Photo by Baptist Standaert on Unsplash
I drove up to Alice’s house in my GMC Terrain and parked the car near the curb. Alice’s home was next to a neighborhood open space. A gigantic hedge, over twelve feet high separated her front yard from the park.
I pushed my purse under the front seat, taking my car key with me. When I opened the door and got out, I tucked the key into my fanny pack where I had already put my cell phone. I put on my walking hat, which was pink and matched my hoodie. It also had a flap to protect my neck from the sun.
It was Tuesday, the day we always walked together. Alice walked her Border Collie while I stayed on her right. For some reason, the dog liked to pull the leash to the left onto the grass.
I’d known Alice since my son was in kindergarten; her son was my son’s best friend. We had met in the kindergarten playground after school while picking up our children. Later, we saw each other at another friend’s house for swimming, and even later when the boys were in middle and high school, they took turns hanging out at Alice’s and my house. In fact, when my son, Zach, graduated from high school at went to college, Alice had said that her grocery bill went down. Apparently, he liked her snacks and chocolate.
But now our sons were grown and working in Silicon Valley for high-tech companies, and we were both divorced from their dads. We were members of a single’s group named Rusty Bindings, which was a ski club for single people over 50. Alice and I were both in our sixties.
We looked pretty good for our age. Both of us had dyed our hair blonde since our thirties when the gray started to show. In addition, we both were avid exercisers, even though we didn’t ski. Alice did Zumba in her kitchen via Zoom and I attended Pilates classes four times a week. And we walked.
I ambled up Alice’s driveway over the flagstones. Her yard was a profusion of flowers and succulents of all kinds. Alice believed that lawns were ridiculous for yards in a state like California which was experiencing a drought, so she had ripped out all her grass and planted flowering bushes. Roses climbed up a metal arbor standing in the middle. African irises punctuated the landscape around the edges, and tea roses of pink, white, and yellow filled in the remainder of the middle.
Under the four-foot-wide eaves of the house, Alice had planted azaleas and gardenias in the shade that were now in full bloom. The gardenias gave off a strong vanilla scent as I walked up to the door.
On the porch, pots of all shapes and sizes held a variety of succulents: red, green, purple, curly, and pointed. The yard was a green thumb’s paradise.
As soon as I knocked on the door, a cacophony of barking began inside the house. Running paws pounded the floor and bodies thumped against the inside of the door. I jumped when the door shook since I had once been bitten by a German Shephard that was off its leash. I still had the scar just above my right ankle, an angry red curve.
After waiting two full minutes, I heard Alice come into the front hallway yelling at her dogs to let her through. The deadbolt clicked and then the door knob clunked as she unlocked the door. When she opened it, the Border Collie and Jack Russel dogs scooted through the narrow opening, jumped clear across the porch and pounced onto my chest with their front paws.
“Here Jack,” Alice called. “Come get your treat.” Jack jumped down, turned like a top, and ran back inside. As he did, Alice handed me the leash for the Border Collie, then she disappeared and closed the door.
I had gotten a little smarter over the years that we had been walking together, so I took a treat out of my pocket and threw it on the ground for Cali, the Collie. When she bent down to eat it, I clipped on her leash in a flash.
Alice came out of the door holding her hat and a flask of water. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a pony tail. She was dressed in blue jeans, a printed blouse, and a buttoned-up red cardigan sweater. She set the flask on the top of her car in the driveway while she put on her hat and I held onto Cali’s leash for life.
“I’m ready,” said Alice.
“Cali’s been ready,” I said.
Cali heard me and took off running with me holding onto the leash like a kite in the wind.
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