them off,” I told her. “Being myself means being as real as possible, which can understandably startle people, I realize. They don’t know what the fuck to do with some of the shit I say. But at least they know who I am from the get-go, I guess.”

“The right woman will sense it and love it,” Julie wisely said as she, or so I assumed, fought the urge to take three licks of a Tootsie Roll Tootsie Pop before crunching into it.

On the ride home she commented on my refusal to disarm our server, a bland, curly-haired flower child who largely kept out of our way, Julie stating how she preferred the hands-off approach. We also spelunked into the dark period in Sue’s life before I met her, Julie candid about how her disagreement with select choices led to their drifting apart for a decade. It pained her to see Sue unravel, the neon pink spool of thread turning blacker than Butter’s worst enemy, Sue’s confidence and ingenuity zapped by a marriage she would later convince herself never happened. Not for the first time, Julie inquired how I endured the bleak years early in our relationship, years when Julie felt powerless and too busy with motherhood to help, which yielded my honest if trite answer, an answer many of those who knew Sue best might be inclined to nod in agreement upon hearing: “Even Sue at her worst was better than most people on their good days.”

Kevin was watching the Yankees game with Desiree and Butter when we walked in the house, considerately pausing the television to quiz us about our day. I’d asked in the afternoon if Desiree had scored a goal, but Julie reluctantly said how her daughter’s right foot and the back of the net hadn’t consummated the relationship. Kind-hearted empath that he is, Kevin lied to Julie so that he could surprise her in person (and not sour the day): “Desiree scored a goal today!”

“No shit!” I blurted out as Julie unknowingly wandered out of earshot. “Congratulations!”

“Thank you,” she shyly said.

“I got a video of it from one of the moms who was there,” Kevin said.

“Unlike Julie, who missed her daughter’s biggest moment to go shopping!” I joked.

“Stop it!” she laughed. “YOU DID?! Yayyy!” she finally said, withholding her excitement until the right moment as Kevin cued up the video, a moment so significant I shocked myself by not becoming bothered about missing the baseball game in real time.

We watched Desiree kick a ball in mid-air as it then arced over the goalie’s head and bounced in the net, a fluke goal, admittedly, but a unique goal too, and one deserving of a slice of apartheid cake served with an embossed gold leaf paper napkin.

“Mother of the Year,” I said to Julie. “Now you can’t attend any of her future games or she won’t score.”

“That’s it,” Julie said. “I’m retired from soccer.”

Desiree departed to her room to chat with a friend while the three of us braved a second nervy night on the couch, part of it spent debating who relief pitcher Tim Hill resembled as I unpersuasively argued on character actor Warren Oates’s behalf while their mainstream memories said I really meant Steve Buscemi. The Yankees prevailed in the tenth inning and clinched their first trip to the World Series in fifteen years. It signaled another weird gift from The Universe in Sue’s absence, the number one item on my Do Before Death List—fuck you, euphemistic buckets—being to attend a Yankees World Series game in the Bronx, having already secured a pair of tickets. Whatever doom the day had grown accustomed to delivering had been usurped by the inexorability that is Maine Magic. We turned off the television before the champagne showers, the three of us drained and fretful that Butter might mistake our team’s navy blue victory gear for skin tone. “Your band did it!” I could picture Sue squealing, her enamored with referring to the Yankees like they were a nine-piece jazz ensemble. Doomsday had metamorphosed into Bloomsday.

★ ★ ★ ★

“We’ll go in a minute,” Julie said the next morning, “but first I’ve gotta throw in a load of colored laundry.”

“Juuuule,” Kevin mockingly said to her while side-eyeing Butter.

“I’m sorry,” she replied. “I mean laundry of color.”

We first stopped at a beach where Julie found herself routinely returning for its serenity and at times for solace. Numerous dog owners were on hand taking advantage of the off-season rule allowing canines to roam the shoreline as Julie scoured for heart-shaped rocks, a passion of hers, coming up empty-handed but offering me an indigo-hued ombré shell in its place. On the ride to the morning’s main attraction a dead possum filled the bike lane, Julie motioning her arms on her chest.

“You cross yourself like Sue when you see dead animals?” I asked her.

“Not quite,” she said, “but I like to touch my heart and give love.”

Visiting the Pemaquid Lighthouse, a lighthouse locals feel the urge to tell you is featured on the state’s quarter, had been on the agenda when Sue and I hoped to return and see Julie and Kevin a second time. Although I’d resigned myself to not living in Maine with her due to the cold winters, the fact that such an attraction stood twenty minutes from Julie and Kevin’s house was Sue’s usual argument in favor of residing by the ocean, her sporadically uneasy about how she couldn’t hop in the car and zoom by for a quick restoration of her soul. Approaching the lighthouse museum a lonely seagull stood atop the structure staring at us, the animal’s eyes big and brown like Sue’s, eyes she disliked for not being blue except when I once rhapsodized about how pulchritudinous they were.

“What’s that mean?” Sue had asked me in mild irritation.

“Beautiful.”

“Aww, you and your big words. Shut up and give me a kissy,” she said while humorously pointing her lips at me and clicking them together.

A man in a Red Sox hat warmly greeted Julie then facetiously said that he’d rather not converse with me, Julie implying that I might find trouble for my Yankees fandom before leaving the state. One woman got her Maine lighthouse passport book stamped as Julie’s momentary envy arrived. In addition to unearthing heart rocks, she had also become determined to set foot inside all the state’s lighthouses, a task involving ferry rides to islands designed to take years, but one she seemed eager and disciplined enough to conquer. Along with several strangers, we watched a grainy video taken during a January storm whose mammoth waves landed ashore like a heavyweight knockout punch and should have killed a couple who wandered too far out on the rocks abutting the lighthouse, a cautionary tale to love but also show respect for nature by not assuming its beauty won’t turn brutal on a dime.

Sun-soaked daisies being aggressively pollinated by orange-belted bumblebees lined the entryway to the lighthouse’s art museum, a collection of paintings by area artists, some standouts created by the volunteer at the desk, her striking, neon-saturated shoreline vistas blazing across the room from the far wall. A plethora of puffin canvases were exhibited—the captivating orange-beaked seabirds ones that Mainers pridefully consider their own—along with loons, snow-strewn birches, lobstermen, and the other regional imagery that permeates Maine’s idiosyncratic personality. Distorted watercolors grabbed our attention as Julie noted how she knew the man who painted them.

“I actually stopped to sleep with his sister on the way to your place on Friday,” I said, waging war with impulse control.

“Oh, stop,” Julie said. “You like those peaches?” she asked about two shaded ones touching as they dangled from a tree limb, disclosing how she knew the artist as well.

“I do, but it’s so expensive. You think they’ll give me a discount if I fuck that lady’s sister too?”

“Cut it out,” Julie said while rolling her eyes, an angel for enduring my nonsense.

The breakfast restaurant where we planned to eat was closed, so Julie commenced taking me on a tour of the remnants from Damariscotta Pumpkinfest, home to oversized, decorated gourds strategically showcased on both sides of the town’s main drag, the quaint kind of street commonly associated with black and white movies. One Wizard of Oz-themed pumpkin arrangement felt inevitable, a Judy Garland postcard Sue mailed her parents from Los Angeles on my fridge at home, the movie her father’s sole lifelong pop culture fixation. Fond of mocking her for being a proud iPhone cult member, Julie ribbed me back for my inferior camera phone quality, astutely noting that the flash was still enabled from when I impolitely blinded the room while snagging a memento of a marinated cauliflower, lentil, and scallion salad during the previous night’s dinner.

Walking across the bridge linking Damariscotta with Newcastle, we stopped for a tribute usie, the location home to what had become the signature image of Sue and me together, Julie capturing an exquisite sequence where our overflowing laughter grew to the point that our eyes were shut and mouths larger than Carly Simon’s and Mick Jagger’s, in hysterics at a throwaway line Julie said, the images funny enough to earn their own intense laughter on each viewing, a monument to life’s supreme pleasure: happiness. In the water below sat a lonely seagull, the tide carrying it out to the same spot where it would fly back under the bridge and slowly reappear in full view like a silent comedy bit about conveyor belts, us howling at the eternal recurrence and debating if the bird didn’t know how to swim (like Sue), was having carefree fun oblivious to its surroundings (see previous note), or waiting for a feathered friend to take a hint (ibid).

Affixed to the door of a store named in honor of puffins was a sticker reading “NO PUFFIN’” with a red line struck through one of the birds smoking a cigarette, Julie not shy about calling it her all-time favorite sticker and nudging me to put one on the powertrain’s nude bumper. Inside I glimpsed a turquoise shirt featuring five puffins in a line—one red, one green, one pink, one yellow, and one blue—sporting the phrase “We Are More Alike Than Different,” a not-so-subtle memo to be nice to one another, and also to be nice to the nonverbal creatures around us, Mother Nature’s true guardians, our coexistence together imperative to our planet continuing its spin in the right direction, a fact I myself was reminded of when tossing two plastic water bottles due to the lack of a recycling bin, Julie genuinely pained by how one small, thoughtless act could be emblematic of the casual destruction we’re forced to cruelly embrace by shrugging and accepting that it’s the best we can do. Behind the register was a woman in her thirties and in front was her mother, attempting to memorize a coffee order.

“I’ll take an iced, black,” I said to confuse her. “How are you both today?”

“Good!” the cashier said.

“Minimal ice,” I joked to her mother.

“Uh, okay,” she said, shooting her daughter a weary look.

“I’m kidding,” I said. “Medium roast, though, no exceptions!”

Rounding up several irresistible items—a stuffed pink gnome with a floral headdress, a box of balsam-scented incense, a coaster, the door sticker, and an unavoidable stuffed puffin—led me back to the register to set them down while waiting for Julie to try on a sweatshirt, my additional small talk with the cashier a given.

“I haven’t heard this song in ages,” I told her about a ‘90s one-hit wonder playing.

“Oh, this is my era,” she said, a fan of the tune. “My husband’s older than me and he’ll ask me about old stuff like I was around then.”

“What?” I said. “You don’t like history?”

“No, it’s not that,” she said before clarifying, “but people will say something like, ‘Remember that fire in 1973?’ when I wasn’t even born yet. Like, how do I know?”

“That’s when you tell ‘em, ‘Oh god, that’s the day I died in my previous life!’ and see what happens.”

“I’m not quick-witted enough,” she said while laughing.

“Steal it, I don’t care. It’s my gift to you for this wonderful store.”

She smiled as her mother surfaced with the coffee. 

“You left mine on the front step like I requested, right?” I joked about the two cups present, the lady now hip to my deal.

I paid for my items then walked to Julie, her standing in a corner near the door holding a stuffed pink axolotl, a salamander unknown to me.

“Look at how cute,” she said, love for it in her eyes.

“You gonna get it?”

“Ehhh,” she said in defeat, “maybe next time.”

“It won’t be as meaningful then. You have to get it today to commemorate the weekend. Fuck it, I’m buying it for you.”

At the register we chatted with the cashier once more, me repeating how much I loved the place and town in general.

“What’s your name, by the way?” I asked her.

“Tanya,” she said, the first syllable rhyming with man, not fawn.

“This is Julie and I’m Adam. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

“You, too. Thanks for the laughs.”

“The kindest thing you can do for a stranger is make ‘em laugh,” I said.

“It’s so funny that when you and Sue met you both loved stuffed animals,” Julie said on the way to her van.

She had eyed my new gnome and called it Sue as I told her how I planned on pairing it on my bookshelf with a male gnome I’d previously gotten in Maine. Back at Julie’s house we rounded up Butter for a trip to the lakeside dock. Moving through the garage, an alarming thunk sounded as a trapped finch fluttered its wings, landing by a window facing the lake. Butter got excited, standing on her hind legs pawing the sill as Julie distracted her. I reached for the bird as it flapped around, a few feathers sashaying to the floor. On the fourth try, I calmly cupped the bird with both hands and walked it to the driveway, opening my right palm as it stood immobile for a couple moments while Julie fumbled for her cellphone to take a picture, failing to snap one as it flew into a pine, free at last.

“Do you write out here?” I asked about the dock’s four chairs and one bench.

“I’m too afraid I’ll drop my laptop,” Julie said.

“Fair enough. You at least journal here?” 

“Definitely,” she said while extracting a bite of bacon from her grilled cheese to feed Butter. “It’s a happy place for me.”

“Take my picture with your axolotl,” I said, mugging for shots that would replicate the view I had from the dining room. “We should make this an annual thing.”

“That would be great,” Julie said on our walk to meet Kevin in the driveway.

“Did you point this out to him?” Kevin asked about a small leafless tree in their front yard.

“What’s that again?” I asked.

“It’s the weeping cherry tree we planted for Sue,” Julie said, “but I dunno if it’s gonna make it.”

“Yes, it will!” Kevin said in mild exasperation. “It’ll be just fine in the spring.”

“They have two at the nursery,” I said about the weeping cherry trees Sue’s former co-workers had planted in her honor at that property’s entrance, mirrored shrines to not merely a life well lived, but also a testament to her invincible afterlife energy. “Thank you for the hospitality, watching the Yankees with me, everything,” I said while shaking Kevin’s hand.

“Safe travels,” Julie said as I hugged her goodbye, petting Butter farewell before she presumably urinated on a photo of Martin Luther King she’d buried near the garden.

As I exited the driveway I beeped the horn, the first time doing so in my new ride. Going down the road at peace, I found Buddhism for a mile or two. Breathing in, I saw myself as a FRENCH FRY. Breathing out, I felt a seagull nibbling on me, TRUE LOVE.